Canadian cinemania: one critic’s take on TIFF ’09

Pub date September 22, 2009
Writersfbg
SectionPixel Vision

By Jesse Hawthorne Ficks

>>Check out critic Dennis Harvey’s TIFF takes here.

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There were quite a number of exciting films at the 34th annual Toronto International Film Festival, though attending 21 features and 20 shorts in five days also involved some disappointments. Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Air Doll somehow dropped the ball in every which way, throwing around interesting concepts involving a sex doll who comes to life (a la The Velveteen Rabbit), but it ended up leaving me longing for Michael Gottlieb’s 1987 politically incorrect gem, Mannequin. Or Fridrik Thor Fridriksson‘s The Sunshine Boy, an Icelandic documentary about Autism around the world. Though it used Bjork and Sigur Ros on the soundtrack, it felt like an infomercial for public access. (To be fair, I saw the version with an Icelandic narrator and not the newest version with Kate Winslet reading the cues.)

Some films succeeded in minor ways, including George Romero’s fifth entry in his zombie oeuvre, Survival of the Dead. While enjoyable, this one seems to lack the political immediacy of his previous entries, including his underrated Diary of the Dead (2007). Michael Moore’s (last?) feature Capitalism: A Love Story had some brilliantly ironic moments — as always, interspersed with his typical forehead-slapping activism (do you really have to continue using minimum wage-earning security guards at major corporations as the butt of your wacky antic jokes?). It felt a bit scatterbrained. Still, the film is well worth watching and even won the runner-up audience award for Best Documentary.

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The creator of the original British version of The Office had his directorial debut with The Invention of Lying. Ricky Gervais’ cynically hilarious, cameo-packed laugh-fest sadly ran out of steam during its last act, but no matter. What’s most important here is the sucker-punch moment that has Gervais flexing dramatic skills so poignantly that it literally brought tears to the entire audience. (On a side note, why doesn’t Gervais ever end up kissing his leading ladies? Is this a conscious choice to counteract the likes of Woody Allen or Vincent Gallo or is it truly due to a low-self esteem?)

Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime, Bong Joon-ho’s Mother, and Claire Denis’ White Materials all delivered solid entries, proving these directors know their craft and do it quite well — though depending on how much you may have enjoyed their previous films you may be left wanting a little less or a little more.