culture
Rep Cinema This Week: Buzzard, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and 2001: A Space Odyssey
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
Still from Buzzard.
At rep cinemas this week: a lean, mean American indie comedy; a Marilyn Monroe classic; and Stanley Kubrick’s psychedelic sci-fi odyssey.
Buzzard
Directed by Joel Potrykus
The Royal (608 College Street)
You’d be hard-pressed to come up with a more distinctive voice in recent American independent filmmaking than Joel Potrykus, who concludes his so-called “Animal Trilogy” with Buzzard, which plays out a bit like a meaner Punch-Drunk Love without the love. Like Coyote and Ape before it, Buzzard stars Joshua Burge as a ne’er-do-well loser whose animalistic urges get the better of him. And like its predecessors, Buzzard is as wickedly funny as it is insightful about a peculiar strand of beta-male rage.
The plot here is admittedly (and one has to imagine deliberately) a bit thin: Burge’s Nintendo Power Glove–outfitted man-child Marty Jackitansky flees his mundane office life of stealing and reselling office supplies when he begins to think his small-time scams are catching up with him. Still, Buzzard is full of strong, strange stuff, from some of the most startling depictions of sudden violence we’ve seen in a while (at least since Potrykus’s own Ape) to a surprisingly tender moment with a doctor who cuts through one of Marty’s insurance scams and meets him in the middle, person-to-person. Much of the credit here has to go to Burge as the birdbrained nascent human at the centre of Potrykus’s droll investigation of male impotence. His shifts from innocent to con artist to inarticulate psychopath somehow seem all of a piece, making this an astonishingly varied character study.
Co-presented by MDFF, Buzzard screens as part of Last Laugh, a new monthly comedy series at The Royal.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Directed by Howard Hawks
The Royal (608 College Street)
You can’t really go wrong with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Howard Hawks’s technicolour 1953 adaptation of the Broadway musical. Though it’s best remembered today for featuring one of Marilyn Monroe’s definitive performances—down to her oft-imitated rendition of “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend”—seen again with about 60 years of hindsight, it remains just as impressive for Hawks’s signature direction of the snappy dialogue and for Jake Cole’s understated jazz dance choreography.
Monroe stars as Lorelei Lee, a showgirl from Little Rock, Arkansas who wants nothing more than to snag herself a well-heeled man to keep her in diamonds through to the grave, while her more serious-minded colleague and loyal friend Dorothy Shaw (a very funny Jane Russell) wants to spend her time with more authentic (read: poorer and handsomer) sorts. Before long, the women find themselves aboard a ship bound for France, where Lorelei would be off to get married to moneybags Gus (Tommy Noonan), if his skeptical father hadn’t banned him from joining and sent a private investigator (Elliott Reid) on Lorelei’s trail instead.
Everything here goes about the way you’d expect and, predictably, certain aspects of the film’s gender and sexual politics haven’t held up so well. But Monroe’s work as the alternately dunderheaded and preternaturally savvy blonde is just this side of sublime, and Russell’s witty repartee with Reid is worthy of comparison to Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell’s sparring in Hawks’s His Girl Friday.
2001: A Space Odyssey
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Fox Theatre (2236 Queen Street East)
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, even if the human character work is a bit lacking. 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. Come for the infamous Star Gate sequence that sees astronaut David Bowman (Keir Dullea) traipsing through various psychedelic nebulae, but stay for the unbearably tense stretch that precedes it, where poor Dave has to make nice with his ship’s homicidal computer HAL 9000.