TIFF - DAY8

Renaissance (Christian Volckman)
A film noir with outstanding visuals, imagery and a innovative -japanese-style- animation technique (in the same lines of Sin City).

But don't expect more, the innovation concerns the style, everything else is either snatched (Blade Runner more than any other film) or just blindly borrowed from "The Film Noir Template": straightforward one -liner dialouges (English accent in Paris 2050's!), typical sterotypes (v.s. characters development) , simply put all the people are divided into:
Good guys: Rebelious good cop, cute dame with killer French legs with an odd English Accent, missing girl (a cocky and stuckup scientist, which oddly is the cute dame's sister but more looks like English Rachel) , other good but insignificant cops who are pretty much "fillers".

Bad guys:evil corporation (Avalon) gang, invisable Avalon security guys and other which are there to create suspense.
Overall a movie with stunning cinematagrophy but a plot as thin as a pizza crust.
















Mainline (Rakhshan Bani-Etemad)
Another gritty and blunt film by the Queen of Iranian Cinema. After her last movie "Gilaneh" (shown at last year's TIFF), a film on the post-war era life in Iran, she return to her favorite subject (something she's been working on for years in documentaries): drug addiction, but this time as a feature, this -by the way- is the first Iranian feature movie about drug addiction in this format.

Casting her own daughter (Baran Kowsari) as the main character (who delivers a jaw-dropping stunning performance) and shooting in destaurated tones and documentary style (hand-held camera, fast paced cuts, fly-on-the-wall style), the film is a powerful depiction of an epidemic among the middle class Iranians. The movie is well balanced in terms of looking at the life of young drug-addicts from all angles and perspectives, their struggles, dreams, short-lived joys and their doomed fate.

Daring as she always is, Bani-Etemad aims stright at the issue without any compromises, she barely leaves any stone unturned and gives you a brutal glimpse of a life of a drug addict in a wealthy upper-middle class in Tehran.

Bita Farahi gives a heart-wrenching performance as the worrisome suffering mother who's on the verge of a mental breakdown, as she rides the emotional rollar-coaster of a parent trying to put up with her daughter's unorthodox life and getting her off the drug and dealing with the sense of guilt and blame for what her daughter has become.

This is not a movie for the faint-hearted, it's an intense and challenging ride (the mood of the is very similiar to Jafar Panahi's "The Circle" ), but real as it gets and Rakhshan's best work in her repertoire of commentaries on contemporary Iranian social issues. Issues that no-one else can portray like she does.

TIFF - DAY7

A Few Days Later (Niki Karimi)

I want my money back! never have I felt so pissed after wasting money and time on a crappy movie like this and thinking i could've seen anothe movie instead of this amateur work (still can't figure why it was chosen for TIFF).

Sad thing is -like my friend was saying- movies like this give Iran a bad rep, so they do more harm than good. I'm all for 'l'art pour l'art'' and minimalistic movies, but hey you gotta have something to tell first and then settle on the form/style , Kiarostami is a good example of this, where the audince still takes something away from the movie. The audience were totally confused about what the movie was trying to convey. A lady asked Ms. Karimi "what was the message of this movie?" and she replied i don't have any message, and then babbled about how movies are -like Spielberg's "Dreamworks" company!!- a work of dreams and how hard it is to make a decision and how she was trying to portray a woman who has to make a hard decision.

Well thank you Capt. obvious, well done! because we couldn't have figured it out without your help, how about working on your script next time so characters have a meaning and don't just appear and disappear like ghost dummies. how about a story for your next film? something that the poor viewers might find a "bit" engaging and compelled to follow.

You'd expect for a actress with 25 films (some with the best directors in Iran) in her resume, to know what narration means and if your film fails to communicate with the viewers, you're literally done, regardless if you're an overrated celebrity female actress in your country or not.Unfortunately that's not the case in some star-deprived countries. Leave film making to those who have talent and stick to what you do best (hint: acting).

S&Man (JT Petty)
Why do we watch horror movies? do we sympathize with the torturers or the victims?

Can documentaries be trusted? why do we believe a documentary is valid where it could be totally fake? what's the critera for distinguishing them? don't we decide if they should be true or not? do we want them to be true, even if know they are not?

Do we enjoy the Abu Ghraib prison pictures? why do we rush to accident scenes? to see the blood? to see the dead bodies?

Are we all of voyeurists by nature? is that why we watch movies? where do we draw the line between voyeurism and wattching movies? aren't they essentially the same thing?


Leave it to JT Petty to ask these blunt questions and then decide yourself. That is, if you can still deal with yourself, the sense of guilt and embarrassment after watching this shocking and cleverly made movie.
the final sequence just blew me away, very twisted and layered.

TIFF - DAY5

I don’t want to sleep alone (Hei Yan Quan)

Man is Tsai Ming-Liang an awesome director. Back again with another absurd-comedy feature, I guess the only director who’s movies makes people leave the theater (even in TIFF!).

Last year I was able to catch his “Wayward Clouds” a porno-art house movie (which doesn’t describe it at all, as his movies are genre-breaking or rather anti-genre) which snatched the Silver Bear at last years Berlin film fest.. The last sequence of Wayward clouds was so brutal and intense/shocking that people flocked to the exits of Ryerson theater like birds running away from fire. However as always if you survive the intensity, there’s always a cathartic poetic/subtle reward.

Last night the same thing happened although on a smaller scale, folks felt uncomfortable with his brutal depictions of awkward everyday life-situations which totally creates uneasy moments for North American audiences, who are not used to see bodily contacts in a non-gay sense.

Commissioned by the “MOZART'S VISIONARY CINEMA: NEW CROWNED HOPE” program, the films follows a mute and homeless “Lee Kang-sheng” through the streets of Kuala Lumpur. He is robbed, beaten-up and then found, carried with a mattress and nursed by a group of Bangladeshi foreign workers. One of them (Rawang ) takes care of him and eventually bonds with Lee. (there’s a long scene where Rawang helps Lee relieve himself in the bathroom where there’s so much half-nude body contact and yet subtle human connection that it’s overwhelming by any standards).

The third point of the love triangle is Chyi (Tsai regular Chen Siang-chyi) who’s a waitress and nurses her boss’s paralyzed husband (and later on forced to do things in a sequence that allegedly caused some crew members to opt not to work with Ming-liang again!) .

The prevalent Ming-liang elements are dominant as always: water (I asked him after the movie why he’s always so fascinated with water (like his previous movies The Hole, The River, etc) and he cleverly avoided my question with a vague/philosophical reply “because it’s there”), isolation (scilence), alienation (Lee’s mute and other characters barely talk to each other), buildings, natural catastrophes (this time Haze resulting from Indonesia’s forrest blaze) and strange objects (mattress/building wrecks).

Style wise, he implements the same torture-some long shots, with characters lazily moving around the screen, depicting daily routines in real time (something Lee has mastered and does it so wonderfully with his body).

The movie is full of metaphoric scenes which emphasize the loneliness, alienation and isolation of today’s life in the modern world (reminiscent of Antonioni’s works) and are contrasted with the humanly scenes which show how Rawang cares about Lee without having any expectations. There’s a scene where Lee and Chvi are trying to have sex with their Haze-protecting masks but fail due to constant coughing and it’s so telling and clever that shows how amazingly Ming-liang has captured the essence of cinema, humans who can’t interact sexually/physically(talk) or mentally.

The movie finishes with a typical Ming-liang scene where all the important characters (love triangle) float on the mattress, and Motzart’s music floats on the screen singing about love and compassion.

Ming-liang mentioned how during shooting this film he was healed (by going back to his motherland Malaysia) and he wanted to show what is lost nowadays is how to care about each other and not be apathetic.

Another stunning work by a gay philosopher who understands the man-woman relationship and gender dynamics better than any heterosexual director.

TIFF-Day 4 or V-Fest?

(photo by izrits0122)

Alright Today I had no films to see but a ticket to V Fest, just took a little break and let the music take over, it's such a blow that Massive Attack pulled out of the fet due to U.S visa problems (can't believe it, if U.K bands can't get a visa then who can?).

Got in time there to see the Strokes, Wolfmother, Zero 7 and Broken Social Scene.
Wolfmother was impressive kind of reminds me of Led Zeppelin for some reason , although musically they are very different.


The Srokes were alright, not my cup of tea , same for BSS, no big deal, just a nice band.

Highlight of the night was (unexpectedly ) Zero 7 who totally blew my socks off. With their new album “The garden” they have changed their image as a soulful down tempo band , to a combo of Pink Floyd’s space rock, Interpol’s thumping alt rock and even a bit of ELLO /Tangerine dream 70’s electronica, a weird but wonderful mix that works perfectly and had the crowd going nuts during their 1.1/2 hour performance.

Singer Sia Furler’s wonderful voice was too strong to bare at moments , like riding an emotional roller coaster and the newly added singer /guitarist Jose Gonzalez is amazing (Think James Taylor but more relaxed and cooler). Overall an unforgettable performance and something to remember for many years to come.