It’s gotten to be that working class characters are something of a rarity in wide-release movies. Heroes adorned in work boots and denim have become increasingly hard to find, now that the market is so saturated with tights, cowls, and army fatigues. The exploits of superheroes and spies make for more spectacular adventures than those of your average working stiff, even though the color of a person’s collar or cape isn’t what makes them interesting -competence is. Director Paul Greengrass is an expert in his own right when presenting very skilled people going to work as cause for excitement, so it’s without much surprise that his latest film, Captain Phillips, makes a story of sea-trade gone wrong the most exhilarating fall film this side of the ozone layer.
Looking to capitalize on home ice advantage even before the Toronto International Film Festival has properly begun, Canadian director Denis Villeneuve throws down the gauntlet early with his twisty, and morbid Prisoners. While a more approachable genre effort than some of the biographical, experimental, and extraterrestrial offerings using TIFF as stumping ground zero for their long campaigns to awards season, Prisoners proves that Villeneuve won’t go quietly into the Hollywood machinery. While a tad more histrionic, and not quite as, well, incendiary as the stellar gutpunch that was 2010’s Incendies, Villeneuve has crafted an excellent crime thriller with Prisoners, one that very easily could have turned out otherwise.
Jason Reitman’s hotly anticipated new film Labor Day made an appearance at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, and we were there to see it. The film stars Josh Brolin as Frank, a fugitive on the run in rural Massachusetts who interrupts the lives of the young and impressionable Henry (Gattlin Griffith), and his deeply depressed mother Adele, who is played by Oscar-winner Kate Winslet.
From the melodramatic title alone, Can a Song Save Your Life? might lead you to believe that Irish director John Carney is the latest victim of one of the entertainment industry’s most destructive trends: The Guy Ritchie Effect. You’d be right to make such an inference, as Carney’s follow-up (give or take a little released alien invasion comedy) to the shoestring budgeted winner Once shows many of the telltale signs that come when a distinct voice gets drowned out trying to harmonize with Hollywood. Just as the madcap and scrappy zeal of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was dulled in the process of cleaning up and legitimizing Ritchie’s style for broader appeal in Snatch, Can a Song Save Your Life? takes Carney’s original formula, and refines it for ease of mass consumption.
Under the Dome has finally entered its seasonal end game, with “Exigent Circumstances” presenting a culmination of weeks' worth of careful chess piece maneuvering. Okay, that’s a lie: chess makes for far too intricate a board game metaphor. And it’s not like the show has setup an elaborate Rube Goldberg apparatus over the course of the season either, so there goes the Mousetrap analogy (cause and effect don’t really go well together in Chester’s Mill anyway). It would be tempting to finally draw the Trouble comparison I promised back in the pilot, but the team of pegs the player has control over moving in that game convey to great a sense of individual agency for this show to match.
Gravity deserves to be seen on a screen big enough to do justice to Cuarón’s incredible direction, with a soundsystem booming enough to invoke the calamitous power of Steven Price’s score, and with a loved one at your side to join you on an unforgettable ride.
Reitman has established himself as a modern great of being consistently good, and 'Labor Day' gives him room for the kind of leg stretching and boundary pushing that make it his most promising film to date.
Not long from now, it’s possible audiences will look at cinematic depictions of journalism the way we see smoking in a restaurant today –a jarring artifact from another time period. It’s what makes Citizen Kane an impossible film to modernize, structurally speaking. Hopping on planes, beating the pavement, and finding out who a person was by talking with those who knew them personally? How positively quaint, says The Fifth Estate, the new Wikileaks drama. While you’re still packing to visit the subject’s nearest and dearest, I’ve already gained access to their career history, interests, hopes, dreams, and political leanings in minutes -all it cost me was a friend request and a follow.
Hey, Under the Dome. It’s me, how’ve you been? You still keeping those people trapped under a dome? Aw, that’s great, glad to hear it. Sorry we couldn’t chat last week, I was busy fighting the flu. But I see you got a little busy doing some fighting yourself too. Mad Max’s Thunderdome? Just terrific. And hey, we got to meet Max’s mom! And then you immediately got rid of Max’s mom ten minutes later by having her fall off a boat! Really, that’s some top-drawer crazypants material right there, and you know that’s what I love to see you do. Good work, good work. I feel like we’re in a really good place in our relationship right now. You’re continuing to be your wonderfully inconsistent and messy self, letting the ol' freak flag fly in 40 knot dome-based headwinds. Me: I’ve been having way more fun ever since I realized there’s no point in trying to tear you apart each week, because it’s about as constructive a critical exercise as making fun of a clown’s wardrobe. You’re a bad show, and that’s okay.
