culture
Rep Cinema This Week: Advanced Style, Home Alone, and 2001: A Space Odyssey
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
Still from Advanced Style.
At rep cinemas this week: a spirited look at septuagenarian fashionistas, a quote-along presentation of a holiday staple, and a 70-mm print of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece.
Advanced Style
Directed by Lina Plioplyte
Bloor Hot Docs Cinema (506 Bloor Street West)
“Money has nothing to do with it,” a cannily dressed septuagenarian says of her personal image in Advanced Style, Lina Plioplyte’s brisk, charming profile of the stars of New York photographer Ari Seth Cohen’s fashion blog dedicated to the city’s best-dressed women over 50. That might not be true of the women’s vintage chic—their Chanel bags certainly didn’t buy themselves—but it turns out to be an operating principle for the film. Despite its refreshingly positive take on aging as something involving more than staggering illness and loss, the usual staples of docs on the subject, the film has surprisingly little to say about the privileged economic and social circumstances that enable its protagonists to cultivate idiosyncratic personae for themselves during a life stage when women are typically reduced to flat stereotypes.
Still, one doesn’t go to a style documentary for class critique so much as for larger-than-life characters and, of course, fashion. As a character study and an amuse-bouche that manages to advocate a kind of soft feminism, Plioplyte’s film is more than able—though one wishes it had taken a closer look at the realities of maintaining one’s self-image while confronting the onset of illness and disability, which are treated here as uncouth digressions rather than a normal part of life.
Home Alone
Directed by Chris Columbus
Bloor Hot Docs Cinema (506 Bloor Street West)
A live-action cartoon with some of the most violent slapstick this side of Wile E. Coyote and his backfiring Acme rockets and anvils, Home Alone has, in the years since its smash debut, become something of an unorthodox Christmas staple, a yearly refresher for those who can’t get through the holidays without seeing a hot iron burned into Daniel Stern’s face.
For the handful of uninitiated, a pre-pizza-eating Macaulay Culkin stars as Kevin McCallister, a good-natured but bratty kid who finds himself master of the house when any number of fail-safe systems, including decent parenting, go awry, and he ends up left at home for the holidays while his absent-minded parents (Catherine O’Hara and John Heard) and unruly extended family jet off to Paris. From there, it’s a mix of quixotic journey, as Mom heads back by plane and by U-Haul (driven by John Candy and his team of modestly successful polka musicians), and survival movie, as Kevin arms the homestead against a pair of burglars (Stern and Joe Pesci), who’ve had their eyes on the obscenely opulent McCallister abode for some time.
Seen now, what most impresses about Home Alone—besides the inventive damage it wreaks against Stern and Pesci’s fragile bodies and the curious way that damage sits comfortably with the yuletide bells and holiday sentiment—is its strange dream logic. We’re never quite sure what the so-called wet bandits hope to achieve by plundering the home while Kevin’s still there, for one thing, and the denouement to their failed heist is so clipped as to feel straight out of fantasy: Kevin is spared the requisite police interviews about, say, the nail-through-the-foot incident, and is advanced straight into the welcoming arms of his miraculously returned family, who are none the wiser about what’s just gone down.
Some concerned sorts took from the film’s vagueness about the consequences of beating the hell out of your neighbourhood burglars a sense that director Chris Columbus and screenwriter John Hughes were endorsing child sadism—and certainly one comes away at the end worried for the next door-to-door salesman to cross Kevin’s path. But we choose to think of the whole thing as Kevin’s Freudian nightmare about being the constantly put-upon youngest pup in the litter, though it looks close enough to reality to be mistaken for the real thing. Anyway, it’s a good time.
Friday’s screening is a karaoke-style quote-along hosted by comedian Steph Tolev.
2001: A Space Odyssey
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
It’s long been a habit of a certain type of sci-fi aficionado to set Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey off against George Lucas’s Star Wars in a nerdy cage match, as if the only way to appreciate their respective contributions to the genre is to pit the former’s modernist difficulty against the latter’s goofy affability and see what happens. What that approach misses, besides nuance, is the fact that despite his reputation as a cerebral trickster figure, Kubrick was in some ways just as maximal and big-picture a filmmaker as Lucas, or indeed, as a contemporary inheritor such as Christopher Nolan. 2001: A Space Odyssey is the most quintessential product of Kubrick’s showman tendencies—a rigorously composed, unabashedly pretentious, and symphonic epic about human nature, whose effects work still rates as some of the best in modern studio filmmaking.
While a lot of Canadians of a certain age inevitably first watched 2001 on mediocre televisions in its annual New Year’s broadcasts on Bravo, the best place to see it and take in its ambition and scale is inarguably the cinema. That’s especially true of TIFF Bell Lightbox’s new 70-mm print, which ought to recreate the near-religious (but still secular-humanist) experience Kubrick intended.