Film Friday: Crank Calling

Hey Matthew:

As an Eye guy, I'm not sure why you have so much trouble understanding the concept of a review/interview. It's a critical essay about the film that draws upon interviews with those involved in making the film.

For those (like Matthew) who think the post linked to doesn't "make any sense as a review," I've cut and pasted a no-interview version of the story here:

There are 261 features set to play the Toronto International Film Festival, but just how many of them will actually star Toronto? Oh, sure, there'll be a few in which our easily made-over metropolis plays Chicago, Detroit or maybe even Kuala Lumpur. But only one dares expose the grubbiest patch of our civic underbelly, revealing the desperate lives and revolutionary actions going down on downtown's western frontier. Indeed, Reg Harkema's Monkey Warfare -- a radical-minded comedy that makes its world premiere at the festival Sept. 10 -- comes straight outta Parkdale.
[Don] McKellar and Tracy Wright play Dan and Linda, two embittered bohemians living in a west-end house filled with evidence of their chosen vocation: selling off finds from local garage sales and junk piles to online collectors. After their dope dealer is arrested, Susan (Litz) becomes their new source for BC bud. Though she seems cool enough, Susan's deepening attachment to the couple -- and to Dan's Baader-Meinhof books, Fugs records and other holy relics of radicalism -- inspires incendiary ambitions. Bike-riding, balaclava-clad Bolsheviks are soon making the whole city unsafe for SUVs.
Acerbically funny, yet imbued with surprising emotional heft, Monkey Warfare comes equipped with some Godard-tested tactics (jump cuts, onscreen text, agitprop slogans) and a mighty cool soundtrack (see sidebar). It also offers the rare chance to see some quintessentially Torontonian settings on screen.
Made on a microscopic budget that included $30,000 from Harkema's credit line at the CIBC, Monkey Warfare celebrates and ridicules with savvy the ideals Dan and Laura have abandoned, and which Susan is all too happy to reclaim. McKellar and Wright are terrific as a couple who languish in a haze of guilt and pot smoke until Susan up-ends their existence. Litz's sly performance makes good on the promise displayed in films like Evelyn: The Cutest Evil Dead Girl, the Brad Peyton short that inspired Harkema to cast her.
[A]s absurd as their activities may seem, the characters are played without a trace of cheek or condescension.
More serious than it may look, Monkey Warfare returns repeatedly to questions about how one is supposed to go about changing the world and whether violent acts are ever justified. While Litz doesn't necessarily agree with Susan's methods, she connects with her nobler instincts.
Meanwhile, the director [has] pulled off his own act of cinematic subterfuge, complete with a potentially irresponsible but hilariously fitting post-credits sequence intended for audience members who want to take the movie's ideas to the street, though preferably not Queen West.

See, Matt? It isn't just an interview with a star rating. For those able to read, there's whole review there.

Hello again Mathew:

Sorry for misspelling your name in my first post. I tossed it off fairly hastily.

And I'm glad you're a fan, but I'm also glad you feel that what we're doing is worth being critical of. I welcome your comments, but I hoped to point out where and why I think you may be wrong.

Here's a brief look behind the scenes at Eye: we would never bother to do a feature story about a film that we didn't like (the rule is generally three stars or higher). So after Jason or Adam or Kieran or (less frequently) someone else has seen a film, if they're really jazzed about it they call and say, "let's make it a cover story" or "let's make it a feature." And if we all agree that that is a good idea, we go ahead and arrange interviews and photography and all the other things that go into a feature story. Those are the ones that you see in the review/interview format.

Sometimes we don't get to see a movie until the last minute before it comes out, but we expect it to be good or interesting or otherwise feature-worthy, so we just do a striaght-ahead preview/interview and run the review in the following issue. Sometimes when we do that the movie turns out to suck. Then we feel stupid.

See, generally we don't want to waste our space providing a big feel-good preview to a movie that we don't believe in (some other weekly blew Kevin Smith in a preview of Clerks II -- I hope they feel appropriately ashamed) because then we are basically encouraging our readers to go out and waste their time and money. And we don't like to do that.

All of which is a long-winded way to try to address your fair-enough concern over whether reviews get compromised ethically when we've got a good interview. They don't because the interviews almost always happen after we've decided we like the movie.

As to your specific criticisms about the review I hastily edited above by simply cutting out the quotes: I could quibble (No crtical points? How about these: "Acerbically funny, yet imbued with surprising emotional heft," "a mighty cool soundtrack" "McKellar and Wright are terrific" "Litz's sly performance makes good on the promise...") but I'm not going to try to convince you that you like something you don't.

I think we all (at Eye) just think it's a silly waste of space (having to do two intros and conclusions, and then also probably two summaries of the plot, plus all the display copy) to run the review as separate from the preview in the same issue (since generally we're going to do all the press immediately before the film is released, they would always run in the same issue). With limited space available in any given issue, it seems weird to run two different stories on the same film, especially when -- since we're not going to do a little puff feature on a film we think sucks -- both of them will be leading to the same "see this film" conclusion.

Do you find yourself wondering the same thing when you read, say, John Baber's City Hall column in the Globe and say, "what's all this original reporting doing in an opinion column. How can this function as an opinion column when he's busy compromising his objectivity with all these quotes from the people he's pronouncing on. Why doesn't the Globe separate the opinion from the interviews?"?

But of course film and politics are different beasts.

In any event, I'll pass your dislike for the format along to Kieran (our film editor). But I hope I've at least shed some light on our rationale, even if I haven't convinced you.

And here's a little advice on film festival coverage: take some speed.

Edward