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Film Friday: He’s Got A Big Face
For most cinephiles not still captivated by the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, this week will simply serve as preparation for Hot Docs—NOW, in fact, used its movie section feature as an vague attempt to help you plan—but if you really can’t wait to see a documentary there’s always earth, the first film from Disney’s new, stomach-turning “Disneynature” brand.
Of course, the likelihood is that unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of years you’ll have already seen all of the best bits, as earth is just an edited compilation of the BBC’s award-winning television documentary Planet Earth. You know—the one that was, for a while, the justification anyone you knew with a HDTV set-up would use for being an early adopter…or a pot-head.
So we can’t think of any reason to reward Disney for using the BBC’s work and slapping their name all over it like they had any input on it, other than, we guess, that some of the money in the cinema ticket would trickle down to the BBC eventually.
(Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the image above is a Superb Bird of Paradise trying to attract a mate.)
This week’s most hyped (if belated) release is The Soloist, another “crazy man good at music” flick all set to swell people’s hearts with the message that people, no matter how weird, can have purpose. Of course, all of our hearts have already swelled thanks to “crazy lady good at singing” Susan Boyle, so undoubtedly we’re all “whatever” at the prospect of Jamie Foxx acting like a loony. However, Jason Anderson at Eye Weekly is willing to go as far as saying that “distasteful and wrongheaded as it may often be, the movie’s too flagrantly odd to ever be boring.”
If that version of the perennial “plucky underdog” story doesn’t suit, there’s always the simplistically titled Fighting on offer, about a down-and-out (yet clean and handsome) bloke who for some reason or another gets involved in an entirely unrealistic underground street-fighting tournament. Though we’d argue its street fighting isn’t unrealistic enough—where are the hadoukens and dragon punches?—the Globe and Mail‘s Liam Lacy is positive, calling it a “surprisingly watchable B-movie.”
Also on release this week: Three Monkeys, which won the directors award for Nuri Bilge Ceylan at Cannes (the Star‘s Peter Howell gives it a very positive review) and Only, opening at the Royal tonight at 7 p.m. with a Q&A with the directors, Ingrid Veninger and Simon Reynolds, to follow.