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Movie Mondays: Your Third Man In
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.
Featured in this week’s newly redesigned Movie Mondays: gripping noir film from one of cinema’s great one-hit wonders, a magical realist high school sex comedy, a bit of classic De Palma, and Ryan Reynolds trapped in a coffin.
Great cinema has its share of one-hit wonders: directors who made one great movie before dropping out of filmmaking and fading into direct-to-video obscurity. Michael Cimino had The Deer Hunter. Shane Carruth had Primer. Simon West had Con Air. And Carol Reed had The Third Man (1949).
Granted, Reed had success with other films like Our Man in Havana and Oliver!, but The Third Man had the British director exhibiting signs of auteur-ish brilliance he’d never again fully realize. Screening on Monday, November 22 at 6 p.m. as part of the Essential Cinema program at TIFF Bell Lightbox, The Third Man cast Joseph Cotton as an American writer seeking work in post-war Vienna. Soon after arriving, he becomes embroiled in the murder of his close friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) and his underground penicillin racket. The Third Man is first-rate noir cinema, moving briskly (the editing anticipates the now-nauseating flash cuts of MTV and Michael Bay) through a taught mystery set against the expressionistically rendered streets of Vienna. Some people like to hypothesize that the film was all but directed by Welles. But as long as such rumours remain unsubstantiated, The Third Man remains Carol Reed’s singular masterpiece.
John Hughes really had a way of getting inside the minds of teenagers. After all, sometimes we just want a day off. Who among us hasn’t learned a little bit about ourselves and others during a weekend detention sentence? Or travelled by plane, train, and automobile? And what red-blooded adolescent male hasn’t fantasized about trying to conjure up a sex genie by connecting his computer to his sister’s Barbie doll?
Weird Science (1985) may not be much for the lunchroom realism of Hughes’ other teens films, but it’s a lot more fun. Featuring studs like Anthony Michael Hall, Robert Downey Jr., and Bill Paxton in their lean, mid-’80s prime, Weird Science nailed the nerds’ revenge film well before Judd Apatow came along, and somehow made navel-gazing slobs with encyclopedic pop culture knowledge attractive to women out of their league. (Buying the coupling of Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl in Knocked Up requires a greater leap of faith than Weird Science, sex genie and all.) It also boasts an amazing theme by Oingo Boingo, which alone is worth twice the price of admission. Wednesday, November 24 at 9 p.m.
If there were any justice in this wackadoo world, the Academy would give Ryan Reynolds a best actor nod for his stunning turn as a trapped army contractor in Rodrigo Cortés’ excellent Buried (2010).
Gaining plenty of critical acclaim at Sundance and TIFF (where we sung its stuffy praises), Buried is an astonishingly nerve-wracking thriller that traps the viewer inside a coffin with Reynolds, an American truck driver taken hostage in Iraq, as he struggled against loss of oxygen and cellphone battery life. Drawing plenty of comparisons to Hitchcock—from the close-quarters potboiler of a premise to the Saul Bass–influenced poster—Buried is that rare kind of high concept thriller that doesn’t make a habit of getting hung up on its essential gimmick. Wednesday, November 24 at 9 p.m.
Chris Alexander’s Film School Confidential is back this month with another offering from the Fangoria editor’s lengthy list of under-appreciated cinematic schlock. Well, to be fair, this month sees Alexander screening a film with less problematic claims to greatness, De Palma’s Blow Out (1981).
Essentially a remake of Antonioni’s Blow Up (and, by proxy, Francis Ford Coppola’s excellent The Conversation), Blow Out stars John Travolta as a sound effects technician on a low-budget horror movie who accidentally records a conversation outlining an assassination plot. As in Blow Up (and again in The Conversation), Travolta becomes obsessed with unravelling the mystery he stumbles across. It may be Blow Out’s exploitation elements that most interest Alexander. But exploring as it does the fluid connections between sound, image, and action, Blow Out serves up plenty to chew on for cinephiles of all stripes. Thursday, November 25 at 9:30 p.m.