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Film Friday: A Bad Omen for Film This Month, But Who Cars? (Groan)
Well, with the first match of the World Cup watched and a fresh cup of coffee brewed, looks like it’s time for Torontoist to file another one of it’s Film Friday reports. But with the whole world going footy mad (Rightly so – did you see Lahm’s goal at six minutes? What about Frings’ finisher? But we digress) what on earth is there to get excited about in the world of film?
I mean, we’ve only got tripe like The Omen out, a film released just because the date was relevant. The less said about it the better, but NOW’s John Harkness has at least taken the opportunity to write a very worthy piece examining (read: complaining about) the current trend of pointless Hollywood remakes of horror flicks.
Oh, and we’ve got Cars. Poor, poor, misguided Pixar.
Torontoist has very indistinct memories (and has just wasted like, an hour googling in an attempt to find) of an old short which featured a cute little car who wanted to be a race car, against his father’s (some kind of a truck, I think) wishes. He gets the operation, crashes, and then gets put back together in his father’s image. Though I might just have imagined it, the similarity in my mind of the characterisation of vehicles (eyes in the windscreens rather than the lights, which causes some people confusion, I’m told) this cartoon is exactly what Pixar are trying to ape. And, with cars being about the least charismatic objects you could try to anthropomorphise (though look out for Dreamworks coming flick, Bathroom Sinks), it’s no wonder that the advance word is Cars (wait for it) crashes! (Groan) No love from our local critics, for example Adam Nayman notes “Cars is beautifully animated but wretchedly conceived and flatly executed”, and Glenn Sumi reminds us why we all go and see Pixar films anyway: “Make sure you stay for the closing credits, a gag reel about former Pixar flicks that will have you laughing more than you did during the previous 110 minutes.”
Anyway, enough of that. As we established, it’s just not exciting enough to cure us of our World Cup fever (we’re burning up!) there is much better stuff to be excited about. Cinematheque Ontario continues with it’s thrilling Heroic Grace II series (you may want to check out The Five Venoms at least) and they’re also showing Žižek! (All showings at Jackman Hall, AGO, 317 Dundas W.) But the excitement this week is truly because with only 12 weeks (or something) to go until the Toronto International Film Festival, the city is going film festival crazy with no less than five different festivals running during the week. The Alucine Toronto Latino Media Festival continues (listings here), and the North by Northeast Film Festival began last night and runs until the 11th. It’s at the Royal Cinema (608 College) one of our soon to be lost indie cinemas, so it’s probably worth checking out one of the showings (listings here) to show some respect to the old bird. There’s the Silver Screens Film Fest, listings here, and the Toronto Italian Film Fest, listings here, too.
This week’s biggest festival however is the Worldwide Short Film Festival, which runs from June 13th to 18th at a variety of locations. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to note out our picks of the festival before it begins, but there’s certainly a very nice collection of reviews already up on Eye Weekly’s website. Some short films sound like just the ticket, considering we’ll already be getting most of our entertainment this month in hour and a half installments…