culture
Rep Cinema This Week: Whiplash, John Wick, and My Neighbor Totoro
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
Still from Whiplash.
At rep cinemas this week: Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons face off in a jazz-drumming thriller, Keanu Reeves shoots some bad guys, and a Studio Ghibli favourite gets a repeat engagement.
Whiplash
Directed by Damien Chazelle
The Royal (608 College Street)
Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash made waves when it debuted earlier this year at Sundance, and despite its prickliness relative to the fest’s usual sunny hits, it’s not hard to see why. Starring Miles Teller as a jazz drum prodigy enrolled in a prestigious college music program and J.K. Simmons as an obscenely cruel conductor and teacher who will either bring out his artistic genius and knock some rhythm into him or ruin him personally and professionally, the film is an unsentimental, entertaining, and unfathomably silly concoction that never quite decides whether it’s a thriller or a straight drama—mostly to its credit.
Teller and Simmons are so good in their claustrophobic scenes together that it’s a real disappointment whenever the film settles into humdrum material about the difficulties of dating while pursuing one’s artistic dream, the irritations of having a family that just doesn’t understand, and the single-mindedness of serious men. One also wonders whether Teller’s tortured artiste is as good as the film seems to want him to be, given his seemingly fatal issues with timing—the sort of thing you’d expect would be mastered by even a competent drummer. At its best, however, as in the truly strange final concert set piece that sees the two men facing off mano-a-mano as if there weren’t a full concert hall behind them, Whiplash becomes the sort of pure spectacle you let slide on brute force appeal.
John Wick
Directed by Chad Stahelski
The Royal (608 College Street)
Unappreciated and often outright derided for much of his career, Keanu Reeves has seen a resurgence of late, even finding himself the subject of a career retrospective—fittingly entitled “Whoa: The Films of Keanu Reeves”—at TIFF Bell Lightbox. Nothing represents this second wind better than John Wick, Chad Stahelski’s confident and ingeniously designed feature debut, an ultra-violent but overall minimalist affair featuring Reeves as the titular contract killer, brought out of retirement when well-connected thugs (led by Game of Thrones’s perpetually sallow Alfie Allen) steal his car and kill his dog.
A sensitive, if not especially articulate, screen presence—just see the “Sad Keanu” meme, which finds the actor going about his day in various hangdog poses—Reeves is a fine anchor for a film about a quiet modern samurai dragged back into his shameful past when his new life is threatened. This is all fairly conventional stuff, and the devil-may-care attitude toward violence is perhaps worryingly retrograde, but Reeves’ stoic performance sells it. Meanwhile, Stahelski, a well-heeled fight choreographer who clearly knows the ropes, finds a balletic sort of grace and even the occasional glint of humour in his many action set pieces, which riff endlessly on the grim visual punchline of our hero dispatching his enemies with a gunshot or two to the face. It isn’t Shakespeare, which Reeves famously muddled his way through in the early ‘90s, but thank heavens for that.
My Neighbor Totoro
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
In support of its recent release of The Tale of The Princess Kaguya, rumoured to be the last feature to come out of Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli, TIFF has been screening a number of the studio’s critical staples. Fond as we are of Ponyo, the Hans Christian Andersen riff that also screens Friday, if we had to choose to see one, we’d put our money on My Neighbor Totoro, the studio’s first international smash and arguably its most beloved work.
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki, the most prolific and well-regarded of Studio Ghibli’s filmmakers, the film tells the story of Satsuki and Mei, two young sisters who discover that their new house is also occupied by a number of dusty spirits, and find that the forest just past their front door is home to the enormous titular creature. Since the film’s success, Totoro has become Ghibli’s equivalent to Mickey Mouse, and for good reason: he’s a sweet and gently surreal creation, an undomesticated teddy bear who, in one of the most beautiful and strange sequences in the film, delights in the mere sound of raindrops falling on his comically undersized umbrella.
More than its fantasy elements, what makes the film special is its staggering attention to detail and its emotional depth and texture. This may be one of the most sophisticated children’s films to come down the pike, in part because of how astutely it renders the psychology of its young heroines—a preteen and a toddler trying to make sense of their mother’s illness and cope with their new surroundings, while keeping their imaginations alive.