Toronto International Film Festival '05 : Day 3

Overall this was a mixed day, with some great hits, some misses, and some no-shows.

Maybe here's a good time to remind people I'm not a writer, so these "reviews" that follow are really just my impressions of the film. There are much better sources [ imdb ] to actually find out who and what the movies are about, and generally where I mention a movie or actor I link back there.

Takeshis'

Paramount 1

4/5 Self-indulgent Treat

The only real downside to Takeshis’ was that I think I haven’t seen enough Kitano movies to recognize all the characters. Takeshi plays both himself, and… himself? One is “Beat Takeshi” his well known persona from his gangster movies, the only one of which I’ve seen is the stellar Brother. The other is “Takeshi Kitano”, a struggling convenience store worker who fails time after time at breaking into the business. It’s almost hard to keep up with the twists and turns from the movie-within-the-movie to the dream sequences, but it is a marvelous deconstruction of the man and the character.

The only other recent Takeshi movie I’ve seen is Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman and there were several recognizable characters and elements of that movie present. My favorite was a group of younger men doing the final dance scene from Zatoichi. It’s interesting to see how Takeshi chose to deal with his persona. Now I just have to go watch about 5 more movies so I can get all the in jokes 

Three Times

Paramount 1

2/5 Oh no, too slow

As a film about expressions of love in different time periods, Three Times is good but not great. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for it, but the silent second act just could not keep me interested. I almost left before the third act but decided against it. The acting was very well done, both main actors taking the roles in three different generations did a great job of making me believe they were of that time.

Sorry, Haters

Varsity 8

4.5/5 Gripping and Disturbing

After seeing Sorry, Haters I just couldn’t sit through another slow 2 hour Chinese epic, and so skipped my next film Sunflower in favour of feeding the cat. Really I should have known the way the movie was going that it couldn’t end well, but still I got hooked.

The performances by Robin Wright Penn and Abdellatif Kechiche were outstanding. Wright Penn plays a seriously disturbed woman, to a point we can’t truly imagine. Just when you think she’s done, there’s more.. just so much more. As a counterpoint to this Abdellatif plays the earnest and caring Muslim taxi driver.

I really don’t want to spoil the film because I think everyone should see it, but the general plot is that a chance encounter in a taxi leads to the entanglement of their lives and pains.

Brothers of the Head

Paramount 2

5/5 Oh so Punk!

After taking a break I was really glad I came back downtown to catch this. Shot as a documentary about a pair of conjoined twins who become punk rockers, Brothers of the Head was just so perfect it’s scary. The story is just played so real, so straight, and done so well that it draws you right in. It’s so absurd but in exactly the kind of way Punk could be absurd. Unlike a movie like Spinal Tap, this is not a mockumentory, everyone in this fictional past and present treats it all as dead real.

On top of this Luke and Harry Treadaway seem to give themselves over to the roles so completely it’s scary.. yes, in that self-destructive punk kind of way. I have to mention the music as well which was so well done, so well thought out. Because this movie was in the Visions section it maybe didn’t get the audience it deserved – I really feel a Midnight Madness crowd would have gone wild with this movie. However it really is to straight of a film overall for the Midnight Madness program. Okay, I admit it, I just wanted to crowd to start rocking out.

Posted at 08:30 AM to Film By: John Fairley