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February 25, 2010


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2010-02-25

A masterpiece from a master

Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island is big, bold and irresistibly compelling

SHUTTER ISLAND
Now playing

Now this is a Movie. The capital M is intentional.

Shutter Island is A-grade Hollywood spectacle they way they used to make it, when filmmakers still prized things such as story, style, atmosphere and character. This movie has these all in spades. It's almost quaint that way.

Indeed, it may even be downright audacious among studio films these days in its confidence that such notions are enough to grip a mass audience. (There's but one explosion in the whole picture. Imagine that!)

The director is the great Martin Scorsese, of Taxi Driver and Goodfellas fame. He's said he'd love to make big Hollywood crowd-pleasers but isn't sure if he would know how.

Shutter Island seems like the Scorsese notion of a blockbuster: it's grand in scope, technically masterful and a feast to behold - but it still insists on psychological complexity, as opposed to simplistic characters overwhelmed by the spectacle.

Federal marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), arrives on Shutter Island, a high-security asylum located on a foreboding rock off Boston. He and his partner, Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), are there to investigate the apparent escape of a prisoner. There's no trace of her -it's like she simply evaporated.

What happened? It quickly becomes clear to Teddy that something more is afoot on Shutter Island. something sinister. What is the facility's director, the cryptic Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), hiding? And what is the secret of the island's lighthouse?

Trust me, I haven't even let you in on the half of it. Shutter Island is one of those thrillers with revelations inside of mysteries inside the darkest of secrets.

It builds tremendous foreboding as it plays upon a dark implication: Teddy, a Second World War vet who helped liberate Dachau and suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, is profoundly vulnerable to the esteemed authorities of Shutter Island.

That's the genius of it, one character explains: once they decide to declare you insane, anything you say to the contrary only confirms the diagnosis. It proves you don't accept the reality of your insanity.

This element of the film prompted one nagging thought on my part: is the movie essentially exploiting fear of mental illness for effect? At a time when psychiatry still remains distrusted, misunderstood, and even attacked, I began to feel Shutter Island was striking a definitively distasteful note.

As it turned out, I was premature in my assessment of the film. I cannot say more without spoiling the movie's surprises.

But the twist ending is the dooziest in some time, and doesn't make the mistake of Level 1 twist endings, which assume a twist alone is impressive enough. Level 2 twist endings assume the twist must add some meaning to what has gone before.

The directorial control on display here is something to behold. Scorsese knows exactly what he's doing and how to do it. We're practically led to the conclusion by the nose. The capital M for Movie isn't just out of sentiment - Shutter Island is so commanding, it's downright authoritative.
— Kenton Smith

More than just gore

The Crazies delivers the B-movie goods with a welcome measure of panache

THE CRAZIES
Opens Friday, Feb. 26

You know the shot I'm talking about. It comes at the point just before a sympathetic character, perhaps the hero, who's vulnerable and defenseless, is about to dispatched by some fiend in what promises to be brutal fashion.

Usually the victim is on the ground, backed into a corner, or otherwise trapped. There's terror in the victim's eyes; there's no mercy in the killer's. And there's nowhere left to go. The murder weapon of choice is poised. The victim screams, and perhaps puts up their hands defensively.

Then - BANG! A shot rings out, and a moist bullet wound explodes through the killer's chest. The fiend falls, revealing the victim's friend/lover/family member behind him, having arrived just in time.

(Alternatively, the villain might have a sharp object emerge from his chest, or simply be smacked over the noggin. There's room to manoeuvre, here.)

It's a hackneyed device that saves several characters over the course of The Crazies, and one can't help but laugh to keep from cringing. I don't know if this device is mentioned anywhere in Roger Ebert's Little Movie Glossary, but it oughta be.

Maybe one needs to view such clichés as just integral to good horror B-movie fun. Certainly the rest of this remake of George Romero's 1973 flick is really pretty good, even while it's lifting familiar elements from (admittedly) better movies.

The movie opens in a small Midwest town, where the former town drunk interrupts a baseball game armed with a shotgun. The sheriff (Timothy Olyphant) is forced to shoot him dead. An autopsy shows he hadn't been drinking. What made him do it?

While the sheriff investigates, other locals start losing it and flambéeing their families. Then the army shows up - but it's not there to help. Once the source of the madness is understood, it's uncertain who among the survivors - including the sheriff, his wife (Radha Mitchell) and his deputy (Joe Anderson) - will be affected next.

What's refreshing about The Crazies is this: here's a low-budget horror flick that mostly eschews gore in favour of. well, storytelling. Mood. Scenario. Pacing. Suspense. Build-up. Payoff. You know, the stuff horror directors used to always carry around in their tool kits.

The Crazies makes particularly good use of the Spielbergian Slow Reveal. We see the characters' astonished faces as they absorb something off-screen. We're left to stew for a second. Then a reverse, high-angle or tracking shot reveals to us whatever astonishing sight had the characters' jaws drooping.

There's one really good bit in which the Sheriff uncovers something beneath a lake. It's a fun moment, not only because it's plausible and unforced, but also because it allows the viewer to participate in the discovery.

Unfortunately, it all leads to a rather redundant action finale, tacked on to what is the movie's true emotional climax. Perhaps the producers thought the audience would feel it didn't get its money's worth. Good thing the movie ends with one final, darkly comic turn of the screw.
— Kenton Smith

Sweet, but satisfying

On the surface, The Last Station is a touching Tolstoy biopic, but the themes it explores run much deeper

B+

THE LAST STATION
Now playing at Globe Cinema

Now here's a perfectly nice movie. The Last Station, a biopic of Russian novelist and philosopher Count Leo Tolstoy, has no real profanity, no graphic violence, and what footage it breasts it does have is tasteful.

(Perhaps your mother will still consider said footage gratuitous. Personally, I find such footage incapable of being gratuitous.)

All of this is not to say the film is innocuous; it's funny and zesty and touching. Some too-cute character attributes notwithstanding, it illustrates that people we can care about involve us more than anything else.

The Last Station is based upon a novel by Jay Parini, and ostensibly recounts the events of Tolstoy's final year. Whether it does so to any degree of accuracy, I cannot say. I confess to being equally ignorant of Tolstoy's writings, save for their famous titles (War and Peace, Anna Karenina).

That's just as well, though: for all I know, the more one knows about Tolstoy, the more one may dislike this movie. Thing is, it's not necessary to know anything to enjoy the film; its strength is in its portrait of an autumnal love affair, brought to life by two gracefully aging, still-robust master thespians.

It's 1910, and Count Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) is as famous as any man of his day. He's seen as a near-prophet by followers such as Chertkov (Paul Giamatti), who commands Tolstoy's every move be recorded for posterity. "Stop writing!" screams Sofya (Helen Mirren), Tolstoy's wife of 48 years, in exasperation at her husband's ever-present entourage.

She can't deal with Tolstoy's quasi-divinity. She also can't deal with the possibility that Tolstoy may be entertaining the bequeathing of his oeuvre to the Russian people - leaving Sofya and their 13 children without an inheritance.

The tension within this triangle provides the film's real drama, but its heart is in the relationship between Tolstoy and Sofya. The flesh may be old but the spirit is still willing, and the elder Sofya likes playing Rooster in bed, beckoning her eager Cock.

Here is a married couple whose passion has never cooled. These people know and love each other dearly. What really comes between them is Sofya's competition: Tolstoy's love of his own self-image.

I'll be damned if Mirren isn't becoming more attractive. She doesn't look old, just. pure. She is radiant. And, like Judi Dench, she's an actress who can dependably fill a nomination annually for best actress; indeed, she's earned one for this performance.

Plummer is rather craggy in comparison, but he makes palpable the strength of Tolstoy's conviction.

And just listen to the protectiveness in his voice when he defends his wife against Chertkov. He's equally entitled to his best supporting actor nomination.

The Last Station is really about something deeper and more poignant: the inevitable fallibility that is exposed when human beings try to live up to their ideals. Not that some ideals aren't worth striving for; just that real love means accepting falling short.
— Kenton Smith

How much is too much?

Graphic Sexual Horror is revealing doc on BDSM - but it's not for the faint of heart

B+

GRAPHIC SEXUAL HORROR
Feb. 27, 7 p.m., Aqua Books (274 Garry St.)

At one point in the disquieting documentary Graphic Sexual Horror, a former model for defunct BDSM website Insex makes an illuminating revelation.

Modeling for Insex, she says, became like a test of endurance - but one she took on willingly. Insex pushed the envelope, and she wanted to see just how far she herself was capable of going.

Two thoughts. Number one: this is a moment of psychological insight into BDSM that this otherwise thoughtful documentary could have used more of. But I'll come back to that.

Number two: I kept asking myself a similar question throughout the film. How much longer, I wondered, can I hold out?

Be warned: Graphic Sexual Horror will be simply too much for some. Its portrait of BDSM as business is fascinating, but if leather, stress positions, and pleasure-as-pain do not, as they say, float your boat, the film will demand a dedicated resoluteness to sit through.

In fact, co-directors Barbara Bell and Anna Lorentzon have perhaps asked too much. This is a worthy subject, and obviously it's necessary to show something of it - but, of course, the problem with fetishes is what's good for you isn't necessarily good for me.

Hence for non-enthusiasts (and perhaps even somewhat less enthusiastic enthusiasts), it's a lot to take. More suggestion, and trust that the audience will fill in some blanks, might have been a better strategy.

Instead it feels like we're clubbed over and over again with unrelentingly graphic footage. And even worse, it's in the service of making the same points over and over. The bloated middle third of this film actually starts to become boring.

Nonetheless, Graphic Sexual Horror asks some important questions. Perhaps the most pertinent issue is, to what extent are BDSM activities immutably altered by the presence of the camera and the spectre of profit?

What we learn is that many models for Insex, when enough money was dangled before their eyes, put up with a lot more than they might otherwise have been willing.

The most harrowing scene in the film shows a young woman on camera who is slapped in the face, starts to cry, and protests that that hadn't been discussed beforehand. Yet she sucks it up when the director suggests she quit.

There was a lot of money at stake for these models, we learn. The inevitable question that arises is the same as regards anyone in porn or the sex trade: are the workers empowered, or exploited?

What the film doesn't ask is what attracts some people to BDSM in the first place. The perspective of an expert psychologist on the topic would have been welcome and enabled a more thorough probing of the topic.

Also unfortunate is the rushed final third, which concerns Insex's essentially government-enforced shutdown. It raises serious questions about censorship and the possible misuse of US security legislation.

For all its flaws, Graphic Sexual Horror is both informative and provocative - and for a documentary, those are strong measures of success.
— Kenton Smith

A journey worth taking

Peter Wintonick's pilgrIMAGE is a meandering, but inspiring film about, well, filmmaking

B+

pilgrIMAGE
Feb. 26, 7 p.m., Cinematheque

By the end of pilgrIMAGE, by acclaimed documentarian Peter Wintonick, you realize you've wound up in a much different place from where you began. Many films go essentially nowhere. This documentary wanders, meanders and ends up in some pleasingly unexpected places.

That's its charm. The looseness, the feeling of free association, and the proliferation of ideas makes the film sometimes feel like the conversations we have as undergrads. How interesting this film is.

The Montreal-based Wintonick may not be known to casual moviegoers, but within film communities worldwide he's celebrated as the co-director of Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media - for many years the most successful documentary in Canadian history.

In some respects, pilgrIMAGE resembles that film: it approaches the documentary as more of a series of ideas, rather than a narrative or journalistic investigation. The framework here is a road trip undertaken by Wintonick and his daughter Mira, herself an aspiring filmmaker, to various significant sites in film history.

For instance, the two visit the basement of a Paris hotel where the first films were screened, in 1895, by the Lumiere Brothers. According to legend, the image train fast approaching the camera lens panicked the crowd (more likely an urban myth, in fact).

The Lumiere Brothers were also responsible for the world's first "documentary": a long static shot of workers emerging from the Lumiere factory, who had actually had been sent home to change into better clothes. "Thus he first documentary was actually a lie," Wintonick narrates.

At moments like this, there is perhaps less a feeling of discussion and more a sense of classroom lecture, although of course it will all seem so new to viewers untutored in the particulars. The film also catalogues famous quotes on film that if you haven't already heard, you ought to.

Yet cinema history is merely the jumping-off point to an exploration of the doc's evolution, within a now larger world of media. We meet Fanny Armstrong, who made the documentary McLibel about the long-running English McDonald's libel trial.

Unable to find a distributor at first, Armstrong first distributed McLibel on the net. Thus it could be considered one of the first web docs.

Armstrong also clarifies an important point about the documentary form: it's about perspective, not so-called "objective truth." This point is reinforced in a brilliant scene with Russian director Victor Kossakovsky, who demonstrates the difference between recording an interview and making a film.

For aspiring filmmakers in the audience, this is going to be some nourishing brain food. Even for experienced filmmakers, it may be an opportunity to deconstruct what they know, or think they know, and put it back together.

What's made clear is that in film, as with any other medium, artists have to find a philosophy that will work for them.

Perhaps the film's final suggestion is that, in an age of readily available digital tools, we may do well do get out there and produce our own content. It's inspiring to be reminded that we all have our own stories.
— Kenton Smith

'Well, that was a downer...'

The Most Dangerous Man In America is an insightful - and totally depressing - look at the impact (or lack thereof) of Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers

THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN AMERICA
Feb. 27 - March 4, Cinematheque

Honestly. Has anything really changed since the Pentagon Papers blew the lid off the truth of U.S. involvement in Vietnam?

Oh, some of the self-satisfied people interviewed in this documentary sure think so. One New York Times reporter crows that the media's publication of the classified documents has enabled press independence ever since. An activist champions the Supreme Court's allowing the publication as a great victory for the First Amendment.

Flash forward to now, when the press is too chicken shit to confront a former vice president who openly brags on television that he endorsed what is, by relevant legal standards, torture. What's the point of winning your freedom if you're too cowardly to exercise it?

Such questions are what occurred to me as I watched The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. Even at the time, the film claims the media in fact probed little beneath the facade exposed by the Papers.

Who was Ellsberg? A bright young analyst at the RAND Corporation, he was at first was a wholehearted supporter of the war. He even did a tour of duty himself.

Then Robert McNamara, US Secretary of Defense, ordered from RAND a comprehensive study on U.S. involvement in Vietnam. That study essentially constituted the real history of the war, which had been predicated on the fraud of the Gulf of Tonkin and, in fact, stretched back even further.

Slowly, Ellsberg changed his mind about Vietnam, and started photocopying the documents in his trust. Finally, he turned what became known as the Pentagon Papers over to the press.

Narrated in grave tones by Ellsberg himself, this is a riveting but disheartening documentary. The question hangs there: sure, you can act on principle and clear your conscience, but will it make a difference?

After all, even after the revelations, Nixon was re-elected in a landslide, and Ellsberg himself faced prison time. In one of the film's most devastating moments, we learn that a psychiatrist advised Ellsberg's lawyer as follows: many potential jurors, men of middle age, might just hold Ellsberg's sacrifice in contempt.

Why? Because they themselves had likely once made the altogether different sacrifice of compromising their own morals - and learned to live with it.

It bears repeating just how useless the press comes across. Max Frankel, former Washington bureau chief for the NYT, admits that the paper "would never survive, just suppressing this material"; sooner or later it would get out that they'd "flinched." So basically, the NYT was just covering its ass.

Of all the distressing things in the film, perhaps nothing is more chilling than the actual words of Nixon and Kissinger. I don't give a damn about civilians, says Nixon, wondering why Kissinger's so concerned. Except he's not concerned so much about civilians either - only how their deaths will make his boss look.

The impression left by The Most Dangerous Man in America is that ruthless men in high places run the show - because apathetic people let them. Have a nice day.
— Kenton Smith

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