The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) kicked off last week, bringing some of the best and worst films of 2007 to Canada for a paparazzi-saturated celebration of cinema. This is the first entry in a two-part series of reviews of some of the films featured in this year’s fest. I saw them so that you didn’t have to suffer through the misery of doing so and, man, was it ever tough.
Across The Universe
With contemporary musical theatre overrun by adaptations of songs by pop music groups such as Abba’s Mamma Mia and Queen’s We Will Rock You, it was only a matter of time before someone got the bright idea of turning the Beatles’ back catalogue into musical. Julie Taymor, a renowned director of stage (The Lion King) and screen (Titus and Frida) would seem like the perfect choice to helm the project. Her arresting visual style, intelligence and pop sensibilities should have been an ideal fit, but sadly Across The Universe is possibly the worst thing to happen to the Beatles since Yoko Ono. This misconceived musical attempts to use Beatles songs to encom the story of America in the 1960s into a single narrative. It’s not a terrible concept, but sadly the film is little more than a series of clichéd characters and plot devices. Taymor does manage to create a few magical musical sequences, but they aren’t enough to excuse the drivel in between. It’s hard to say which is the worst moment of the movie, but I would have to call it a tie between Bono singing “I Am The Walrus” as an acid guru and the appropriation of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” as a ballad about unrequited lesbian love. If you consider yourself a Beatles fan, then you owe it to yourself not to see Across The Universe.
Diary Of The Dead
Horror auteur George Romero invented the modern zombie film in 1968 with the classic Night Of The Living Dead and has returned to the genre four times since. What separates his flesh-eating movies from the rest is the way he laces his gorefests with surprisingly relevant social commentary. His latest entry to the Living Dead franchise, Diary Of The Dead, tackles the unreliability of the media during the digital age. The film is a Blair Witch Project-style mockumentary about a group of film students who set out to make a mummy movie but end up inadvertently documenting the beginning of a zombie apocalypse. The meagre budget shows in a few poorly executed sequences, a few lines of dialogue are laughably cheesy and several of the performances from the unknown cast reek of amateurism. But all these flaws are minor and practically expected in the horror genre. It’s certainly not as impressive as Romero’s early zombie efforts, but it’s an effective and thought-provoking movie nonetheless. And where else are you going to see a scene in which a zombie’s head is slowly eaten away by acid in a disgustingly graphic close-up? If that’s not worth $10, I don’t know what is.
Lars And The Real Girl
Lars And The Real Girl is a hilarious and oddly touching story of a grown man and a small town’s platonic relationship with a disturbingly realistic love doll. Canuck Ryan Gosling stars as the hopelessly repressed and awkward Lars who surprises his friends and colleagues by not only ordering the titular love doll, but bringing it around with him in a wheelchair as if it were a real person. The concept sounds like a smutty Farrelly Brothers-esque comedy on paper, but director Craig Gillespie (Mr. Woodcock) and writer Nancy Oliver (Six Feet Under) infuse the story with such deadpan realism and love for the characters that what emerges is a wonderful tale about breaking out of one’s protective shell and learning how to interact with the outside world. Gosling gives his best performance to date as the introverted protagonist, rising to the challenge of communicating the complex emotional state of a character who rarely speaks his mind. Don’t be surprised if the former Breaker High star wins his share of acting honours come award season. This wonderful little movie could very well be the sleeper hit of 2007.
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More reviews from Phil Brown’s TIFF experiences will appear in Tuesday’s issue of the Journal.
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