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TIFF 2006 Daily Round-up: Day 5
We’re pleased to say we managed to reach day five of the Toronto International Film Festival before succumbing to a migraine. Of course, the result is that we missed whatever exciting happenings were going on in the evening, including the Planet Africa party, always one of the most popular TIFF parties (which is why they continue to run it two years after ending the Planet Africa programme.) We heard the entire Raptors team were invited, but we don’t know anything else about it!
Thankfully the aura phase hadn’t hit by the time we went to one of the highlights of the dialogues programme, Albert Maysles presenting The Beales of Grey Gardens, his follow up to the cult favourite Grey Gardens; and Psychiatry in Russia, his first film.
The Beales of Grey Gardens – you could consider this a cash-in, as it would certainly be near meaningless to a viewer unfamiliar with Grey Gardens, the Maysles brothers’ 1975 documentary about the life big and little Edie (mother and daughter relatives of Jackie O) and their life in a dilapidated mansion. We’d prefer to consider it a gift to fans. Less of a portrait of the relationship between mother and daughter than the original, this is more a series of vignettes that work as an astoundingly loving and intimate portrait of little Edie, but still with plenty of the laughs that made the original so quotable. Flawed, but still loveable. 3.5/5
Renaissance – Almost everything in this film comes so close to being brilliant but crucially each component part seems to fail in some unfortunate fashion. The story of a hard-boiled cop searching for a kidnapped scientist in a futuristic Paris is represented entirely in CG graphics cleverly created in striking two-tone black and white. As stunning as this visual concept is, it’s let down somewhat by clichéd character design and animation that drops the film entirely into the uncanny valley. The same mistake is made with impossibly trite dialogue that makes the voice acting feel stilted, helping ruin a plot that could almost be clever, if it didn’t rely so heavily on cop-film tropes. In the end it feels like you’ve just watched an hour and a half cut-scene from a videogame, and everything, from the aesthetic to the plot, pales into comparison to Capcom’s Killer 7, so why bother? 2/5