Greg Klymkiw's ***½ review is available at
"Electric Sheep - a deviant view of cinema"
by clicking this handy-dandy link HERE
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| BEASTS and BABES in the Old City |
Showing posts with label VSC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label VSC. Show all posts
Thursday, 21 January 2016
BABES vs BEASTS in the Holy Land. READ Greg Klymkiw's Review of JERUZALEM now available for your pleasurable perusal on "Electric Sheep UK - a deviant view of cinema" and you will find the link to the review BELOW
Friday, 18 December 2015
ARABIAN NIGHTS - Review By Thomas Zachary Toles - The Captive Storyteller in Gomes Epic
Video Services Corp. (VSC) presents its Canadian theatrical release of 2015's most ambitious and unique cinematic experiences in Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto. A major hit at Cannes and TIFF, Arabian Nights (2015), directed by Portuguese auteur Miguel (Tabu) Gomes is an epic six-hour contemporary masterpiece presented in three parts: Vol. 1, The Restless One / Vol. 2, The Desolate One / Vol. 3, The Enchanted One. This revolutionary trilogy begins in Montreal – Cinema du Parc (3575 Avenue du Parc) on December 18, 2015, then begins in Vancouver – Vancity Theatre (1181 Seymour St) on January 1, 2016, and last, but not least in Toronto – TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King St W) on January 8, 2016.
The Film Corner is pleased to present its guest critic (and lecturer, actor, director, Rhodes Scholar), Thomas Zachary Toles, to share his thoughts...
The Captive Storyteller: Arabian Nights by Miguel Gomes
Film Corner Guest Review
By Thomas Zachary Toles
When your episodic epic is over six hours long, you have plenty of time for scathing social critique, deadpan comedy, magical realism, documentary-style interviews, and an impressive number of dick jokes.
The sweeping three-part Arabian Nights by Miguel Gomes uses the familiar structure of the classic folktale collection to celebrate and contemplate the need for stories during a crisis (in this case, massive unemployment and fiscal inequality in Portugal). As Scheherazade (Crista Alfaiate) explains, stories “spring from the wishes and fears of man” and, fated as she is herself to hold an audience’s attention she quite literally affirms that stories “help us to survive.”
Whereas Federico Fellini uses Marcello Mastroianni as a fictional surrogate for himself in 8½, Gomes becomes his own Guido Anselmi in Arabian Nights, slipping himself into the prologue--the filmmaker as both fictional character and documentary subject.
Interviews with laid off Portuguese shipyard workers are intercut with footage of an attempted wasp cull, a hazy metaphoric link that the director claims to be too stupid to clarify. Gomes describes himself in these early scenes as pretentious, idealistic, and cowardly. He literally runs from the Arabian Nights project, apparently riddled with doubts about his ambition and competence.
With these self-referential moments, Gomes thematically links his own status as a filmmaker to Scheherazade’s status as the imprisoned storyteller of Arabian Nights. While Scheherazade must always tantalize her audience night after night or be killed, Gomes sees the fate of his country hanging in the balance. The director feels a grave responsibility to respond to the draconian austerity measures across his country, yet is tormented by the thought that his creativity could fail him when he needs it most.
The prologue that introduces Arabian Nights, ostensibly takes a cinéma-vérité approach that suggests a certain faithfulness to “reality” while simultaneously employing a surreal indirectness that bleeds into fantasy. The sequence sets up a crucial collation for Gomes: that of fiction and so-called historical fact.
When the film crew is buried in the sand and Scheherazade takes control of the film’s narration, Gomes imposes his conviction that “imagination and reality have never been able to exist without each other”.
The fantastic elements of the film exist in relation to recognizable human impulse. Moments of magic sometimes serve to highlight contradictions in characters’ thought, as when the expert bird-trapper, Chapas, begrudgingly frees an old, sick genie trapped in a net. In other sequences, magical instances provide an intangible space for characters to connect with each other.
One tale, “The Tears of the Judge,” comically depicts a judge’s frustration as she unravels an increasingly ridiculous and convoluted chain of guilt. The judge becomes so overwhelmed that she rejects everyone in their stupidity, evilness, and despair, lowering her head in surrender. Then, impossibly, the judge is heartened by a sign language pardon that she cannot see. The language of mercy is shown to operate on an extra-sensual level.
The mystical elements of Scheherazade’s tales are knit into the fabric of the world, unsurprising to the characters that encounter them. Strikingly, even the most outlandish tales are filmed with a degree of asceticism. Gomes presents wind spirits, beached mermaids, and talking cows without spectacle, conscious that such inventions are no less comprehensible than the moral bankruptcy of Portugal’s leaders.
Gomes’s lack of visual extravagance in no way limits the aesthetic impact of Arabian Nights. The film’s delicate restraint can be exquisitely devastating: a fugitive patiently eats beans in the dark as officers on horseback gather behind him; Scheherazade and her father discuss her incarceration as they ride a dreamy Ferris wheel on the beach; a mirror is lowered by a dog leash towards the window of an apartment where a couple has committed suicide.
Gomes is fascinated by actors’ bodies, using long takes to capture the way they amble through landscapes or sunbathe nude on a roof. Such attention has an empathic effect. We spend so long watching Simão “Without Bowels” (Chico Chapas) wander, as he staves off the isolation of exile through the offerings of others, that when we are finally told that he has murdered his family, his corporeal vulnerability is entrenched in our minds.
Gomes’s film suggests that stories are as essential to the survival of the Portuguese people as to Scheherazade. Her real world counterparts also face miserable restrictions by tyrannical “kings.”
Heartbreaking testimonies from the unemployed people in “The Swim of the Magnificents” attempt to make sense of life in the aftermath of economic crisis (one man hands out over a thousand CVs until he feels his identity has dissolved). Gomes knows that storytelling done right expands our empathy, helping us to take hold of incomprehensible events that leave us adrift.
The disenfranchised people of Portugal form a chorus of Chaffinches, cruelly trapped, singing beautiful songs for those with the patience to listen.
And, seeing the morning break, the film critic fell silent.
THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5-Stars
Video Services Corp. (VSC) presents
Arabian Nights:
Vol. 1, The Restless One
Vol. 2, The Desolate One
Vol. 3, The Enchanted One
A trilogy by Miguel Gomes
Begins in Montreal – Cinema du Parc (3575 Avenue du Parc)
December 18, 2015
Begins in Vancouver – Vancity Theatre (1181 Seymour St)
January 1, 2016
Begins in Toronto – TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King St W)
January 8, 2016
Thursday, 13 August 2015
THE KINDERGARTEN TEACHER - Reviews By Greg Klymkiw - Creepy Ode to Artistic Genius
The Kindergarten Teacher (2014)
Dir. Nadav Lapid
Starring: Sarit Larry, Avi Shnaidman
Review By Greg Klymkiw
The world is so full of mediocrity, conformity and ugliness that to discover pure beauty in artistic expression makes one want to hold on to it and never let go in order to preserve the delicacy and shelter it from all that could possibly shatter, tatter and tarnish the perfection. This is what faces the title character of Nadav Lapid's extraordinary film.
Nira (Sarit Larry) is a hard-working kindergarten teacher committed to making sure her students get everything they need to enrich their minds. When she discovers that one of her students, five-year-old Yoav (Avi Shnaidman) has the mysterious ability to plunge, almost trancelike into creating some of the most astonishing poetry she's ever heard, Nira begins to spend an inordinate amount of her time with the child for fear that she'll miss an opportunity to hear him recite works of exquisite maturity and observation. She begins writing down his verse in order to preserve it.
This is all well and good until she begins to shield Yoav from the other kids in class, fearing they'll taint his genius with their normalcy. In addition to reading his work aloud in an evening adult education creative writing class - claiming it as her own, Nira even takes to unhealthily prying into the child's home life, assuming his parents are ill-equipped to nurture his artistic genius.
Nira decides the best thing she can do, is kidnap Yoav and take him away from anything she believes will be a bad influence.
Writer-director Lapid creates a creepily compelling portrait of a teacher's love for her student's genius with a steadily mounting sense of unease. This is not a traditional thriller in any sense of the word, but at times, it sure feels like a wrenching psychodrama in the tradition of early Roman Polanski.
Sarit Larry and Avi Shnaidman have a terrific onscreen chemistry and their performances are so compelling that they create, with camera-loves-them intensity, the kind of images of beauty, inspiration and even modulated terror that stay with you long after the film ends.
The film is strikingly original storytelling, never taking expected turns and always, through the sheer force of its carefully layered characterization, writing and controlled (but never "showy") direction, knocking you for several loops along the way and like all great films, compelling you to see it again and again.
THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4 Stars
The Kindergarten Teacher is in theatrical release via VSC (Video Services Corp.) It plays from August 14 at the Carlton Cinema in Toronto and the Cinema du Parc and Cinema Beaubien in Montreal.
Saturday, 25 July 2015
A HARD DAY - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Tense, Darkly Hilarious Korean Cop Thriller
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| This fellow is having a harder day than most. |
Dir. Kim Seong-hun
Starring: Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Jin-woong
Review By Greg Klymkiw
Have you ever have one of those days? You know the kind. We all have them. You're as boiled as a fucking owl on whatever rotgut you've chugged back before getting in your car to drive to the funeral parlour so you can deliver a fond farewell to your mother, laying stiff in her coffin, and then you hit some goddamn pedestrian, killing the bastard, and adding insult to injury, after tossing his sack of potatoes carcass in the trunk, you're stopped and hassled by a bunch of rookie traffic cops doing a spot check. It's a total piss-off, right?
Luckily, for Ko Gun-soo (Lee Sun-kyun) in Kim Seong-hun's A Hard Day, he gets a reprieve when the boneheaded tax-collectors-with-guns drop a few loads in their drawers upon discovering that he's a highly-placed detective within the Seoul police department.
Phew! He's on top of the world. For now.
Unfortunately, just as he's in the middle of a ceremony involving the nailing shut of Mom's coffin, he finds out about some mega-shit going down. A clutch of internal affairs dicks are onto his graft and high-tailing it to the funeral home to roust him. Now, he's gotta figure out some way to smuggle the corpse in his trunk into the funeral parlour and get it into his mother's coffin before the turncoats get there. Adding insult to injury, his partners want him to take the fall, the pedestrian he killed is a notorious made-man in the Korean mafia and he's eventually assigned to investigate the disappearance of said gangster.
This is going to be a hard day, indeed.
For us, Ko Gun-soo's troubles mount exponentially and we're treated to one of the most suspenseful, brutal and funny Asian crime thrillers in many a day. Director Kim Seong-hun displays a taut command of cinematic language to keep us sliding off the edge of our seats and both the action and laughs come fast and furious. Even more extraordinary is the perverse likability of this nasty piece of work for a hero. Granted he's Jesus Christ incarnate compared to the other filth around him, so that we're allowed to root for the least egregious wad of crap is some kind of miracle.
Reminiscent of Jon Finch's accused murderer Blaney in Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy Ko Gin-soo just can't seem to get a break. His troubles pile up so insurmountably that we're hoping against all hope that he gets out of the various sticky wickets assailing him. The movie puts us directly in his shoes and as such, we can't help but marvel at director Kim Seong-hun's complex and downright dazzling approach to the material.
I'd like to say that Hollywood would do well to pay attention to these extraordinary Asian masters of art, craft and genre, but the reality is this: all that's going to happen is the crapping out of more lifeless American remakes of Asian movies directed by round-eyed losers with eyes made of tin.
THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ Three-and-a-half Stars
A Hard Day plays at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto via VSC. Visit the TIFF website for tickets and further info HERE.
Friday, 10 July 2015
TANGERINE - Guest Review By The Film Corner's Ghee Time Columnist Meraj Dhir - Acclaimed Trangender Drama shot on Apple iPhone 5s in theatrical release via VSC/Magnolia & featured @ FANTASIA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2015 in Montreal
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| Click image just above to get more info on MERAJ DHIR |
Dir. Sean S. Baker
Starring: Kiki Kitana Rodriguez,
May Taylor, Karren Karagulian,
Mickey O'Hagan, James Ransone
Guest Review
By Meraj Dhir
The Film Corner's
Ghee Time Columnist
Evocatively unfolding over twenty-four hours, on a sun-kissed So-Cal Christmas Eve, Tangerine ferrets out the hidden subculture of transgender prostitutes, petty pimps, drug dealers and the johns who frequent them. This third feature by writer-director Sean S. Baker (Prince of Broadway, Starlet) further expands his interest in racially and sexually marginalized characters as it explores a decidedly seedy stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard and Highland Avenue.
The picture hits the ground running as prostitute Sin-dee Rella (Kiki Kitana Rodriguez) erupts into an unrestrained fury upon her release from a month-long prison stint. When best friend Alexandra (Mya Taylor) snitches the unwelcome news that Sin-dee's boyfriend/pimp Chester has been cheating on her, the roiling magma is released from its confines, erupting with full ferocity when it's revealed that the target of his attention is not only a white girl, but a “fish” (slang for biological female).
"Like a vagina and everything,” Alexandra squeals.
This results in Sin-dee taking to the streets, with Alexandra in tow, to hook the “fish” whose name they think might be Diana or Dinah or Deena -- and to bust Chester.
The film intercuts this “search and destroy” plotline with the story of taciturn Armenian cab driver, Razmik (Karan Karagulian), as he picks up fares -- each increasingly strange, and oddly, somnolent. While accompanying Sin-dee, Alexandra hands out fliers for a performance she’s giving at a local club later that evening. Alexandra’s nightclub act forms the fulcrum, as well as the midpoint, of the film’s narrative and the catalyst that will ultimately lead to all these characters intersecting.
Tangerine smartly showcases two actual transgendered women playing transgendered characters with both performers contributing considerably to the scripted elements. Baker and his co-writer Chris Bergoch also spent several weeks with real transgendered prostitutes to develop the screenplay.
Certainly not for effete sensibilities, the film features plenty of raw moments and piquant dialogue. For example, Alexandra dissuades her friend on the topic of Chester’s desirability: “His breath smells like he’s been eating ass for days. I mean when I walk into his room it shouldn’t always smell like ‘homeless’ And those socks! Those socks are so black. That’s not a pimp! What do you see in him? Why are you looking for him?”
Another of the film's attributes is that it was entirely shot on a pair of Apple iPhone 5s fitted with newly available anamorphic adapters. The congruence of style and narrative mesh perfectly, producing vivid and pictorially sophisticated results out of sparse technologies. Add real L.A. locations to the mix and Tangerine indeed exudes a rank kitchen sink authenticity.
To contemporary eyes -- growing up watching camera-phone shot videos on YouTube instead of traditional television and film -- the prospect of an entire movie shot with iPhones might seem utterly conventional. But cinematographer Radium Cheung uses the inherent restrictions of the technology, particularly its short focal length lens, to produce inventive and pictorially strident effects.
While it has a verité feel, Tangerine is no dogme film, and is worth seeing on the merits of its camera-work and editing alone. Fluidly arcing tracking shots, crisply cut to the intermittent kick drums and deep baseline of trap music, endows the film with an energy sometimes reaching the kineticism of the Neveldine/Taylor Crank films.
Here though, Baker and Cheung develop something approaching a distinctive iPhone aesthetic. By capitalizing on the fixed wide-angle perspective of the camera and its robust depth of field, they produce classically looming compositions. A face or part of a head often anchors the foreground part of the frame. The distortions created by the wide-angle lens are used to great comic effect.
Gags and events are played out across different planes, through a creative use of deep space. In one scene, Alexandra diverges from Sin-dee to quickly turn a trick for extra cash. Failing to “get-off”, her john reneges on the payment. She charges into him as they both exit off-screen right on the humorous line “You forgot, I got a dick too!”
We then smash into a long-scale shot of Sin-dee interrogating a homeless man about the whereabouts of “Dinah, or Delilah or Dana or whomever.”
The following shot introduces a pair of cops casually minding a corner, then cuts to the camera positioned inside the car, and the windshield clearly framing Alexandra and her john, entangled and still struggling as they slowly drift into view. The film’s use of rhythmic cutting, off-screen and deep space compositions, as well as aperture framing, showcases reliably traditional film craft. The result is a vividly staged, unabashedly humorous and genuinely suspenseful scene.
There’s a visual brilliance on display when the film renders a cab driver giving head to a tranny offscreen, while the cab itself passes through a car wash: the viscous suds, the cloth ribbons that lap away at the wet foam on the windshield, and the jet-stream of water are a clever way to visually and viscerally displace the sexual act occurring just out of our view.
Sin-dee finally locates her quarry in a room chock full of motley figures engaged in all manner of fleshly shenanigans. Sin-dee bursts in and abducts Dinah, proceeding to drag her through what feels like half the city.
The anamorphic format is used throughout for ensemble staging and deep space compositions. Since so much of the performances entails “performing” one’s gender through pose, vocal accent and timbre, and the overall comportment and attitude of one’s body, the film frequently uses long-scale staging of figures to skilled effect.
Tangerine isn’t simply out to shock bourgeois sensibilities with a graphic depiction of tranny prostitutes and the often “straight” men lining up for their services. In fact, the highpoint of the film, Alexandra’s performance at a nightclub, evokes genuine pathos and charm. In an adjacent scene, Sin-dee and Dinah, locked together in a bathroom, share a crack pipe while Sin-dee tenderly applies make-up to her rival’s face.
The latter half of the film suffers from a predictably melodramatic climax where all the characters intersect. These scenes feel staged, like Funny or Die vids, leaving the film’s final attempts to evoke pathos less convincing. And it’s uncertain whether all of this is staged for slapstick or satire. Some audiences may end up bored and chafed as hints of the film’s artifice are revealed.
What’s refreshing about Tangerine, though, is that there’s no sense these characters are on a path to redemption. Neither does the film celebrate their right to a life lived with defiant self-expression. And it’s this neorealist impulse, moments where the characters are allowed to inhabit and interact, borne through solid cinematic craft that makes Tangerine a film that's very much worth seeing.
THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars
Tangerine is playing theatrically via VSC/Magnolia. In Canada, it can be seen at the Carlton Cinema in Toronto and the VanCity Theatre in Vancouver with other playdates to follow. It can also be seen at the Fantasia International Film Festival 2015 in Montreal.
Thursday, 12 February 2015
WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Kiwi-Vamp MockDoc via VSC
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| VLADISLAV ENJOYS, uh, IMPALING, or rather, POKING. |
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1. A Fine Mess 2. Erotic Dance 3. Big Grumpy Pants 4. Impaling is always Fun |
What We Do In The Shadows (2014)
Dir. Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi
Starring: Jemaine Clement, Taika Waititi, Jonathan Brugh, Ben Fransham, Cori Gonzalez-Macuer, Stuart Rutherford, Jackie van Beek, Rhys Darby
Review By Greg Klymkiw
I should have hated this movie, but I couldn't. It's too good-natured and funny not to like. We're talking mockumentary, here. The subjects are vampires in New Zealand in the modern world. Just imagine a slightly broader This is Spinal Tap with blood-sucking before you go in and you're going to be just fine. I went in expecting nothing, mind you, but was rewarded with consistent laughs and often found myself soaring with joyous ebullience.
The set-up is pretty basic. A documentary crew (who always stay behind camera and don't ever appear as characters a la Rob Reiner in Spinal Tap) is granted permission to capture the daily lives of vampires (with a solemn oath that they'll never be attacked).
We're introduced to a "family" of four bloodsuckers and unlike our traditional notion of the undead living solitary lives in out-of-the-way castles, these fellas live in a sprawling dwelling in Wellington, New Zealand as - get this - flatmates.
Viago (Taika Waititi) is a bit frilly and foppish and takes on the role of fuss-budget den mother - always reminding his co-habitants of their household duties (sweeping, dusting, doing dishes and not leaving bloody spinal columns on the floor).
Vladislav (Jemaine Clement) is a long-haired, moustachioed satyr who hails from an Eastern European tradition of impaling, though he prefers to call it "poking".
Deacon (Jonathan Brugh) is the youngest and hence, most immature of the bunch, complaining about having to lift even the slightest finger to fulfil his responsibilities as a flatmate.
Deep in the bowels of the basement lives the eldest of the group, Petyr (Ben Fransham), a grumpy, 8000-year-old Max Schrek (or depending on your cup of Nosferatu, Klaus Kinski) lookalike.
The camera crew conducts one-on-one interviews with the oddball assortment of vampires in addition to capturing their day-to-day activities. The lads especially enjoy nights on the town (save for Petyr, who seldom leaves the basement, preferring victims to be dragged downstairs for him) and we get to enjoy our sidewalk-sashaying nocturnal undead buds roaming about, making like Dion and the Belmonts' The Wanderers.
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| Vampire Jam Session |
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| Nick - Master Clubber |
Nick's quite the man about town and gets his pals into all the hottest nightclubs.
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| IT-whiz Stu introduces our vampires to the INTERNET! |
There's a tiny bit of conflict that creeps into the movie involving their natural rivals, the werewolves of Wellington and Nick's less-than-discrete bad habit of telling everyone he knows (or barely knows) that he and his buds are vampires. This brings far too much unwanted attention upon them including a genuine vampire hunter and visits from the local constabulary.
The film eventually builds to an absolutely insane climax when the lads attend an annual ball of vampires, witches and zombies which furthermore spills over into a potentially deadly conflict with the werewolves. None of this, however, is ever scary, though there's a decent amount of tension and plenty of surprises to be had.
All in all, this group of bloodsuckers prove to be genuinely charming and likeable fellows and the movie injects all the tropes and lore of vampirism into the proceedings to keep genre fans constantly delighted. The running time is mercifully short and the picture never overstays its welcome. Happily, the camera crew do capture more than a few chases and kills, but they're never offensively complicit in their actions like, for example, the filmmakers in the vaguely reprehensible Man Bites Dog. The mock-doc is true to the genre and we're never presented with the sort of gaffes that can, in lesser examples of the ilk, takes us completely out of the forward thrust of the piece.
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| WHOOPSIE-DAISY: A BLEEDING MESS! |
My only major quibble is that there are simply not enough babes in the movie. Yes, there are a few, but they take a major back seat to the fellas and what red-blooded genre-geek doesn't want a good amount of babe action?
Well, this writer, for one, but even I had to concede that my grumblings about the dearth of babes eventually fell upon my own deaf ears. These guys are a riot!
THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3-Stars
What We Do In The Shadows is currently in theatrical platform release throughout Canada via VSC (Video Services Corp). Upcoming playdates include:
February 13 opening:
TORONTO - Scotiabank Theatre
MONTREAL - Cinema Cineplex Forum
VANCOUVER - Cineplex International Village
February 20 opening:
OTTAWA - SilverCity Gloucester
CALGARY - Select CINEPLEX Locations
February 27 opening:
WINNIPEG - SilverCity Polo Park
PLEASE FEEL FREE TO ORDER ANYTHING FROM AMAZON BY USING THE LINKS BELOW. CLICKING ON THEM AND THEN CLICKING THROUGH TO ANYTHING WILL ALLOW YOU TO ORDER AND IN SO DOING, SUPPORT THE ONGING MAINTENANCE OF THE FILM CORNER.
Friday, 30 January 2015
RED ARMY - Review By Greg Klymkiw - American Doc on Soviet Hockey Ignores Canada
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| RUSSIAN PROPAGANDA |
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| AMERICAN PROPAGANDA |
Dir. Gabe Polsky
Review By Greg Klymkiw
Gabe Polsky’s feature length documentary Red Army is as much about the propaganda machine (of Cold War Russia/Soviet Union) as it is pure propaganda unto itself, by placing undue emphasis upon the rivalry between America and the Soviet Union on the blood-spattered battleground of ice hockey competition. Polsky has fashioned a downright spellbinding history of the Red Army hockey team, which eventually became a near-juggernaut of Soviet skill and superiority in the world.
In spite of this, many Canadians will call the film a total crock-and-bull story.
I wholeheartedly admit, however, the bias of growing up intimately within the universe of world competition hockey. My own father, Julian Klymkiw, played goal for Canada’s national team in the 1960s, a team that was managed by Chas Maddin (filmmaker Guy Maddin’s father). Guy and I eventually became the respective director-producer team behind Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Archangel and Careful. Maddin went on to immortalise a ‘non-professional’ team from the wintry Canadian prairies in the Jody Shapiro-produced My Winnipeg. Maddin even featured a beefy lookalike of yours-truly wearing a uniform emblazoned with the name ‘Julian Klymberger’ (the surname being one of my own nicknames in years past and to represent my Dad).
To say Maddin and I were both well aware of the true rivalry in international hockey would be an understatement.
But one didn’t need to actually grow up in hockey families intimately involved with various Team Canada hockey leagues to realise that the United States was a blip on the Soviet rivalry-radar. The only famous match-up between the Soviets and America happened during the 1980 Olympics, when a team of veritable untested ‘kids’ hammered the Soviets (immortalised as the 2004 Walt Disney Studios feature film Miracle starring Kurt Russell).
Polsky’s film uses this match as the film’s primary structural tent pole, and completely ignores the historic 1972 Canada-USSR Summit Series, which has gone down in most histories (save, perhaps, for America’s) as the greatest display of hockey war of all time. His film also ignores, though pays passing lip service, to the fact that the real rivalry throughout the 1970s and 1980s had virtually nothing to do with America and everything to do with Canada and Russia.
I know this all too well.
My own father eventually became the Carling O’Keefe Breweries marketing guru who brokered huge swaths of promotional sponsorship to Team Canada over 15-or-so years and, in fact, worked closely with hockey agent/manager/promoter and Team Canada’s mastermind Alan Eagleson. Dad not only spoke a variety of Slavic languages fluently, but his decades as an amateur and pro hockey player all contributed to making him an invaluable ally to both administrators and players of Team Canada. To the latter, famed Canadian sports reporter Hal Sigurdson reported, ‘Big Julie [Klymkiw] often rolled up his sleeves and got his hands dirty behind the Canadian bench.’
I’m not, by the way, arguing the absence of my Dad in this film – he did his thing, promoting beer to promote hockey and hockey to promote beer, which allowed him to travel the world and be with all the hockey players he loved – but what I’m shocked about is how Red Army can ignore my Dad’s old pal and colleague. The film includes ONE – count ’em – ONE off-camera sound bite from Alan Eagleson.
Polsky appears to have made no effort to even interview the man himself or include the reams of historic interview footage of Eagleson that fills a multitude of archives to over-flowing. Eagleson, for all the scandals that eventually brought him down, including imprisonment for fraud and embezzlement convictions, was the game’s most important individual on the North American side to make Soviet match-ups in the Western world a reality, and to allow professional North American players to go head-to-head with the Soviets. (Though Eagleson went down in flames, my Dad always remarked straight-facedly, ‘The “Eagle” never screwed me.’)
How, then, can a documentary about Soviet hockey so wilfully mute this supremely important Canadian angle to the tale? Where are the interviews (new or archival) with such hockey superstars as Gordie Howe (including sons Mark and Marty), Bobby Hull, Bobby Orr, Marc Tardif and all the others who battled the Soviets on-ice? Why are there only mere blips of Wayne (‘The Great One’) Gretzky, most notably a clip in which he sadly refers to the Soviets’ unstoppable qualities? Why are there not more pointed interview bites with the former Soviet players discussing the strength of Canadian players? It’s not like archival footage of this doesn’t exist.
There’s only one reason for any of these errors of omission: all the aforementioned personages and angles are Canadian. Ignoring the World Hockey Association’s (WHA) bouts with the USSR is ludicrous enough, but by focusing on the 1980 Olympic tourney and placing emphasis on the National Hockey League (NHL), the latter of which is optically seen as a solely AMERICAN interest, Red Army is clearly not the definitive documentary about the Soviet players that its director and, most probably American fans and pundits, assume it is.
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| America? HAH! Canada! YEAH! |
Even if one were to argue that the story Polsky was interested in telling didn’t allow for angling Canadian involvement more vigorously, ‘one’ would be wrong. The story of Soviet hockey supremacy has everything to do with Canada – a country that provided their only consistent and serious adversary, a country that embraced hockey as intensely as the USSR and a country, by virtue of Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s official policy of Canadian multiculturalism, that reflected the vast number of Canuck players who had Eastern European blood and culture coursing through them.
It’s also strange how Polsky, the son of Soviet Ukrainian immigrants, ignores the fact that a huge majority of great Soviet players were ethnically Ukrainian. I vividly remember meeting so many of those legends as a kid and listening to them talk with my Dad about a day when maybe, just maybe, Ukraine would have its independence and display Ukrainian hockey superiority over the Russians, never mind the rest of the world. (Given the current struggles between Russia and Ukraine, this might have made for a very interesting political cherry-on-the-sundae.)
Ultimately, Red Army is American propaganda, or at the very least, is deeply imbued with American propagandistic elements. Given that it’s about Soviet hockey players, I find this strangely and almost hilariously ironic, which in and of itself, gives the movie big points.
All this kvetching aside, Red Army is still a solid film. Focusing on the historic and political backdrop of Joseph Stalin and those leaders who followed him, all of who built up one of the greatest, if not the greatest series of hockey teams in the world, this is still a supremely entertaining movie. Polsky’s pacing, sense of character and storytelling is slick and electric. The subjects he does focus upon, the greatest line of Soviet players in hockey history, all deliver solid bedrock for a perspective many hockey fans (and even non-hockey fans) know nothing or little about.
Polsky even interviews a former KGB agent who accompanied the Soviet players to North America in order to guard against defection to the West. Here again, though, I’ll kvetch about a funny Canadian perspective. Dad not only played hockey, not only was he a marketing guy, but he even squeezed in a decade of being a damn good cop in Winnipeg, and when Team Canada went to Russia, Dad would go from hotel room to hotel room, find bugs (not the plentiful cockroaches, either) and rip the KGB surveillance devices out of their hiding places for himself, his colleagues, players and administrators from the West.
I’ll also admit to enjoying the interviews with the likes of NHL coach Scotty Bowman and Soviet goalie Vladislav Tretiak; however, the most compelling subject in Polsky’s film is the Soviet defenceman Slava Fetisov, who movingly recounts the early days of his hockey career, his friendship and brotherhood with the other players and his leading role in encouraging Soviet players to defect for the big money of pro hockey in North America. It’s also alternately joyous and heartbreaking to see the juxtaposition between the balletic Soviet styles of play with that of the violent, brutal North American approach.
Contrast is, of course, an important element of any storytelling, but in a visual medium like film, it’s especially vital. It’s what provides the necessary conflict. With Red Army, however, the conflict is extremely selective. It is, after all, an American movie, and as it proves, if Americans do anything really well, it’s propaganda. Us Canucks here in the colonies can only stew in our green-with-envy pot of inferiority. We know we’re the best, but we have no idea how to tell this to the rest of the world, and least of all, to ourselves.
Kudos to Polsky and America are unreservedly owed.
They show us all how it’s done.
THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3-Stars
Red Army is currently in theatrical release via Mongrel Media in Toronto and Vancouver, followed by a February 27 release in Montreal and a rollout in the rest of Canada later in the year. It previously screened at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF 2014).
To read a full version of my essay Canada vs. America: The Politics and Propaganda of Sports in Gabe Polsky's RED ARMY and Bennett Miller's FOXCATCHER, feel free to visit my column: Greg Klymkiw's COLONIAL REPORT (on cinema) from the DOMINION OF CANADA at the ultra-cool UK-based magazine electric sheep - a deviant view of cinema by clicking HERE.
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Thursday, 22 January 2015
A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT - Review By Greg Klymkiw - How can a Spaghetti Noir Vampire Chick in Iran NOT be cool? Stunning directorial debut from Kino Lorber, opens TIFF Bell Lightbox, The Royal Cinema via VSC (Video Services Corp)
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| This is what you could meet in lovely Iran. |
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| Iranian Bloodsucker in a Chador |
Dir. Ana Lily Amirpour
Starring: Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi,
Marshall Manesh, Mozhan Marnò, Dominic Rains
Review By Greg Klymkiw
There aren't too many vampire movies these days like A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. In fact, there aren't any at all, but now that this one exists, we can all repress the stench of the abominable Twilight series. What we've got here pretty much blows all recent blood-sucker extravaganzas away.
It's not only a genuinely terrific picture, but it's all in Farsi, the language of Iran, where, incidentally the movie is set (though, amazingly, it was shot in southern California). The movie is staggeringly original, yet at the same time, owes a debt of gratitude to Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch, Sergio Leone, Guy Maddin and James Whale.
Decent bedfellows all, especially for the film's director, a young Iranian-American lassie who makes her feature length debut with this moving picture graphic novel that could well have sprung from the loins of Frank Miller if he was a woman from Iran and wasn't a misogynist.
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| Nothing sexier than the scent of a jugular vein |
And what a setting!
Bad City is practically a ghost town smack in the middle of some desolate plain in Iran, surrounded by endless rows of unmanned oil pumps seesawing ceaselessly and deeply into the flat, dusty earth. In the distance, desolate factories belch clouds of smoke into the atmosphere, the sunny skies blotted out by the filth of pollution.
A lone whore wanders aimlessly on the streets at night, hoping ever-so desperately that someone, anyone will drive by or walk up to her for a cheap fuck or blow job, anything, no matter how degrading will do to avoid being beaten to a pulp by her pimp for not turning enough tricks.
Daylight is murky, nighttime is murkier still, pools of light from high pressure sodium street lamps cast their eerie glow upon the forlorn streets, flanked by dollops of pitch black shadow. If anything, the subtext of the film is found within the shades of grey. Black and white are the pillars holding it all up, but the depth resides twixt those visual support beams of light and darkness.
Somewhere in Bad City is a vampire.
Not that anyone would notice or even care. Life is cheap. Bodies appear, then disappear. Corpses are tossed casually just outside of town into a ditch. The men are (mostly) pigs, the women are invisible and/or abused. The brutish sex in Bad City are pimps, pushers, addicts, drunks, unemployed, slave-class labourers and/or all of the above. Homes appear squalid, their interiors are even more squalid. There's little to do and pretty much nowhere to go. The one nightclub is full of ecstasy-popping babes and scumbags.
At times, we feel like we're in a dreamscape that could only exist in the movies. Of course, I never have a problem with that, but as the film progresses, we're creepily affected by a world that feels as real as it is fantastical. This is a country of waste, repression, rape of the land, rape of the soul and the clear suppression, or rape, if you will, of women's rights. Oil, the ever-present oil being pumped, seems to be the only life or at least, vigorous movement, in this somnambulistic, backward, backyard of despair.
Escape seems to be the only way to avoid death, or at least, a living death, but everyone seems too beaten down to even bother thinking about it. Flight at the end of a needle or the lip of a bottle or whatever can be popped down the gullet, all seem to be the easiest way to dull the pain and, perhaps, allow Bad City's denizens to imagine a better world.
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| ARASH VARANDI is HOT!!! |
Pops once had something resembling class, but now he's an addled bum, obsessed with the whore Atti (Mozhan Marnò) who reminds him of his late wife, but who, in turn, refuses to acknowledge his pathetic existence unless he's got money to buy her grudging attention and/or respect.
There is, however, a mysterious, exotic and gorgeous young woman (Sheila Vand) who slowly creeps about the streets at night in a full traditional chador.
She's no whore. She's a vampire on the prowl for blood. Her tastes, however, appear limited to exploitative misogynistic men.
Luckily for Arash, he's a sensitive lad, not deserving of having his throat torn out by her fangs, but one of the vampire's victims conveniently opens an opportunity for our hero to secure wads of dough, scads of drugs and the return of his beloved Ford T-Bird coupe.
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| SHEILA VAND is pretty HOT too!!! |
Why not? They're young, smoulderingly intense and, uh, HOT! So what if she's the walking dead? Living in Bad City with a drug addicted father makes him just as undead. Mais non?
Will love conquer all?
Will escape be a viable option?
Will Bad City become a distant memory?
The answers to these questions will all be found in this compulsively engrossing, gorgeously photographed (in beautiful monochrome) and yes, often creepy and scary immersion into the delectable depths of feminist revenge fantasy with a to-die-for soundtrack and a pace so hypnotic that filmmaker Amirpour might well be more than a mere artist.
She's a Class-A mesmerist and as such, watching the movie is to fall under her spell of magic and to emerge pumped, enriched and convinced you've seen one of the most original movies in years.
THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars
A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night from Kino Lorber is in theatrical release across Canada via VSC (Video Services Corp) with Toronto playdates at TIFF Bell Lightbox and The Royal Cinema. Keep your eyes peeled. You won't want to miss this for anything.
Tuesday, 20 January 2015
HONEYMOON - DVD/BLU-RAY Review By Greg Klymkiw - Sicko Shocker on VSC & Magnolia
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| Honorary Canadian Chiller |
Filmmaker Leigh Janiak is NOT Canadian, but she might as well be.
Her first feature HONEYMOON is set in the wilds of Canada and prior to learning that this twisted, uber-talented Cleveland lassie actually vacationed with her folks as a child in their Canuck cottage every summer, my first two helpings of the movie convinced me she HAD to be a Canuck.
Friday, 2 January 2015
THE FILM CORNER'S 4TH ANNUAL TOP 10 HEROES OF CANADIAN FILM as selected by your Most Reverend Greg Klymkiw in this, the year of Our Good Lord, 2014 (in alphabetical order, of course)
as selected by the Film Corner's Most Reverend Greg Klymkiw
(in alphabetical order, of course)
(in alphabetical order, of course)
Wednesday, 31 December 2014
CORNER GAS THE MOVIE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Canuck TV show on big screen, eh
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| Here be a real knee-slapper from CORNER GAS THE MOVIE Nyuck. Nyuck. Nyuck. Are you be laughing yet? It be real funny, eh? It be Canadian, eh. Come on! Laugh, goddamn ye! LAUGH! Ah, fuck you, gimme a beer, eh. |
Dir. David Storey
Scr. Brent Butt,
Andrew Carr, Andrew Wreggitt
Starring: Brent Butt, Gabrielle Miller, Fred Ewanuick, Eric Peterson, Janet Wright, Tara Spencer-Nairn, Lorne Cardinal, Nancy Robertson, Don Lake, Reagan Pasternak, Karen Holness, Cavan Cunningham, Graham Greene
Review By Greg Klymkiw
The Canadian TV series Corner Gas was an undeniable smash. For six seasons, its ratings kicked everything off the charts, including big American programs. Its worldwide sales have also been through the roof. The show could probably have gone on for a few more seasons, but its creator Brent Butt bravely decided to pull the plug on a high note. The final episode drew a staggering three-million-plus Canadian viewers.
Wednesday, 24 December 2014
Greg Klymkiw picks The Film Corner's Top 21 Documentaries of 2014 - Stellar Year 4 DOCS - Many of these films were first unleashed at such film festivals and venues as TIFF 2014, TIFF Bell Lightbox, Hot Docs 2014, Toronto After Dark 2014, FantAsia 2014, FNC 2014, BITS 2014, NIFF 2014, Planet Out 2014, The Royal Cinema and the Magic Lantern Carlton Cinemas
Documentary cinema in 2014 was so powerful that it seems almost ludicrous to even attempt a list honouring only 10 movies, so I've decided to include a few categories here that are comprised of a variety of films within them which I've chosen to bundle together and furthermore present my picks as the Top 21 Documentaries of 2014. The list will be in alphabetical order by category and title.
Documentaries on the Artistic Process:
Tuesday, 23 December 2014
Greg Klymkiw's 10 BEST HORROR/SCI-FI/FANTASY/ACTION FILMS of 2014 - Many of these films were first unleashed at such film festivals and venues as TIFF 2014, TIFF Bell Lightbox, Hot Docs 2014, Toronto After Dark 2014, FantAsia 2014, FNC 2014, BITS 2014, NIFF 2014, The Royal Cinema and the Magic Lantern Carlton Cinemas
Dir. Audrey Cummings, Scr. Chris Gamble, Prod. A71 Productions, High Star Entertainment, Narrow Edge Productions
Pigs, you see, are lurking in the woods. Not just any pigs, mind you, but a family of travelling serial killers adorned in horrifying pig masks. And these sick fuckers mean business.
Monday, 22 December 2014
RARE EXPORTS: A CHRISTMAS TALE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Grim Yuletide from Finland
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010)
dir. Jalmari Helander
Starring: Onni Tommila, Jorma Tommila
Review By Greg Klymkiw
While it is an indisputable truth that Jesus is the reason for the season. the eventual commercialization of Christmas inevitably yielded the fantasy figure of Santa Claus, the jolly, porcine dispenser of toys to children. Living with his equally corpulent wife, Mrs. Claus, a passel of dwarves and a herd of reindeer at the North Pole, Santa purportedly toils away in his workshop for the one day of the year when he can distribute the fruits of his labour into the greedy palms of children the world over.
Is it any wonder we forget that Christmas is to celebrate the birth of Our Lord Baby Jesus H. Christ?
In the movies, however, we have had numerous dramatic renderings of the true spirit of Christmas - tales of redemption and forgiveness like the Alistair Sim version of A Christmas Carol, Frank Capra's immortal It's a Wonderful Life and Phillip Borsos's One Magic Christmas, but fewer and far between are the Christmas movies that address the malevolence of the season celebrating Christ's Birth. There's the brilliant Joan Collins segment in the Amicus production of Tales From the Crypt, the Silent Night Deadly Night franchise and, perhaps greatest of all, that magnificent Canadian movie Black Christmas from Bob (Porky's) Clark.
And now, add Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale to your perennial Baby-Jesus-Worship viewings! This creepy, terrifying, darkly hilarious and dazzlingly directed bauble of Yuletide perversity takes us on a myth-infused journey to the northern border between Finland and Lapland where a crazed archeologist and an evil corporation have discovered and unearthed the resting place of the REAL Santa Claus.
When Santa is finally freed from the purgatorial tomb, he runs amuck and indulges himself in a crazed killing spree - devouring all the local livestock before feeding upon both adults and children who do not subscribe to the basic tenet of Santa's philosophy of: "You better be Good!" A motley crew of local hunters and farmers, having lost their livelihood, embark upon an obsessive hunt for Santa. They capture him alive and hold him ransom to score a huge settlement from the Rare Exports corporation who, in turn, have nefarious plans of their own for world wide consumer domination. How can you go wrong if you control the REAL Santa?
There's always, however, a spanner in the works, and it soon appears that thousands of Claus-ian clones emerge from the icy pit in Lapland and embark upon a desperate hunt for their leader. These vicious creatures are powerful, ravenous and naked.
Yes, naked!
Thousands of old men with white beards traverse across the tundras of Finland with their saggy buttocks and floppy genitalia exposed to the bitter northern winds. For some, this might even be the ultimate wet dream, but I'll try not to think too hard about who they might be.
All cultures, of course, have their own indigenous versions of everyone's favourite gift-giver and this eventually led to the contemporary rendering of the Santa Claus we're all familiar with. Finland, however, absorbed in considerable wintery darkness for much of the year, insanely overflowing with rampant alcoholism and being the birthplace of the brilliant Kaurismäki filmmaking brothers, is one delightfully twisted country. It's no surprise, then, that the Finns' version of jolly old Saint Nick is utterly malevolent. As presented in this bizarre and supremely entertaining movie, Santa is one demonic mo-fo!!!
Directed with panache by the young Finnish director Jalmari Helander (and based on his truly insane short films), Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale is one unique treat. It's a Christmas movie with scares, carnage and loads of laughs. Helander renders spectacular images in scene after scene and his filmmaking vocabulary is sophisticated as all get-out. In fact, some of his shots out-Spielberg Spielberg, and unlike the woeful, tin-eyed J.J. Abrams (he of the loathsome Super-8, the Star Trek reboots, the worst Mission Impossible of all time and now, God forbid, Star Wars), I'd put money on Helander eventually becoming the true heir apparent to the Steven Spielberg torch. Helander's imaginative mise-en-scène is especially brilliant as he stretches a modest budget (using stunning Norwegian locations) and renders a movie with all the glorious production value of a bonafide studio blockbuster. The difference here, is that it's not stupid, but blessed with intelligence and imagination.
While the movie is not suitable for most young children (except mine), it actually makes for superb family viewing if the kiddies are not whining sissy-pants. Anyone expecting a traditional splatter-fest will also be disappointed, but I suspect even they will find merit in the movie. Most of all, Moms, Dads and their brave progeny can all delight in this dazzling Christmas thriller filled with plenty of jolts, laughs, adventure and yes, even a sentimental streak that rivals that of the master of all things darkly wholesome, Steven Spielberg.
You have hereby been warned:
You better watch out,
you better not cry,
you better not pout,
I'm telling you why,
Santa Claus is coming to town,
with razor-sharp big gnarly teeth,
a taste for human flesh,
he knows if you've been bad or good,
and he likes to eat kids fresh.
Hey!
Or in the words of Tiny Tim: "God Bless us, everyone."
THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ 3 and-a-half stars
Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale is currently available in a superb Bluray and DVD from the Oscilloscope Pictures (and distributed in Canada via the visionary company VSC). I normally have little use for extra features, but this release is one of the few exceptions. It includes Helander's brilliant shorts and some truly informative and entertaining making-of docs. This is truly worth owning and cherishing - again and again!
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