BURT'S BUZZ - Review By Greg Klymkiw - One of Canada's Most Dynamic Filmmakers Shoots the King of Bees.

In addition to having it's World Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival 2013, Burt's Buzz, Jody Shapiro's fine documentary portrait of Burt Shavitz, the public face of Burt's Bees health products, was released by FilmBuff theatrically and via iTunes download in the USA on June 6, 2014 and will begin its theatrical launch in Canada on June 13, 2014 at TIFF Bell Lightbox (the year-round home for all of TIFF's activities, including the Toronto International Film Festival). After you read the review, please note that just below it on this page is a preview and link to a major feature length story entitled Jody Shapiro: A Guy For All Seasons in "Electric Sheep - a deviant view of cinema", focusing upon the director of Burt's Buzz, Jody Shapiro, one of Canada's most legendary young filmmakers.

Burt's Buzz (2013) ***1/2
Dir: Jody Shapiro
Starring: Burt Shavitz

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Jody Shapiro began his career in film as one of the truly genuine creative producers in Canada, or rather, as a producer, he was always easy to look upon as a filmmaker (as opposed to the annoying assumption that a filmmaker and a producer are two different things).

Working with Guy Maddin in the latter stages of the great surrealist's career, Shapiro brought his artistic instincts to bear and was never shy about leaping into the fray with a movie camera and shooting like a madman. That Shapiro went on to be Isabella Rossellini's chief collaborator as a co-director and producer on her utterly insane Green Porno series of shorts speaks volumes about why he might have been the perfect director to document the life of Burt Shavitz.

Any producer attracted to as many eccentric projects and working closely with as many genuine eccentrics as Maddin and Rossellini has proven indeed that Shavitz could not have been luckier than to have someone like Shapiro infuse Burt's Buzz with his keen eye for the joys of, well, eccentricity. Shapiro's feature documentary is a loving portrait of the famed old bearded hippie whose face has adorned the packaging of the Health Store mainstay products "Burt's Bees". Though Shapiro interviews associates, sponsors and family, the film is mostly all Burt all the time - which is great because the camera loves him and he has a nice low key irascibility.

Shapiro delivers all the fascinating biographical details of how this city boy made his way to the backwoods of Maine and eventually became an avid beekeeper. With the assistance of the woman he loved, the company grew to gargantuan proportions. There's a melancholy to the tale also since Burt by his own admission was not happy nor especially cut out for corporate life and he sadly sold his shares in the company and his "brand" for peanuts. Considering Burt's Bees sold to the Clorox Corp. (I kid you not!), the sale was worth over 900 million dollars. Burt's not seen a cent of that and makes his living as a kind of travelling personal appearance spokesman.

Shapiro bounces between the solace of Burt on his farm and the genuine adulation he receives during live appearances. This is a simple, but effective juxtaposition and was the wisest way to present contrast, conflict and the two sides of the current coin that is Burt Shavitz.

Given the ubiquity of the Burt's Bees brand, you'd think we were dealing with a typical hippie-turned-corporate-sellout, but Shavitz is anything but that. He's a man of nature who's happiest on his farm in Maine and it's within the context of this that Shapiro trains his camera. Though there's probably a film to be made about a natural health company being owned by one of the most heinous producers of environmentally unfriendly consumer goods - this is NOT that film.

It's a sweet, funny and loving portrait of a man, his dog and his farm and how he needs to drag himself out to trade shows and malls to do a horse and pony act for the privilege of living a life of solitude amongst the hills and the trees.

And, of course, his bees.

He might not be a multi-millonaire, but you know, it could be worse.

Burt's Buzz was released by FilmBuff theatrically and via iTunes download in the USA on June 6, 2014 and begins its theatrical launch in Canada on June 13, 2014 at TIFF Bell Lightbox (the year-round home for all of TIFF's activities, including the Toronto International Film Festival). AND NOW, HERE'S ALL THE INFO YOU NEED ON HOW TO ACCESS MY FEATURE LENGTH STORY ON JODY SHAPIRO, THE DIRECTOR OF BURT'S BUZZ:

JODY SHAPIRO: A GUY FOR ALL SEASONS by Greg Klymkiw

can be read in Electric Sheep - a deviant view of cinema

by accessing UK's coolest online film magazine HERE

JOURNEY

with Jody Shapiro
into the very heart, soul and mind of Burt Shavitz

DISCOVER

the special bond twixt two men
from two generations

who share one object of affection

LIVE

the humble beginnings of a nice Jewish Boy

in the neighbourhood of Mel Lastman's North York

EXPERIENCE

Shapiro's post-secondary adventures at York University
and his STRICT tutelage under Niv Fichman

ENJOY

an ALL-EXCLUSIVE Guy Maddin pitch
for a highly-charged erotic scene involving
Jody Shapiro

BASK

in the glory that
IS
JODY SHAPIRO
as STEVE GRAVESTOCK,
ISABELLA ROSSELLINI
and GAY MADDIN
extol the Great Man's
considerable virtues

DELVE

into Shapiro's most intimate personal fantasy
involving culinary arts and wildlife

SHARE

a rare fantasy with two men among men

ALL THIS AND MORE WHEN YOU READ:

JODY SHAPIRO: A GUY FOR ALL SEASONS

BY GREG KLYMKIW at ELECTRIC SHEEP

JODY SHAPIRO GETS A SMOOCH
FROM FORMER GF
LOUELLA NEGIN.

TRACKS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Cuteness Galore available theatrically via Mongrel Media in Toronto, Montreal & Vancouver on June 6, 2014. Cuteness Abounds Down Under: Cute Babe, Cute Camel, Cute Movie.

Tracks (2013) **1/2
Dir. John Curran
Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Adam Driver

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Robyn Davidson (Mia Wasikowska) was an Aussie hippie chick who abandoned a formal post-secondary education and instead lived with a bunch of radical animal science types n Adelaide (where she learned a whole ton about God's creatures). She subsequently joined a left-wing organization of wanker egghead fruitcakes in Sydney (that included the likes of Germaine Greer) where she grooved the Bohemia electric. In the 70s she settled in the middle of nowhere and learned everything she always wanted to know about camels (and was, decidedly, not afraid to ask). Her first experience was with a brutal camel farmer who exploited her until finally, she met and worked for a kindly camel expert who taught her a great deal and partially bankrolled what was to become her biggest challenge.

Davidson's ultimate goal was to trek 1700 miles alone across the deserts of Western Oz from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean. Well, she wasn't completely alone - she had her faithful mutt and a handful of ornery, but loyal camels. Since her trip was financed by the National Geographic Society, she was occasionally in the company of Rick Smolan (Adam Driver), a photographer who would add the pictorial materials to Robyn's eventual story in the famous wildlife magazine. The two enjoyed an on-again-off-again love affair and eventually Robyn wrote the full length memoir that this film is based upon.

This is by no means a dreadful film. Wasikowska is a pleasing screen presence and very easy on the eyes. When the film focuses upon Robyn and the camels, it's pretty engaging - especially in the first third of the movie. Unfortunately, something is off about the period detail in terms of the performance of the genuinely annoying Adam Driver who seems completely miscast and throws the picture off balance anytime he's on-screen.

Even the picture's sense of place seems off. The movie feels like a Walt Disney True Life Nature Adventure set in the wilds of Australia (with occasionally chaste boinking). Tracks certainly doesn't have the richness in both period and ethnographic detail that is so infused in works like Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout and Ted Kotcheff's Wake in Fright. We never really feel any danger or mystery in the proceedings and other than the early going, the central conflict has no real punch.

This is more than a bit surpising since John Curran's direction of the exquisite film adaptation of Somerset Maugham's novel The Painted Veil was so rich in period detail and observational attention to character nuance. Here, howeve, the leading actors wear everything on their respective sleeves and we're left with little more than a girl and her camels, doggie and an occasonal poke under the desert sky from an enormously unappealing actor.

The movie clips along amiably enough and the scenery is almost always a saving grace, but somehow the whole thing feels a touch inconsequential. While it might provide momentary and relatively inoffensive entertainment as a girls' adventure tale, Tracks doesn't stick to your cerebellum, but rather, sticks to your craw.

Tracks opens theatrically in Canada via Mongrel Media on June 6, 2014 in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. It premiered in the TIFF Special Presentation series at the Toronto International Film Festival 2013.

THE GREAT BEAUTY (Criterion Blu-Ray) - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Dual Format Criterion Special Edition of Paolo Sorrentino's Deserving Best Foreign Language Oscar Winner is a perfect package of anything one could ever need in a home entertainment edition of this, one of the truly great films of the New Millennium

The Great Beauty (2013) *****
Dir. Paolo Sorrentino, Scr. Umberto Contarello
Starring: Toni Servillo, Sabrina Ferilli

Review By Greg Klymkiw

I have a hard time imagining how anyone could not worship the exquisite perfection of Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty, but then I try to think how I might have responded to it as a very young man. Is it possible I'd have responded to it the same way I actually did in my late teens and early 20s to Hitchock's Vertigo and Renoir's The Rules of the Game? These two pictures I admired, almost grudgingly, but respectively and highly preferred other seminal works by their directors like, say, Rear Window and The Grand Illusion. The latter titles offered easy ways in to their brilliance by opening their doors ever-so widely for me to respond more viscerally to them. But then, a funny thing would happen on my way to enlightenment: subsequent viewings of the former titles would come and go, yet with each passing year ever-accumulating waves of life experience would wash over me and allow me to begin responding evermore openly to the films.

Finding my own way through a Knossos-like maze, my maturation became the ball of string I'd left along the trail that would lead me back towards the films themselves and to discover their inherent greatness as art. Eventually, a screening of each would occur that'd hit me with the force of a gale wind and I'd achieve an explosive, near-orgasmic epiphany once the works' obsessions nestled perfectly in tandem with my combined years of sorrow, happiness, heartache, gains, losses, triumphs and failures. And indeed, this is what happened to me with Vertigo and The Rules of the Game. I suspect then, that I would indeed have a similarly fractious on-again-off-again relationship with The Great Beauty. The difference now, however, is that I experience Sorrentino's picture having already acquired the necessary life experience so that my first helping hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks and subsequent screenings spoke to me as loudly as any great movie I'd ever seen.

Each subsequent screening, several of them on a big screen at The Toronto International Film Festival 2013 proper, then during a theatrical engagement at TIFF's Bell Lightbox, would each peel back layer upon layer so that every viewing was as intensive as the last one, and then, more so. And now, the film exists on an absolutely perfect home video format thanks to the Criterion Collection: complete with one Blu-Ray and two DVDs - the emphasis initially being on the stunningly meticulous digital transfer to both formats and finally with the seemingly modest, but ultimately rich bonus features - detailed, inspirational and meticulously shepherded 30-40 minute interviews with director Sorrentino, star Servillo and writer Contarello.

This Criterion volume, then, is an object of both desire and perfection - a special edition if there ever was one and a great, beautifully designed box that serves to preserve the film for subsequent viewings and added features that enhance and enrich an already monumental experience and achievement. The Criterion Collection edition of The Great Beauty is a must-own item for anyone who cares about great cinema. And now, allow me to present a slightly expanded version of my original take on the film during its initial TIFF offering and eventual theatrical release via Mongrel Media, but now guided and influenced by my near-obsessive study of The Criterion Collection Director Approved edition.

* * * * *

Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty opens with a bang - literally. A cannon blasts right into our faces - its explosive force signalling the beginning of the greatest party sequence - bar none - in movie history. Not a single screen revelry comes even close. The first few minutes of this movie throbs and pulsates with the most gorgeous, dazzling, opulent images of triumphant excess ever to strut and swagger before our eyes. This polychromatic orgy of beautiful people and their devil-may-care debauchery is the kind of sordid, celebratory saturnalia that the movies seem to have been invented for.

The party isn't just debauchery for debauchery's sake (though I'd settle for that), but the sequence actually builds deftly to the utterly astounding entrance of the film's main character. On just the right hit of music, at just the right cut-point, our eyes catch the tell-tale jiggle of the delectable jowls of the smiling, long-faced, twinkle-eyed and unequalled sexiest-ugly movie star of our time. We are dazzled, delighted and tempted to cheer as his presence comes like an explosion as great as the aforementioned cannon blast.

Playing the former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, Toni Servillo knocked us on our collective butts in Sorrentino's Il Divo. Here, Servillo continues to electrify - this time etching a very different "Il Divo" - Jep Gambardella, the crown prince of Roman journalism. Jep is a one-novel-wonder, resting on the literary laurels of a single work of genius from his youth, who now, at this august stage of existence, has earned celebrity as a hack scribe of gossipy, sardonic puff pieces for one of Italy's most influential rags.

Jep is surrounded by a seemingly infinite number of losers who think they're winners, as well as a veritable army of the rich and famous and their hangers-on. We find Jep at the epicentre of the aforementioned on-screen party - one we wish would never end. Alas it must - at least until the next one. Rest assured there will be plenty more revelries, but between the indulgences, we follow the powerful and bored-with-his-power Jep as he reaches a crisis point in his 65th year of life. He knows he's not lived up to his promise, but he's still a master wordsmith and puffs himself up with his dazzling prose and his expertise at self-puffery.

He's surrounded by worshippers, but their adulation means nothing to him. Gorgeous women throw themselves at Jep, but he doesn't even much enjoy sex. He longs for a love that escaped him in his youth and tries to find it in the rapturously beautiful daughter of a pimp. His best friend, as best a friend that someone like Jep could ever hope for, is desperate to make a mark for himself as a literary figure but can only think of using Jep as a subject for a book.

Most of all, Jep seems happiest when he's alone. That said, even when he's surrounded by slavering hangers-on, he appears even more solitary than when he's by himself, but at least his private brand of emptiness is more palatable than the sheer nothingness of those in his ultimately pathetic coterie of nothingness - the nothingness of a ruling class who take and take and take all the excess there is to be had, and then some. Italy is on the brink of ruin, but the ruling class is in denial so long as they can cling to celebrity - even if that celebrity is in their own minds.

With The Great Beauty, Sorrentino is clearly paying homage to Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (with dollops of 8 1/2), but this is no mere nod to cinematic mastery (one which might even be working at a subconscious level) - he explores a world the late maestro visited half-a-century ago and uses it as a springboard into contemporary Italy and most importantly, as a flagrantly florid rumination upon the decline of culture, the long-ago loss of youthful ideals and the deep melancholy that sets in from Jep seeking answers to why the woman he loved the most left him behind to his own devices. Set against the backdrop of a historic Rome in ruins, the empire that fell so mightily, we're plunged into a dizzying nocturnal world as blank and vacant as the eyes of a ruling class that rules nothingness.

Finally, it is Jep's moments of introspection when he is alone most mornings, slightly hung-over and bleary-eyed, washing his face in public fountains, then casually strolling through the Rome he loves and where he observes simple beauty, often for the first and possibly only time. He clings to these moments as passionately as he clings to his memories of his one great love - the love that inspired his great novel and only novel. His odyssey is partially to discover and acknowledge the beauty and purity of that great love so that maybe, just maybe, he will write something again - something that matters, like the Great elusive, yet omnipresent Beauty.

Jep is clearly set upon an odyssey by Sorrentino - one that might have been avoided if he could only recognize what he sees in a mirror. Men like Jep, however, have a hard time recognizing the clear reality that stares them in the face and the final third of Sorrentino's masterpiece plunges Jep and the audience through a looking glass in search of a truth they (nor, for that matter, we) might never find.

But the ride will have been worth it.

LA GRANDE BELLEZZA (THE GREAT BEAUTY) - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Sorrentino's Spectacle a BIG SCREEN affair

The Great Beauty (2013) *****
Dir. Paolo Sorrentino
Starring: Toni Servillo

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty opens with a bang - literally. A cannon blasts right into our faces - its explosive force signalling the beginning of the greatest party sequence - bar none - in movie history. Not a single screen revelry comes even close. The first few minutes of this movie throbs and pulsates with the most gorgeous, dazzling, opulent images of triumphant excess ever to strut and swagger before our eyes. This polychromatic orgy of beautiful people and their devil-may-care debauchery is the kind of sordid, celebratory saturnalia that the movies seem to have been invented for.

The party isn't just debauchery for debauchery's sake (though I'd settle for that), but the sequence actually builds deftly to the utterly astounding entrance of the film's main character. On just the right hit of music, at just the right cut-point, our eyes catch the tell-tale jiggle of the delectable jowls of the smiling, long-faced, twinkle-eyed and unequalled sexiest-ugly movie star of our time. We are dazzled, delighted and tempted to cheer as his presence comes like an explosion as great as the aforementioned cannon blast.

Playing the former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, Toni Servillo knocked us on our collective butts in Sorrentino's Il Divo. Here, Servillo continues to electrify - this time etching a very different "Il Divo" - Jep Gambardella, the crown prince of Roman journalism. Jep is a one-novel-wonder, resting on the literary laurels of a single work of genius from his youth, who now, at this august stage of existence, has earned celebrity as a hack scribe of gossipy, sardonic puff pieces for one of Italy's most influential rags.

Jep is surrounded by a seemingly infinite number of losers who think they're winners, as well as a veritable army of the rich and famous and their hangers-on. We find Jep at the epicentre of the aforementioned on-screen party - one we wish would never end. Alas it must - at least until the next one. Rest assured there will be plenty more revelries, but between the indulgences, we follow the powerful and bored-with-his-power Jep as he reaches a crisis point in his 65th year of life. He knows he's not lived up to his promise, but he's still a master wordsmith and puffs himself up with his dazzling prose and his expertise at self-puffery.

He's surrounded by worshippers, but their adulation means nothing to him. Gorgeous women throw themselves at Jep, but he doesn't even much enjoy sex. He longs for a love that escaped him in his youth and tries to find it in the rapturously beautiful daughter of a pimp. His best friend, as best a friend that someone like Jep could ever hope for, is desperate to make a mark for himself as a literary figure but can only think of using Jep as a subject for a book.

Most of all, Jep seems happiest when he's alone. That said, even when he's surrounded by slavering hangers-on, he appears even more solitary than when he's by himself, but at least his private brand of emptiness is more palatable than the sheer nothingness of those in his ultimately pathetic coterie of nothingness - the nothingness of a ruling class who take and take and take all the excess there is to be had, and then some. Italy is on the brink of ruin, but the ruling class is in denial so long as they can cling to celebrity - even if that celebrity is in their own minds.

With The Great Beauty, Sorrentino is clearly paying homage to Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (with dollops of 8 1/2), but this is no mere nod to cinematic mastery - he explores a world the late maestro visited half-a-century ago and uses it as a springboard into contemporary Italy and most importantly, as a flagrantly florid rumination upon the decline of culture, the long-ago loss of youthful ideals and the deep melancholy that sets in from Jep seeking answers to why the woman he loved the most left him behind to his own devices. Set against the backdrop of a historic Rome in ruins, the empire that fell so mightily, we plunged into a dizzying nocturnal world as blank and vacant as the eyes of a ruling class that rules nothingness.

Jep is clearly set upon an odyssey by Sorrentino - one that might have been avoided if he could only recognize what he sees in a mirror. Men like Jep, however, have a hard time recognizing the clear reality that stares them in the face and the final third of Sorrentino's masterpiece plunges Jep and the audience through a looking glass in search of a truth they (nor, for that matter, we) might never find.

But the ride will have been worth it.

"The Great Beauty" is nominated for a 2014 Best Foreign Language Oscar and currently in theatrical release via Mongrel Media, playing AT TIFF BELL LIGBHTBOX in Toronto.

InRealLife - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Connected to the Nothingness of the Internet - the horror, the horror!

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WHEN JEWS WERE FUNNY - the award winning feature film by Alan Zweig Reviewed By Greg Klymkiw *****

Alan Zweig's latest film, WHEN JEWS WERE FUNNY, winner of the Best Canadian Feature Film Award at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF 2013) opens theatrically via KINOSMITH in Canada on Nov. 15 at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema and to be followed by playdates across the country. To read my review (which also encompasses Zweig's entire feature canon, feel free to read my latest Colonial Report column at the very cool UK film magazine: Electric Sheep - a deviant view of cinema. Click HERE!

2 Movies opening this weekend (10/4/2013) that STINK: GRAVITY and PARKLAND - Reviews By Greg Klymkiw

Hi! My name is Sandy. I enjoy floating in my undies.
Too bad George Clooney is dead. Now he can't see
my hot bod. What's a girl to do? There aren't ANY
poor Black Boys up here to educate & encourage.

GRAVITY (2013) *1/2

Dir. Alfonso Cuarón

Starring:
Sandra Bullock, George Clooney

Review By Greg Klymkiw

NOTE: Seeing "Gravity" in 3-D adds NOTHING to the movie (as per usual). If you must waste your time and money, try to see it flat (2-D) and you'll at least be able to enjoy the visuals without the stupid 3-D glasses that mute the colour and contrast and pretty much everything else - and it will be a lot cheaper without paying surcharges for a sub-par product. HINT: It will be cheaper yet if you sneak in your own beverages and munchies.

Gravity is a two-hander involving George Clooney and Sandra Bullock as AMERICAN space station astronauts who get bombarded by a storm of debris from a nearby satellite that's been nuked by its NON-AMERICAN overlords because it's no longer working properly. As we all know, America NEVER does stupid things like that because AMERICA is NEVER responsible for creating ANY form of interstellar (or Earthly) polluton and once again, it is AMERICANS who are placed at risk by goddamned FOREIGNERS. The result of the incompetence of foreigners is that Bullock gets separated from her tie-cord. Luckily, Clooney rescues her. Unluckily, when he realizes that only one person can properly get into the space station and escape, he sacrifices himself and goes hurtling into space whilst Bullock - on her own - is left kickstart the escape pod get to a Chinese space station which, goddamn it, becomes very challenging because they're babbling in Chinese and Sandy doesn't speak Chinese because she isn't a goddamn foreigner and you'll no doubt be sitting on the edge of your seat screaming: "Jesus Christ! Can't they goddamn well speak American? The girl is in trouble." Goddamn foreigners!. From here, it's all Bullock all the time. Sort of. I won't ruin the pathetic surprise for you.

"Gravity" is in wide release via Warner Bros. Read my full review from the Toronto International Film Festival 2013 HERE.

Parkland (2013) *1/2
Dir. Peter Landesman
Starring: James Badge Dale, Zac Efron, Marcia Gay Harden, Paul Giamatti,
Billy Bob Thornton, Jacki Weaver, Jackie Earle Haley

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Nobody believes the findings of the Warren Commission - we all know President John F. Kennedy was murdered by forces much larger than the lone patsy Lee Harvey Oswald. Parkland, the title signifying the name of the hospital in Dallas where both JFK and Oswald were unsuccessfully operated upon, is a lame, unnecessary exploration of that tragic day 5o years ago when our world changed forever. Shot in urgent annoying shaky-cam, blended with real news footage of the time, the film details the preparations leading up to Kennedy's visit to Dallas, his assassination, all the chaos of getting him to the hospital, the desperate unsuccessful attempts to keep him alive, the various law enforcement gymnastics with respect to the FBI, CIA, Dallas Police and the Secret Service, the assessment of the Zapruder 8mm home movie footage, the capture of Oswald, the subsequent shooting of Oswald, the unsuccessful attempt to keep him alive in the hospital and finally, juxtaposing the opulent state funeral of the slain president with the threadbare proceedings afforded to the purported assassin. Screenwriter-Director Landesman chooses to accept the Warren findings and re-enacts the hodgepodge of all the above with an all-star cast parading through and having no time to create anything resembling characters. The film's reliance on trick-pony all-star cameos reminded me of George Stevens all-star Jesus biopic The Greatest Story Ever Told - so much so I half expected John Wayne to wander into the Parkland Memorial Hospital in full Roman Centurion garb and stand over JFK's corpse and intone: "Truly this Man was the son of God," before realizing he'd stepped onto the wrong sound stage via some kind of Time Machine or wormhole.

"Parkland" is in theatrical release via Remstar - just in time to "celebrate" JFK's murder.

Read my full review from the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF 2013) HERE.

GREG KLYMKIW'S TIFF 2013 ACCOLADES AND EXCRETIONS - By Greg Klymkiw - Roundup of Best/Worst of Fest

TIFF 2013 ACCOLADES

By Greg Klymkiw

Best Feature Film at TIFF 2013:
Sébastien Pilote, Le démantèlement

Best Documentary at TIFF 2013:
Alan Zweig, When Jews Were Funny

Best Director (International) at TIFF 2013:
James Franco, Child of God

Best Director (Canada) at TIFF 2013:

Alan Zweig, When Jews Were Funny

Best Director (Quebec) at TIFF 2013:

Sébastien Pilote, Le démantèlement

Best Short Film at TIFF 2013:
Randall Okita, Portrait as a Random Act of Violence

Best Screenplay at TIFF 2013:
Simon Pasternak & Christoffer Boe,
Sex, Drugs & Taxation (Spies & Glistrup)

Best Cinematography at TIFF 2013:
Michel La Veaux, Le démantèlement

Best Editing at TIFF 2013:
Ti West, The Sacrament

Best Actress at TIFF 2013:
Mira Barkhammar, We Are The Best

Best Actress (Supporting) at TIFF 2013:
Sophie Desmarais, Le démantèlement

Best Actor at TIFF 2013:
Gabriel Arcand, Le démantèlement

Best Actor (Supporting) at TIFF 2013:
Gene Jones, The Sacrament

Worst Movies at TIFF 2013 (in alphabetical order):
ALL WORTHY RECIPIENTS OF THE ALL NEW
KLYMKIW ACCOLADE
FOR BAD MOVIES:
"TURD FOUND
BEHIND
HARRY'S CHARCOAL BURGERS
& DINING LOUNGE"

The Dark Matter of Love, Sarah McCarthy

Don Jon, Joseph Gordon-Leavitt

Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón

L'intrepido, Gianni Amelio

Prisoners, Denis Villeneuve

WHEN JEWS WERE FUNNY - Review By Greg Klymkiw - ***** Alaz Zweig Premieres TIFF 2013, then Theatrically

Alan Zweig's latest film, WHEN JEWS WERE FUNNY, winner of the Best Canadian Feature Film Award at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF 2013) opens theatrically via KINOSMITH in Canada on Nov. 15 at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema and to be followed by playdates across the country. To read my review (which also encompasses Zweig's entire feature canon, feel free to read my latest Colonial Report column at the very cool UK film magazine: Electric Sheep - a deviant view of cinema. Click HERE!

"When Jews Were Funny" is part of the TIFF Docs series at the Toronto International Film Festival 2013. Visit the TIFF website HERE.

InRealLife - Review By Greg Klymkiw - #TIFF2013 - Release via KinoSmith - Connected to Nothingingness

Are these your kids? Don't they have something better to do?

Of all the documentaries created - pro and con (mostly con) - about the dehumanizing power of the internet, few have had the exceptional craft and knock-you-on-your-ass power of this chilling portrait of kids in the deadly sights of the corporate scumbags seeking profits through acquiescence and addiction. - G.K.

InRealLife (2013) ***1/2
Dir. Beeban Kidron

Review By Greg Klymkiw

InRealLife might be the only science-fiction horror picture that is not fictional in any way, shape or form. It's solid cinematic storytelling and is in fact, a documentary feature that reels you into a genuinely creepy-crawly world. Director Beeban Kidron presents us with a reality in which children are stripped of humanity and it doesn't get scarier than this.

Here we witness how kids filter their contact and communication with others via an insidious online assault upon their individuality (or, as the best dystopian science fiction will always have us believe, their very souls). That this is a documentary that generally eschews boneheadedly dull journalistic balance for a sledge hammer to the face is totally the right move. Besides, I've long stopped believing in journalistic "balance" since it's mediated through the evil power of slanting stories to make you THINK that you're thinking for yourself and, more often than not, you aren't. Kidron's approach doesn't muddy the waters with fake objectivity, but rather, a subjective, personal point of view that keeps us watching, mouths agape and always wondering just how low the structural arc of the filmmaker's picture will take us.

The movie is so compelling and terrifying, I hesitate to stress the picture's considerable properties of entertainment value, but it's the very fact that the movie is as diverting as it is, that a door opens upon something we all need to face. The picture's importance as activist entertainment, if you will, cannot be denied. Though a 90-minute feature film can only glance upon the surface of such a huge subject, Kidron does so with such mesmerizing commitment and a deft juggling act of nicely selected tales of online addiction that the picture propels ever-forward and keeps our eyes glued to the screen.

Several of the stories are downright horrific and as such, Kidron wisely presents them with clear, simple compositions and just the right off-camera questions and conversation to let the kids do what they need to do and say. The same goes for the interviews with all the various experts in the fields of psychology, engineering, marketing and, of course, the various cyber worlds of texting, gaming, social networking, net surfing and face-to-face communications as explained and opined upon by said experts.

The atmosphere she creates during the various interviews smartly, subtly and appropriately dovetail into both the natural environments of the kids and their specific tales. The most pointed visual tone occurs during the sequence involving a young girl who so desperately wants a phone that she begins prostituting herself to raise enough money to get one. Kidron clearly needs to mask the teen child's identity and the room in enshrouded in deep, almost neo-noir-like high contrast blacks, white and shades of grey (with only brief muted dollops of other colours). Nowhere is Kidron's mise-en-scene more appropriate to the girl's tale than when she relates how, upon finally acquiring a cell phone it's snatched from her by a teenage boy who leads her back to a flat where she is forced to endure a gang-bang to get her phone back.

The direct contrast to this are the bright, warm hues attached to a gay teen who engages in a long-distance online relationship with another lad. Neither of the boys have met each other, yet when Kidron follows one of the boys on his long journey to finally meet his online lover, she makes superb use of the exigencies of production which, have yielded a travel day that is a more typically wet, rainy Blighty afternoon. Even the interiors, once the boys meet in person, match the exteriors - accentuating the sort of blue-grey dankness most rooms will naturally have during times of heavy precipitation. Here, though, the camera trains itself upon the two young lovers and their natural physical proximity and warmth cuts through the bleakness and we, like they, are infused with one of the few moments in the film of genuine warmth, of endearment and respect that offer a sense of hope to this otherwise bleak world of cyber communication.

These extremes almost provide a bracket to the myriad of visuals during other sequences that focus upon the tales related by so many other kids. And, for the most part, the stories cut through to bone marrow. We meet a variety of kids: for example, two young boys so addicted to internet porn that they happily and somewhat innocently expect women to look like porn stars and to perform sex acts identical to those they watch on their computer monitors. They express that anything less in real life would be a horrible disappointment.

There's a clearly brilliant young man who has messed up his otherwise promising academic standing at Oxford with his online addictions and now spends virtually every waking hour in front of a computer - social networking or gaming. When asked what he'd do if these options were not available, he admits, somewhat disappointedly, that he'd "probably" have to "read a book".

The tales continue, but are punctuated by a series of interviews with the experts who provide information and analysis that many of us probably know and/or ignore. Even scarier to me, if just how many parents are utterly clueless as to what their kids are up to and this is certainly reflected in a nasty case of cyber bullying Kidron shows us, one that escalates into every parent's worst nightmare.

In spite of the fact that I'm about 10 years older than the generations of parents who have spawned these slaves to the internet, part of me is shocked at their cluelessness and the other is not surprised at all - especially, I think, because I dove into the internet in the early 90s and experienced its growth first hand - using it as a tool, but not as a replacement for human contact. So many of my, or even younger generations, avoided online activity like the plague or until it was really too late for them. In spite of the fact that I don't really get how anyone in the modern world avoids things that can make life richer, I have to acknowledge that it's always important to grow with the advancements - especially if one's an adult because it's our growth that is responsible for the growth of our children.

The film hammers home a series of basic facts - most of which seem perfectly reasonable under the circumstances; that people look at their phones 150-200 times day, that material on the net is there to monetize, that the ever-new advancements online create natural Dopamine rushes and for me, most depressingly, that text is too much for most kids. One game designer acknowledges that older users will read instructions but younger users need one line or best, one word. Text is the worst thing. It means nothing to the kids. Even for discomfiting is when one of the interviewed "experts" notes that content drives traffic which, in turn, drives profits.

Websites are designed, pure and simple, to sell and worse, to track you. The threat to privacy has never been more insidious. The sites are there to collect date and with all this information comes REAL power. It's George Orwell and then some. Clouds, for example, or central data banks, are quickly replacing desktop information storage. Your personal information is "out there", not with you. Even more sickening is how social networking sites - especially FaceBook and the like, are training everyone, but mostly KIDS to undervalue their privacy. It's all about YOU unloading/uploading and the corporations COLLECTING, then USING the data to sell you, to control you, to DEFINE you.

Throughout the movie, like goose-flesh-inducing exclamation points are images of massive servers and cables accompanied by a soundscape that feels like some dystopian 70s science fiction film. At times we feel like we're being barraged with a kind of Danny Zeitlin Invasion of the Body Snatchers bed of aural terror.

There's no balance here - in spite of the film's brief nod or two to "positive" aspects of the internet and its effects upon young minds. Some might argue, it's just telling us something we already know. That might well be, but it does so with panache, skill and most of all, the powerful position that we never really know what we know until it's driven into us - again and again - with the power drill and jackhammer of an artist.

"InRealLife" is a Dogwoof Pictures presentation that plays at the Toronto International Film Festival. For further information about the TIFF showing click HERE.
"InRealLife" plays at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema via KinoSmith. For further information click HERE.

DON JOHN - Review By Greg Klymkiw - #TIFF 2013 - White Trash Masturbation "Comedy" purports to be "smart".

I'm so cute and sexy
when I masturbate to internet porn,
especially with this sickening smirk
plastered perpetually across my face
and sporting this stupid haircut.

Don John (2013) *1/2
Dir. Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Scarlett Johansson, Julianne Moore, Tony Danza, Glenne Headley, Brie Larson, Rob Brown, Jeremy Luke, Anne Hathaway, Tatum Channing
Review By Greg Klymkiw

Go ahead, folks. Knock yourself out if alternating between the following resembles your idea of a good time:

90-or-so minutes of Joseph Gordon-Leavitt with a bad haircut and smirking like some malevolent ventriloquist's dummy (think Michael Redgrave's murderous wooden pal in Cavalcanti's segment of Dead of Night)
AND.....
Scarlett Johansson as a repulsively Bovine White Trash girlfriend constantly nagging and cockteasing Gordon-Leavitt whilst chewing gum with her mouth open - in a decidedly cud-like fashion.

Don Jon (nyuck-nyuck-nyuck, get it?) has first-time director Joseph Gordon-Leavitt starring in the title role - so named by his equally stupid, sexist, misogynistic Jersey buds (Rob Brown and Jeremy Luke) due to his prowess at picking up babes for one night stands. When he's not working aimlessly in the "service industry" as a bartender, or tearing about on his wheels exhibiting acute road rage, he hangs with his buds in a pick-up joint to rate the chicks on the 1-to-10 scale and eventually targets one of them as a bit of poontang-to-go. And damn, Jon is a genuine Don Juan (or, uh, Jon) as he scores all the time. He doesn't actually enjoy sex except with someone he really loves. The "someone he really loves", would, of course hark back to Woody Allen's great quip referring to palm action, or as Borat calls it, "the hand pleasure." Yup, he's an inveterate masturbator who beats his meat several times a day to internet porn. He goes to church every Sunday, says confession, gets the necessary absolution and penance (reserving his "Our Father" and "Hail Mary" recitations for the gym to keep his physique amply babe-magnet-ish), joins his equally stupid, sexist, misogynistic (and - ugh - sports obsessed) father (Tony Danza - who'd actually be funny if the script had given him good material to work with) and his dreary, subservient mother who dreams of the day Sonny Jon will bring home a marriage prospect to give her grandchldren (Glenne Headley - who'd actually be funny if the script had given her good material to work with) and his little sister (Brie Larson - who is genuinely funny since her sole "material" involves sitting at the dinner table with her mouth shut and her fingers tapping text messages on her smart phone). Jon's meagre life seems complete until - horrors! - he spots a perfect "10" at the Jersey meat market he and his buds hang in. With the introduction of this White Trash vision to rival the face that launched a thousand ships, we are forced to endure the ubiquitous presence of the increasingly intolerable Scarlett Johansson.

What follows is a fairly predictable chain of events. Jon starts to date the trashy lassie. She drags him to intolerable chick flicks (one of which stars Anne Hathaway and Tatum Channing). He spends less and less time with his buds. When he informs the folks he has a regular woman in his life, Mom is predictably overjoyed. His new girlie teases and tempts, but never delivers the goods. She's a wily minx, though, and knows all too well a case of blue balls might have a disastrous effect upon her long-term gain, so she does Jon the honour of allowing him to dry-hump her. Great! More cum-stains on his clothing. (Oh, an I kid you not, there's actually a scene wherein we get to enjoy the sight of all the dried cum stains in his pants before he tosses them into the laundry.)

Alas, before he's going to get any serious nookie out of this babe, he pretty much has to engage in the following checklist of annoying activities so he can get some honest-to-goodness nookie out of her. He must meet her friends. She must meet his friends. She must meet his parents. He must meet her parents. Oh, and most of all, he must seek to "better" himself and enrol in an evening college class to eventually work his way into a management position - either in the food and beverage industry or whatever loser industry will take him and/or provide enough dough to satisfy his girlie.

Once the checklist is successfully completed, she spreads 'em wide open - missionary, of course, no porn star action, certainly no money shot and not even a blowjob.

What's an inveterate masturbator to do?

He fires up the computer, of course.

When she catches our boy in the act, all Hell breaks loose.

Are you laughing yet? I wasn't. Do any of these story beats surprise you? None of them surprised me. Did the movie, in spite of these shortcomings offer a decent ride? Not at all. The very problem, you see, is that the movie pretty much stinks. Gordon-Leavitt and Johansson have no chemistry whatsoever. Granted, and with some fairness to the picture, this lack of onscreen fireworks is supposed to be the point - or something. After 30 minutes of blue balls, then another 30 minutes of bad sex, nagging and more masturbation, Jon eventually and conveniently discovers via an affair with a hot older woman he meets at night school (Julianne Moore) that to find true happiness with a life partner he's got to be true to himself and to have good sex he needs to "get lost" in the other person.

Do you feel like regurgitating yet? Well lemme tell ya, I shorely felt like letting loose.

Save for the always wonderful Julianne Moore (no matter how dreadful the role and/or writing is) and the aforementioned Brie Larson as Gordon-Leavitt's text-crazy sister who eventually talks and delivers the only real laughs (and common sense) in the whole movie, the performances of the other leads leave much to be desired. Half the blame rests with Gordon-Leavitt's fake, overwrought screenplay - jammed to the rafters with his idea of working-class Jersey-speak and the other half of the blame residing in his miscalculated direction which forces most of the actors, including himself, to spit and shout their lines with what he (and they) think is the stuff of life itself. It's not, of course. It feels like a whole lot of privileged actors pretending they know what it's like to be poor and ignorant. (I don't get offended easily, but when I see actors allowed to indulge in disingenuous crap like this, my P.C. Meter, usually set well below zero, skyrockets to the moons of Jupiter.)

The whole ugly, wretched mess, of course, is what lets pundits and players alike, congratulate the filmmakers (and by, extension, themselves) for being "smart". I've come to detest that word as it's used, abused and overused these days by those who are anything but, and almost always about material that's far from being even remotely endowed with the word's genuine attributes. A quick Google search that includes the title of the film and the word "smart" yields a veritable manna from Heaven of critics ejaculating all over the movie and all using the word "smart".

Here's a sickening sampling:

"... a smart filmmaking debut."
"... definitely smarter than your average R-rated comedy."
"... bracingly smart."
"... authentic and smart."
"... edgy and smart."
"... really smart and sharp."
"... a smart blend of comedic moments."
"... energetic, smart, stylish."
"... humour and smart observation."
"... smart writing."

A mere drop in the bucket and it just goes on and on.

Smart, my ass.

Interestingly, there already exist two fine and unsung Canadian films that deal with the subject matter a whole lot more entertainingly, intelligently and subversively than Gordon-Leavitt's sloppy feel-good fakery.

The first is the delightful romantic comedy Love, Sex and Eating the Bones (2003) by Sudz Sutherland and Jennifer Holness. It has an almost identical plot, but the big difference is that it's genuinely intelligent (as opposed to the aforementioned "smart"), very well written and directed with real pizzaz (as opposed to Gordon-Leavitt's wanna-be zip) and consummate craft, unlike the clear Dream Machine propping-up that inexperienced directors down South rely upon so they don't end up looking like complete morons. Though Sutherland's screenplay was a tad moralistic for my taste, it comes by its morality honestly and it naturally grows from within the context of the narrative - unlike the fake morality tale sloppily shoehorned into Don Jon.

The other terrific Canadian film that beat Gordon-Leavitt to the punch is the harrowing, hilarious personal documentary by Matthew Pollack, Run, Run, It's Him (2010) wherein the filmmaker, over the course of 7 years, explored his very real obsession with porn and, of course, sex with someone he really and truly loved.

Get thee to a video rental store or your favourite on-demand venue. These filmmakers are the real thing and their films deserve your support well beyond the meagre pleasures doled out by Don Jon.

"Don John" is a Special Presentation at the Toronto International Film Festival 2013. Visit TIFF's website HERE. The film opens theatrically via Remstar.

RUN, RUN, IT'S HIM - click HERE 4 more info