I don’t travel well most of the time, and although I tend to appreciate all the experiences that wandering the world and watching movies at festivals has to offer, I’m usually a little too agitated and jet lagged and homesick too have much fun with it. This year’s Toronto International Film Festival was an exception. I had a wonderful time watching some of the best movies of the year, and even one of the worst, and cramming my days with as many screenings as I could possibly stand until it was time to start all over on the morrow.
Related: CraveOnline TIFF Roundup of Reviews and Interviews
This year I saw 13 films over the course of four days, a pretty decent number but oh, what regrets I have about not being able to fit in Force Majeure, The Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything or Nightcrawler. My colleague Brian Formo reviewed most of those films for CraveOnline in my stead, and I’m bound to catch up with them before the end of the year, but they were films on everyone’s lips this season. Fortunately I was able to see four films that impressed the hell out of me: Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh’s masterful biopic about British painter J.M.W. Turner, The Duke of Burgundy, Peter Strickland’s powerful and stylish examination of two lesbian lepidopterists (lesbidopterists?) who journey too far into the forests of their own kink, The Last Five Years, a schmaltzy but absolutely infectious musical featuring a powerhouse performance from Anna Kendrick, and Big Game, a fantastic b-movie yarn about a young Finnish boy forced to protect the American President (Samuel L. Jackson) from terrorists. With nothing but a bow and arrow of course.
But not every film can be great. Adam Sandler and Thomas McCarthy failed to make magic with their nebbishy Darkman riff The Cobbler, Al Pacino put forth a noble attempt to recapture his street cred in Barry Levinson’s scattershot The Humbling (which still sounds like the name of a crappy horror movie), I can barely remember the events of Confessionalready and The Equalizer is just too broad and ridiculous to live up to the memorable legacy of Antoine Fuqua’s and Denzel Washington’s previous collaboration, Training Day. Dave McKean’s grief-stricken fantasy Luna was too damned interesting to be a complete wash, although it’s clear that the famed artist is still finding his way as a filmmaker. And The Judge… well, look, The Judge sucks. It’s one of the worst Oscar bait movies I’ve seen in years. Avoid that film at all costs. Learn from my mistakes.
Related: Denzel Washington & Antoine Fuqua on ‘The Equalizer’ (Video)
Ordinarily I’m the interview guy at film festivals, jumping on camera with as many actors and filmmakers as possible while my colleagues rack up the reviews, but this year worked out a little differently and I only had time for four. It was nice seeing Denzel Washington and Antoine Fuqua again, and we had a lot of fun talking about the over the top explosions of The Equalizer and who should play Washington’s character if they ever green light a “St. Elsewhere” movie. But more than anything else I’m really glad I was able to make time for a half hour interview with Dave McKean. He’s one of my favorite artists and even though I’m not entirely in love with his new movie, he’s so articulate about his work and the state of the fantasy genre that I dare say it’s one of the better interviews we’ve run at CraveOnline in a while. I can take no credit for that. I just had to sit back and let him say intriguing things for a while. I do hope you check that one out.
But film festivals consist of more than highlights and lowlights, and this year’s Toronto International Film Festival was no exception to that particular rule. There were a handful of films about which I just don’t have much to say; they were neither good enough nor bad enough to move me to words. Or rather, to many of them. What follows are my thoughts on the decent but not quite dazzling motion pictures October Gale, Revenge of the Green Dragons and Tokyo Tribe, and with them I leave you. Until next year.
October Gale
Director Ruba Nadda (Cairo Time) has a great eye for atmosphere and an excellent leading lady in Patricia Clarkson, who stars as a doctor who comes across a wounded man (Scott Speedman) while opening up her isolated cabin for the season. It’s enough to make you wonder why anyone ever bothers having cabins. Nothing good ever seems to come of them.
October Gale strives valiantly for a long time to be a character-driven thriller; Clarkson commands the screen and does an exceptional job of selling the emotional vulnerability of a widowed woman who possesses otherwise unmistakable strength. Speedman is a bit of a blank slate but his character is intended to be an enigma for much of the movie, at turns a potential threat and a possible sideways reincarnation of Clarkson’s deceased husband (Callum Keith Rennie). It’s impressive that Clarkson sells the audience on the idea that Speedman’s parallels with her husband can successfully motivate her to trust him, to the point that even a moment of strong sexual chemistry feels natural and alluring.
But for all its good intentions, October Gale doesn’t come through with many actual thrills. The action is relegated almost entirely to the third act, and even then the tone is still frustratingly conversational. It would seem that Ruba Nadda is trying to make a greater point about moving on from the death of a loved one – the motivation for all the violence that befalls them (I won’t reveal exactly how) – but the relationship between the thriller storyline and the backstory of Clarkson’s heroine is too tenuous to really play out that way. It’s a great showcase for Clarkson’s considerable acting abilities, and that’s always something to celebrate, but alas, October Gale isn’t quite developed enough to fully work as an intimate drama or as a suspenseful yarn.
Revenge of the Green Dragons
Revenge of the Green Dragons tries desperately hard to be the Asian-American Goodfellas, and there’s enough solid material here that it could have succeeded. Co-directed by Andrew Loo and Andrew Lau, and produced by Martin Scorsese (who finally won his Oscar for remaking Lau’s ripping crime drama Infernal Affairs), the film takes a hard look at urban street crime from the perspective of illegal Chinese and Japanese immigrants whose gang, The Green Dragons, runs the streets but lives in a squalorous sty of an apartment, packed to the gills with drug abuse and public mating. They rule their little world but don’t know how to live in it properly, filling their environment with danger instead of comfort.
That’s a great backdrop for a gritty crime saga, but Revenge of the Green Dragons is fraught with clichés and no amount of “based on a true story” insistence can make up for them. As soon as you pick up on the fact that the two protagonists are entering a gang, but one of them is disciplined and the other is ruled by his fragile ego, you know exactly where Loo and Lau’s film is heading. No surprises are in store here, but the directors do keep their film pushing forward with bombastic style and cram what could have been a four-hour mini-series into a dense and punchy 94-minute running time. It’s a dense but undisciplined film, not altogether bad but never quite impactful enough to leave the impression it’s clearly going for.
Tokyo Tribe
I had high hopes for Tokyo Tribe, a wall-to-wall rap musical adaptation of a manga series about warring street gangs in Tokyo (as one might imagine). The film comes from director Shion Sono, who is easily one of the most interesting filmmakers working today, and whose horrifying morality tale Cold Fish still ranks among the best films of the decade so far. It’s fair to say that Tokyo Tribe delivers on all of its promises, but it’s also fair to say that it’s a gift that never stops giving. The film is a restaurant with amazing food but ridiculously over-sized portions, and you’re not allowed to leave until you’ve eaten till you’ve puked.
Filmed with propulsive energy and packed to the gills with creative flourish, the film tells the tale of a violent, cannibalistic gang in Tokyo who inadvertently kidnap and try to prostitute a woman with a serious secret, and who cannot be dominated. Multiple stories intersect as rival gangs – most of them dangerously violent, but one of them dedicated to peace and love (their headquarters is essentially a Denny’s) – begin to run afoul of each other, building and building and building and building and gosh this movie is long until a protracted, ultraviolent and absurd climax that also refuses to end but never quite stops being of interest.
Sion Sono has never been what you might call a subtle director, but his previous films have mostly justified their outlandishness with stories that prop up the crazy moments properly. Tokyo Tribe is more of a lark, an ambitious but silly epic that demands credit for committing to every nonsensical idea but not for adding up to a coherent experience. There are moments of sublime entertainment but also of mere excessive excess. It’s a movie about grandiosity, posturing and a seemingly limitless cycle of pointless violence, something Shion Sono puts on screen for as long as you can stand. And then he keeps it thee for about another 40 minutes. It’s impressive but just too exhausting for its own good.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
