culture
Rep Cinema This Week: Diamond Tongues, Magic Mike XXL, and Jaws
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
Still from Diamond Tongues.
At rep cinemas this week: a Toronto-set indie comedy about a struggling actress, a road movie about male entertainers, and Steven Spielberg’s best thriller.
Diamond Tongues
Directed by Pavan Moondi and Brian Robertson
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
July Talk frontwoman Leah Fay Goldstein stars as Edith, a struggling actress making her way through Hogtown’s toxic industry scene, in Diamond Tongues, the accomplished and very funny sophomore feature from Toronto filmmaker Pavan Moondi and Brian Robertson. While Edith faces a number of Job-like trials in her quest to find dignified work, Goldstein herself impresses easily as the tart, mischievous wannabe star who wants nothing more than to secure the envy of her friends.
Though it bears superficial resemblance to a number of recent comedies about ambitious but precariously employed young women ambling through busy cities—among them, Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha and Mistress America—Diamond Tongues has an edge that’s all its own. At bottom, it’s a fascinating, keenly observed portrait of a difficult person with complex desires that even she can’t always figure out. If the closing minutes are a bit redemptive for our tastes, and the soundtrack a bit busy between the Brendan Canning score and cuts from the likes of Sunset Rubdown, it’s still one of the sharpest and most enjoyable character studies we’ve seen in Canadian cinema since Kazik Radwanski’s Tower.
Magic Mike XXL
Directed by Gregory Jacobs
Revue Cinema (400 Roncesvalles Avenue)
The Red Shoes meets The Canterbury Tales in Magic Mike XXL, as unexpected and rewarding a sequel as you’re likely to see. Following Steven Soderbergh’s original, one of his many astute looks at entrepreneurs making the most of post-recession America, Gregory Jacobs’s successor finds artisanal chair manufacturer and former male entertainer—don’t call him a stripper—Mike (Channing Tatum) reuniting with his old crew, save Matthew McConaughey and his monstrous protégé. Leaderless, older, and a little worse for wear relative to their last outing, the team heads for Myrtle Beach to make their mark or die trying at a major stripping convention.
Though his name is absent save for a stray producing credit, Soderbergh’s jazzy prints are all over this exceptional follow-up, thanks in part to his pseudonymous work as cinematographer and editor. More than those traces of the American great’s signature, though, what impresses here is the film’s ingenious construction, which turns its predecessor’s interest in the American gumption of ostensible meatheads with business savvy on its head by structuring their quest as that most quintessential American genre, the road movie. (Their vehicle of choice: a boutique fro-yo van that fronts as one of the entertainers’ side business.)
Along the way, Jacobs, Soderbergh, and company turn in some expert set pieces—including an impromptu gas station performance to the Backstreet Boys and a pit stop at the mansion and high-end boudoir of a strip-club impresaria (Jada Pinkett Smith)—as well as an earnest consideration of the female pleasures of viewing beautiful male bodies. It’s as fun as it sounds, and a lot smarter than it has to be.
Jaws
Directed by Steven Spielberg
The Royal (608 College Street)
We sometimes forget, but before he was America’s go-to chronicler of important historical moments—finally adding the Civil War to his CV with Lincoln—Steven Spielberg was a genre craftsman of the first order, and a relatively unsentimental one at that. Though he’s admirably tried to strike a balance between genre excursions like Jurassic Park and ostensibly headier fare like Amistad (often in the same year), nothing in his career has delivered the unadulterated goods quite like Jaws.
Seen again more than 35 years after it opened, one is struck by how nimble the thing is. Early on, Richard Dreyfuss’s hipster-bearded oceanographer tells the mayor of shark town Amity that what they’re dealing with is a “perfect engine” and a “miracle of evolution”—nothing to treat lightly. No kidding: Jaws is some elegant machine, transforming without a hitch from a fly-by tour through an incompetently managed resort town in its taut opening to a suspenseful three-dudes-in-a-boat thriller in the last act.
Deservedly lauded for its intricate scare scenes—is there a better cut set piece than poor Alex Kintner’s fate on the beach?—Jaws is also one of Spielberg’s smartest looks at outsiders on the edge of a tightly knit community, a pet theme. Notice how the Great White glides under the radar after its first kill, a tourist, and only registers as a serious threat when it claims one of Amity’s own. There’s a running gag where water-phobic police chief and all-around nice guy Brody (Roy Scheider) is reminded by anyone who’ll talk to him that however long he’s been away from New York, he’s still not an islander. Nebbish Dreyfuss, too, gets roundly mocked for his city hands. That makes the finale, an elemental standoff between the transplanted cityfolk and the even more alien shark, as pointed a commentary on territoriality as Munich. More fun, too.
Jaws screens for free as part of NOW Magazine‘s Free Flick Mondays series.