news
Movie Mondays: Your Monstrous Movie-Going Moloch
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.
It’s another packed week at the movies, gang. And the kind we especially like: one which reaches across the high/low divide. We’ve got some Truffaut, some exploding heads, a chamber orchestra, and a Tuesday special that, even if it’s not as cheap as it used to be, is still pretty cheap.
When you think of François Truffaut, you probably think, “Oh, that guy helped mint the French New Wave, probably one of the more influential artistic movements of the twentieth century” or “Yeah, he directed Shoot the Piano Player and The 400 Blows and Jules et Jim.” You may even think, “Hey, he’s the guy from Close Encounters!” You may think of spastically edited films or affecting bildungsromans. But you probably don’t think of Small Change, Truffaut’s blithe family comedy.
Driven more by moments than narrative, Small Change sees Truffaut sketching the daily life of a handful of children living in central France with grace and levity. There are memorable scenes at movie theatres and schoolhouses, dirty jokes, babies on windowsills, bad haircuts, and other scenes from daily life. Though the film enjoyed a good deal of critical success when it was released in 1976, it’s often eclipsed by the more formative works that have come to define Truffaut’s canon.
Still, if you’ve seen The 400 Blows and The Last Metro and want to delve deeper in Truffaut’s body of work, Small Change is a fine place to start (certainly much better than his largely botched English-language adaptation of Fahrenheit 451). Kick off your week at the movies with Small Change at The Bloor (506 Bloor Street West) at 7 p.m. on Monday night.
Continuing in the series of concert-movies (or movie-concerts or movies-with-live-music, or whatever they’re calling it internally), this week the TIFF Bell Lightbox presents a screening of Fritz Lang’s seminal 1927 expressionist sci-fi epic Metropolis, accompanied by a new live score assembled by celebrated Quebecois composer Gabriel Thibaudeau. And if you thought seeing Do Make Say Think perform a live score to Greed was impressive, then get ready for this bad boy.
For two shows only, Thibaudeau has assembled two (count ‘em, two) chamber orchestras to perform on stage, as a way of giving musical representation to the subterranean class schism at the heart of Lang’s film. Keyboards and strings represent ennobled spirit of the bourgeoisies while a brass quintet and organ stand-in for the struggling labourers. And if that’s not enough to whet your appetite, the screening is also showcasing a pristine new print of Metropolis that’s twenty-five whole minutes longer. So come and root, root, root for the working class while resting on your laurels in the luxurious seats of the Lightbox (350 King Street West) at 8 p.m. on Tuesday and Wednesday. Advance tickets are available now at the Lightbox or via their online box office.
If spending upwards of fifty dollars to hear a chamber orchestra score a silent German film isn’t your idea of well-spent Tuesday night, then there’s always cheap movie night at the Rainbow Market Square (80 Front Street East). The prices are gradually inflating—what used to be Toonie Tuesday and then Two Toonie Tuesday is now Five Dollar Tuesday, which hardly has the same alliterative ring to it—but they still can’t be beat. If you need a quick laugh, we recommend Todd Phillips’ Due Date.
Reviews have been mixed, but we can’t help but suspect that transposing the mismatched road movie dynamic of Steve Martin and John Candy in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles onto a high-strung Robert Downey Jr. and the bleary-eyed, ever-bearded Zach Galifianakis promises more than a few laughs. It should at least hold you ever until Phillips tries to redouble on the success of last summer’s The Hangover with the currently-in-production sequel. Due Date is screening at the Rainbow at 6:55 p.m. and 9:15 p.m. on Tuesday. And if it turns out to be not that good, well, at least you only wasted five bucks on it.
There have been a load of great movies made about the Vietnam Conflict, and even more made about the traumatic fallout of those who participated. There’s Born on the Fourth of July and Jacob’s Ladder and House. (Okay, House isn’t really that great. But it’s got George Wendt in it. That’s something, right?) There’s also William Lustig’s gory little number Maniac, a 1980 urban horror film starring character actor Joe Spinell (you know, from the first two Rocky movies) as a psychotic Vietnam vet terrorizing New York City.
What’s just as interesting as having a traumatized, sociopathic Vietnam veteran as the villain are Maniac’s special effects, which come courtesy of goremeister Tom Savini. Himself a veteran of the conflict, Savini brought his typical level of bloody realism to Maniac, but it’s made more disturbing by virtue of the fact that it’s not some George Romero–styled zombie picture. Maniac has Savini, perhaps, coping with his own Vietnam shock (especially during a scene where he himself has his face blown off at close range by a twelve-gauge shotgun), which makes what might otherwise have been a forgettable shocker film that much more compelling. It also inspired that song “Maniac” by Michael Sembello, which we all remember from Flashdance and that scene in Tommy Boy where Chris Farley sings it while having cow plop hosed off of him by Rob Lowe. So there’s your film trivia for the day. You can catch all the hyper-violent mania of Maniac at The Underground (188 Spadina Avenue) Friday at 9:30 p.m. as this month’s entry in their month schlock showcase, Exploitation Ally.
Photos by Eugen Sakhnenko/Torontoist.