Horror
to Hummingbirds, Greta, Gloria and Canadian Screen Awards
I haven’t much to say about the Canadian Screen Awards to be announced this Sunday night on CBC (see the list of nominations: https://www.academy.ca/nominees/), not having seen any of the five “best picture” nominees (none of which has yet played theatrically in Canada’s capital), and precious few of the films nominated for anything. There is a best actor nomination for Brandon Oakes in Don McKellar’s Through Black Spruce now arriving in select theatres. An adaptation of the acclaimed Joseph Boyden novel, it’s about the search by a young Cree woman from Northern Ontario for her twin sister who has disappeared in Toronto. I was able to see it at last year’s Toronto film festival. Definitely worth a look. At New York’s Tribeca film festival a year ago I caught Robert Budreau’s Stockholm, nominated for “best adapted screenplay”. It stars the reliably excellent Ethan Hawke. Several of the documentary features—Anote’s Ark, Anthropocene—had releases last year. One can only hope more nominated titles will show up on Canadian screens, TV, or streaming platforms during 2019
I haven’t much to say about the Canadian Screen Awards to be announced this Sunday night on CBC (see the list of nominations: https://www.academy.ca/nominees/), not having seen any of the five “best picture” nominees (none of which has yet played theatrically in Canada’s capital), and precious few of the films nominated for anything. There is a best actor nomination for Brandon Oakes in Don McKellar’s Through Black Spruce now arriving in select theatres. An adaptation of the acclaimed Joseph Boyden novel, it’s about the search by a young Cree woman from Northern Ontario for her twin sister who has disappeared in Toronto. I was able to see it at last year’s Toronto film festival. Definitely worth a look. At New York’s Tribeca film festival a year ago I caught Robert Budreau’s Stockholm, nominated for “best adapted screenplay”. It stars the reliably excellent Ethan Hawke. Several of the documentary features—Anote’s Ark, Anthropocene—had releases last year. One can only hope more nominated titles will show up on Canadian screens, TV, or streaming platforms during 2019
Moving on to current
releases, here are brief reviews of five … several of which have a Canadian
connection.
African American writer-director Jordan
Peele scored a huge hit in 2017 with the racially-charged horror flick Get Out and this fiendishly clever
follow up also hits home. The movie toggles
between the present day and 1986 when it opens with a family of three—a small
girl Adelaide and her parents—visiting an amusement park along Santa Cruz,
California’s beachfront boardwalk. Adelaide wanders off into a hall of funhouse
mirrors where she comes face to face with an eerie doppelgänger. That traumatic memory is revived when decades
later, Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) accompanies her husband Gabe (Winston Duke),
daughter Zora and small son Jason, on a vacation to Santa Cruz where they meet
up with the Tylers, a white couple (played by Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker)
and their teenage daughters.
Adelaide’s
foreboding turns to dread when a family of four doppelgängers shows up, dressed
in red jumpsuits wielding large scissors.
Things get fatally freaky fast.
“Jeremiah 11:11” scrawled on a sign from the 1986 flashback offers a
portent: “Therefore this is what the Lord says:
‘I will bring on them a disaster they cannot escape. Although they cry out to
me, I will not listen to them.’ ” A subterranean army of doppelgängers rise
up in a murderous rampage—giving ominous new meaning to “Hands Across America”—while
Adelaide becomes locked in a personal battle with her grownup doppelgänger
“Red” who, speaking in a raspy croak, explains “We are Americans”. Indeed. As Pogo warned: “We have met the enemy and
they are us.” The movie’s title, also a play on U.S., goes beyond creepily
effective horror tropes. Because in a
United States more divided than ever it isn’t hard to believe that Americans
are their own worst enemies. A-
Greta (Ireland/U.S.
http://www.focusfeatures.com/greta)
This creepy tale from Irish director
Neil Jordan isn’t up to his earlier classics but it does have French screen
legend Isabelle Huppert. When a young
woman Frances (Chloë Grace Moretz) finds a black purse on the New York subway
and returns it to the owner Greta Hideg (Huppert), a widow living alone, that
innocent gesture opens the door to obsessive stalking that puts Frances and her
roommate Erica (Maika Monroe) at risk. Frances has lost her mother; Greta her
mind. An abduction later, Frances’ father (Canadian Colm Feore) hires a private
detective (Stephen Rea) to find his daughter. By this time Greta has gone full
psycho. You’ll want to keep the lid on the box in her house of horrors. B
Level 16 (Canada)
Writer-director Danishka Esterhazy’s
dystopian fable has a faint echo of a low-budget “Handmaid’s Tale”. A number of young teenage girls in
monochromatic uniforms are being held in a sunless prison-like “academy”, under
guard and subject to ruthless regimentation in “the feminine virtues” by a
platinum blonde headmistress Brixil (Sara Canning). Supposedly protected from
outside “poisonous air”, they are administered “vitamins” and “vaccines” by a
Dr. Milo (Peter Outerbridge”). Moving up
to “level 16” is to ready them for adoption by a family.
Two
of the girls, Vivien (Katie Douglas) and Sophia (Celina Martin), form a bond of
friendship and in trying to escape discover the awful truth of the horrors in
the basement that take exploitation of the female body to a shockingly sinister
for-profit level. The mass breakout of
the girls comes as welcome relief. B
Gloria Bell (U.S./Chile)
I’m never keen on Hollywood remakes of
foreign-language dramas as they almost always lack the edge of the originals.
(See, for example, The Upside, which
despite the efforts of Bryan Cranston, Kevin Hart, and Nicole Kidman, is a
blander version of the uproarious French Les
Intouchables.) However having the
original director at the helm does help (as also the case with Cold Pursuit.) Here Chilean filmmaker
Sebastian Lelio remakes his 2013 hit drama Gloria,
following a 2018 triumph when his A
Fantastic Woman won the Oscar for best foreign-language film.
Julianne
Moore gives a spirited performance as the middle-aged divorcee Gloria with a
son (played by Canadian Michael Cera) and grandson, and a pregnant daughter who
is moving to Sweden. Feeling less than
needed and fulfilled, Gloria meets a seemingly compatible divorced man Arnold
(John Turturro) in a dance club, a connection that quickly blossoms into
romance. While proclaiming his love for Gloria, Arnold however cannot detach
from dependent family ties. Being abandoned twice is enough for Gloria to cut
her losses and move on—dancing to the appropriately upbeat strains of the 1982 Laura
Branigan song “Gloria”. B+
The Hummingbird Project (Canada/Belgium
https://www.thehummingbirdproject.film/)
Although Quebec writer-director Kim
Nyguyen’s drama earned a few technical Canadian screen award nominations and
was shot in Canada, the story is set in the U.S. with an international
cast. The “project” involves New York cousins—motor-mouth
hustler Vincent Zaleski (Jesse Eisenberg) and balding brainiac coder Anton (Alexander
Skarsgård)—in
a quixotic scheme of high frequency stock-market trading where a difference of microseconds
(measured in millionths) can make millions. Quitting their trader jobs, the
pair lure an investor into financing construction of an underground
straight-line fibre-optic cable from a Kansas electronic exchange to one in New
Jersey linked to the New York Stock Exchange.
The aim is to shave a millisecond from the signal travel time, down to
16—the single flap of a hummingbird’s wings; hence the title. However
suspicious ex-boss Eva Torres (Salma Hayek) has them followed to beat them at
their own game. Complications that include
a cancer diagnosis, an FBI arrest, and an Amish angle lead up to a sobering
life lesson.
If it all sounds wackily far-fetched,
according to a survey by Donald Mackenzie in the March 7 London Review of Books, the near light-speed fractions involved in
automated high frequency trading systems are now measured in nanoseconds
(billionths). Nyguyen’s film serves as a cautionary tale about the
soul-destroying competitive drives that take over when the frenzy of
hyper-speed finance capitalism loses any connection to human values. B+
Finally, let me
briefly note a new Netflix production The Dirt, which draws on an
autobiographical account to relive the story of the notorious rock band Mötley
Cruë. I’m not recommending it given the
profane vulgarity of the proceedings (apart from a few sensitive moments)
involving epic substance abuse and sexual license. I watched it because of
Welsh actor Iwan Rheon’s role as Mick Mars, the guitarist who suffered from a
chronic medical condition and seemed to be the most sane member. Rheon is best known for playing the dastardly
psychotic Ramsay in Game of Thrones, returning
for its eighth and final season on April 14. Rheon can be seen in an earlier
small role in the 2011 drama Resistance which
imagines that the D-Day invasion has failed with Germany attacking Britain and
German troops occupying the Welsh countryside.
The movie can be streamed for free on the Kanopy platform with a public
library card.
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