Cinematical

Guest blogger Taylor Barratt files one last report, on Where the Truth Lies, The Matador and Transamerica.

On Day 7 we saw the excellent Where The Truth Lies, from Atom Egoyan. But there is a blemish, and it’s a pretty big one: Alison Lohman seriously stinks things up. There’s one speech she has to give in a driveway after one of the main characters discovers a secret about her with the other and it's so flat and poorly delivered it's like she was being fed the lines. Egoyan, during Q&A, was sure to mention twice that Lohman is the only actress in the world who can play a 12 and 25 year old character. While that may be true, I sure hope that wasn't the only reason for casting her, though we can't imagine what the other reasons could have been. During Q&A the NC-17 debacle was brought up, and after seeing the (uncut) film, I can say the rating is unjustified, as the sex scene is very central to the story. I would love to tell you the reason why Egoyan believes the film was issued the rating (a theory I do not agree with especially due to another film at the festival with similar content), but when you see it, you'll understand why I have not. While I think Egoyan is right about the MPAA and his comments about Blockbuster, I just don't buy his theory on his rating. At the end of the day, though, it's an unfortunate rating and he now believes the film will be released unrated. I suspect it would get an ‘R’ in Canada. 
 
The final film of the day was a very warm comedy about a teenager dying of cancer called One Last Thing... Yes, that's right, a comedy. The premise: during Dylan’s "United Wish Foundation" press conference he decides to change the socially acceptable "Fishing-with-his-favorite-Football-player” wish to the more practical "I-wanna-try-to-score-with-my-favorite-supermodel" wish. Cynthia Nixon, who plays the mother, does a great job. While she's resigned herself to the inevitable, she still fights things at every turn trying to prolong and keep Dylan with her. However, she is not unreasonable and when she's asked to allow him to do the most absurd of things, she digs deep knowing he should be able to live the remainder of his life as he pleases. One of the best surprises of the 20 films we've seen so far.

Thursday morning brought us American Gun, a film showing pieces of 5 families who are all in some way connected to gun violence. One is the mother and brother of a high-school shooter, the other is the Principal of an inner-city school, the 3rd was the first police officer called to the scene of the school shooting, another is one of the inner city school kids and the last is a Gun Shop owner and his granddaughter who works part time at the store. This film is exceptionally well written, the pacing is quick and the content is to the point. A point that was brought out in Q&A is most of the scenes are high-drama and we can already fill in the blanks without wasting screen time. The gun store and the officer get the least of the attention though they both play pivotal parts in the overall message. The film manages to avoid preaching but shows a great balance of cause and effect involving guns. The entire cast is very strong, though Marcia Gay Harden owns every scene. She's amazing in her portrayal of a mother who never saw it coming and now does everything she can to avoid it to ever occur again. If she's not nominated, I'm a monkey's uncle.

Our next film was Free Zone, a film of which I have little to say about. I must have missed something here. The first 5 minutes of the film are of Portman crying while a song sung in Hebrew (a la 12 days of Christmas) plays out a circle of violence. I found the song very comical at first but then as I realized it's purpose (somewhere around "The water quenches the fire") I found it fairly beautiful. But that's about the end of the beauty I could find in this film. About all I could take from it was Jews and Palestinians don't trust each other, even in the movies. Anyhow the ending, or placement thereof, surprised the hell out of me. So perhaps I need some time to digest this one, but I certainly cannot recommend it at this time. BTW, I believe this is the film that Portman took a lot of flack for shooting a kissing scene at the Wailing Wall…now maybe I blinked, but I didn't see any such scene or even really any narrative that would have taken us to such a scene.

The next day we started with The Matador, starring Pierce Brosnan (Julian), Greg Kennear (Danny) and Hope Davis (Bean). This is a quite funny film about a hit-man that's starting to run out of steam. He's has no home and no friends and the depression of it is finally starting to sink in. Julian tries to curb it with women (and men...actually probably more men than women) and with booze but he's fading fast. Until one day, on a job in Mexico City, he runs into Danny,  a down on his luck salesman who's trying to close a deal to get him back on track. The two end up meeting in the hotel bar after Julian, in the deepest of depression, breaks the rules and starts talking with Danny. As you can imagine they start to form a friendship for the duration of their time in Mexico. The film picks up 6 months later and Julian is in a predicament... Danny is his only friend. The characters fleshed out here are not overly deep, but they don't need to be, this is an entertaining film first and foremost. It seemed fairly obvious to me why Brosnan would take on this film: it's the antithesis to Bond. This is what Bond would be in 2005, an aging sex craved killer who's running out of time and realizing he's alone. A very enjoyable and fun film.

The second of the day is Transamerica, a film my wife originally chose but I put further down our list as it seemed ripe for cliché and in the end did not make our advanced draw list. The premise is that a pre-op male transsexual has to complete a request from her doctor before she'll be granted with the operation: she has to come out/clean with her estranged son about who she is and to do so... they embark on…. a road trip across the country... (Insert rolling eyes here). However, to dismiss this film on poor premise would be to do it a disservice. This is a fantastic film with amazing acting, especially on the part of Felicity Huffman whom I didn't even recognize (and that's the point) for at least 10 minutes when I saw her make a "trademark" facial expression. The humor and drama in this film are a result of the dysfunction of all types from all characters. The film does follow the rather predictable sub-genre path but it does such a good job with it, the trip is merely a means at which to prolong Huffman's character from revealing the truth to her son. All of the characters in this film are quite flawed, but you can't help love them all the same. A pleasant surprise with what I think is an Oscar winning performance though considering content, I could unfortunately see it being passed by.

Before wrapping up this installment, I wanted to further comment on the people’s choice ballot issue I raised earlier in the week. I stand by all I said then, but would like to add to it. Since then we've seen probably a half dozen more films at the Elgin Theatre and each time I've harassed the people handling out the ballots as to whether they were going to collect them this time, as the first time I was assured they finally have their stuff together and would have people at the side exits collecting ballots... which they didn't. And as you can imagine, this has not changed; yet they keep handing out ballots. So as I said before, films showing at Elgin seem to be at a distinct disadvantage of getting proper votes. Paramount and Ryerson have it right, not only do they have two stages when you exit, ballot person and a ballot collector, they have limited exits, so there's no excuse for someone not to "vote". However, this also leads to another complaint: how fair is it to force someone to form a rating/opinion for a movie that just ended 1-minute prior? Some movies just need time to digest, especially festival ones that don't involve shit eating gags at weddings. I've personally already found myself rating a film higher than it deserved feeling much less amorous with it after I gave it some time to digest. I think this could give films with dramatic or humorous endings an unfair advantage, as people are more generous when in a good mood... I really must find some way to voice my complaints on this. I would hate to see the same system in place next year... at least if they allowed the option for people to write out a ballot for a film at a later time then I could do all my voting at the end of the festival, when I can gauge what I've seen and properly rate it in context of the festival. As it is, you can only vote for a film at the conclusion of it's screening because the ballots are generic and go into labeled bags. It should be really interesting to see what film takes the award this year, though I'm not sure the results will be fair.