Our postcard dispatches form the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival for Saturday, September 6.
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The Riot Club
Dear TIFF,
Hot British bad boys certainly have (maybe not-so-niche) appeal. Even I was curious what female director Lone Scherfig would bring to The Riot Club, which Laura Wade adapted from her own male-centric play, Posh. And after the opening scene, which dives head-first into big breasts and unrepentant Renaissance debauchery through a wily sense of humour, I buckled up for a wild ride.
Too bad the film never really went there. Despite this early filmic treatment and Wolf of Wall Street-esque promise, the film doesn’t amount to much more than The Skulls at Oxford. The play’s spatial limitation start to feel unnecessarily confined for the big screen during the climax (especially in the massive Princess of Whales Theatre, which signalled a certain importance for a press-only screening). But alas, it was all ultimately as disposable as the women the male characters talk about but rarely engage. To re-quote the them, I suppose there are films for today, and films for tomorrow. This was just a film for today.
Sincerely,
Christopher
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Elephant Song
Dear TIFF,
You never really know which films are going to draw a crowd at this festival. I figured I was safe only showing up a few minutes early for a Canadian film by Charles Binamé that’s adapted from a play. But of course, this one features filmmaking wunderkind Xavier Dolan in a starring role. So I had to sit on the theatre floor for about 15 minutes.
Until the first walk-outs left empty seats behind.
As you know, walkouts at press and industry screenings don’t mean much when you’ve crammed an unreasonable number of films into the line-up. Still, a high walkout rate never bodes well. I won’t venture to say how many left (not many more than normal), but as someone who stayed, I wasn’t all too riveted to my seat.
Dolan plays a mental patient who holds the secret to a doctor’s disappearance, but he never truly inhabits the character. His mannered affections came off as a Christoph Waltz imitation, and the story itself loses a lot of energy by the mid-point. Binamé knows how to move a camera in tight spaces to off-set staged exchanges, but when the mind-games grow wary, there’s little else to latch onto. Other than those comfortable arm rests I finally had.
Sincerely,
Christopher
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Revenge of the Green Dragons
Dear TIFF,
It’s official. You just screened my first major disappointment of the festival: Revenge of the Green Dragons.
It was pretty hard not to come into this Martin Scorsese-produced Chinese gangster film with high hopes – especially since it’s co-directed by Wai-keung Lau (credited as Andrew Lau), who made the Infernal Affairs films that Scorsese adapted into The Departed.
But it all goes terribly, almost hilariously wrong.
Set in 1980s New York, the film is full of English-as-a-second-language performances (or characters?), which lends itself to painfully on-the-nose dialogue and over-acting. And those are the forgivable sins. What makes the film slide straight into parody is the misguided attempts to make it feel like an 80s action movie; wailing guitar solo soundtrack, constant pace-killing fades to black, and strobing, slow-motion sequences meant to punctuate melodramatic deaths. Even the bang-bang intro feels like it comes from an 80s TV show.
So you’d think that’s the point, right? Except the film takes itself deadly serious. All the visuals are desperately trying to live in the shaky-cam, off-kilter camera angle universe of the present, and end up making the whole movie laughable when I was primed to love it.
Sincerely,
Christopher
