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Movie Mondays: The Column with the Midas Touch
As a means of rounding up Toronto’s various cinematic goings-on each week, Movie Mondays compiles the best rep cinema and art house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements.
We generally make an effort to get you really excited about a given week’s movie offerings, but you know what? It’s kind of a ho-hum week. There’s plenty of okay stuff—a Magnetic Fields doc, some classic Bond, some second-run Clooney—but nothing to plan your week around. Save, perhaps, for the premiere of a really cool-looking indie feature by a group of Toronto filmmakers. There’s also the home video release of Neil Marshall’s hyper-violent Ninth Legion epic Centurion (one of our favourites from After Dark 2010) on Tuesday. And that’s great, because who doesn’t want to watch McNulty from The Wire lead first century A.D. bar brawls and threaten to flog people?
Documentaries about bands and musicians tend to be of pretty limited appeal. Because even if you really like the film’s subject, do you necessarily want to spend ninety minutes hearing about them? For fans of baroque pop outfit the Magnetic Fields, odds are that yes, you would really like to spend ninety minutes hearing about them. Because fans of the Magnetic Fields tend to really, really, like the Magnetic Fields.
Strange Powers, a documentary by Kerthy Fix and Gail O’Hara, is an intimate portrait of the Magnetic Fields, placing particular focus on its loner pop-poet frontman Stephin Merritt. Regardless of where you stand on the band, Merritt’s a worthy subject for a documentary. Even if he wasn’t one of the most well-regarded pop tunesmiths of the past two decades, his well-curated curmudgeonly persona (as well as his shelves of books, CDs, and tacky luau dolls) render him almost inherently cinematic. Strange Powers grants viewers incredible access to the band, and especially the working relationship between Merritt and long-time friend/bandmate/manager Claudia Gonson, which fans of the band are bound to relish.
But for anyone either uninitiated or actively disinterested in the Magnetic Fields, Strange Powers is a much harder sell. Though Merritt can be fun to watch, his withdrawn artiste sensibilities border on out-and-out dickheadedness, and while the doc may make a strong-ish case for why we should watch him for ninety minutes, it never really makes a case for why we should care about his music. Is it because he’s some kind of maudlin savant? Because he can crank out love songs at the motorized clip of the Brill Building? Because other people seem to like him?
There’s no doubt that fans of the band will leave Strange Powers swooning over Merritt and Company. And anyone who isn’t interested in the Magnetic Fields (or, heaven forbid, thinks they kind of suck) is likely to be just as vindicated in their own taste. Strange Powers opens at the TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West) this Thursday.
Almost as divisive as Stephen Merritt’s unique brand of bubblegum gloom is James Bond’s brand of campy high-spyin’ action. But again, those who like it, like it a lot. And whether you’re the kind of person who grew up relishing in TBS’s annual Bond marathons, or just got turned on when Daniel Craig added some not-at-all-needed grit to the series with the recent Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace, you could always stand to see 1964’s Goldfinger again.
For many Bond fans (even those of us who much prefer Roger Moore’s smart-alecky take on the character over Sean Connery’s), Goldfinger (not to be confused with the terrible pop-punk band you all liked when you were fourteen) is a hallmark of the series; a primer on how to make a good Bond movie. From the memorable pop theme song by Shirley Bassey, to Bond (Connery) unzipping a wet suit to reveal a dry tuxedo, to bad guy Auric Goldfinger (Karl Gerhart Fröbe) dopily revealing his entire master plan when he thinks he has 007 cornered, to its buxom Bond girl with an appallingly sexist name (Honor Blackman’s Pussy Galore), Goldfinger’s got it all.
There are some people who don’t think the Bond films ages well—that the action scenes are silly and the humour drier than Bond’s famously shaken martinis. Well, that’s always been the point, really. Especially in the ‘60s, Bond was intended as high camp (albeit subtle, English high camp, at least until Roger Moore storms a base in an aligator costume in Octopousy), a caricatured depiction of Cold War–era spy thrillers. It was kind of like England’s version of the Adam West Batman TV series, though Bond plays his cards a little closer to its chest.
Almost any way you cut it, Goldfinger stills holds up wonderfully. And whether you’re a Bond die hard or double-oh-nothing, it’s well worth checking out at The Bloor (506 Bloor Street West) this week, where it screens Monday at 7 p.m., as well as in 4:30 p.m. matinee spot on Tuesday.
This summer’s The American was, in a lot of ways, a rejoinder to the neck-punching, free-running, excessively explosive action of spy thrillers like the Jason Bourne or recent James Bond films. A refreshingly placid thriller, beautifully shot by Dutch director Anton Corbijn (best known for his work on Depeche Mode videos and the 2007 Ian Curtis biopic Control), The American moved at a pace worlds away from the MTV-editing and Michael Bay-ish SFX that saturate many more contemporary American spy films.
Corbijn’s film stars George Clooney, in a nicely understated turn, as Jack, an American assassin adrift in Europe, carrying out a last job before retirement. The plot may seem old hat, but it’s enlivened by a series of refreshing twists, characters that seem comprehensively fleshed out, and an especially memorable ending. Considering its decidedly un-American presentation, the film’s title may itself serve as a clever incitement. But the goading ends there. Otherwise, The American is remiscent of the more cerebral spy films America used to make in the ‘60s, and a reminder of how good Clooney can be when he’s not just mugging for the camera. The American continues its second-run engagement at The Revue (400 Roncesvalles Avenue) at 9:15 p.m. on Monday.
You hear a lot these days about how digital video makes it incredibly easy for upstart filmmakers to crank out a cheapie feature with their friends. But it’s rare you actually see people follow through with it. Well Toronto-based production company Critical Focus did just that, cobbling together their debut feature, Uncle Brian for only fifteen-thousand (Canadian) dollars. The film stars Daniel MacLean as the titular Brian, a high school kid on the road to nowhere, who whiles away the hours drinking and sleeping with his friend’s mom. Being a dark comedy about a self-destructive teenage alcoholic (it’s no Juno, not by a long shot) Uncle Brian is the kind of film you’d usually only catch on the festival circuit, and indeed, it’s already garnered some rave reviews following screenings at the Vancouver International Film Festival and the New York City International Film Festival. But now the film comes home to Toronto, giving local audiences a chance to take in something exciting and fiercely independent. So check out Uncle Brian on Saturday, November 6 at 7 p.m. at The Underground (186 Spadina Avenue).
Photos by Eugen Sakhnenko/Torontoist.