Toronto film festival 2017

[Chris Knipp]

D'Angelo, cont'd. He seems to have had a busy day.


Jane Goodall in Jane

Brawl in Cell Block 99 (Zahler): 75. Riveting amalgam of courtly and brutal, defined by Vaughn's ultra-low-key superhuman badass.
He adds:
Like BONE TOMAHAWK, it justifies its seemingly extreme length (132 mins here, felt like 85) via painstaking accumulation of pungent detail.

Jane (Morgen): 60. Masterfully edits Van Lawick's long-lost footage so that it resembles a fiction feature. Rest is conventional bio-doc.

Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond [etc.] (Smith): 55. More interested in watching Carrey channel Kaufman 24-7 than in hearing him self-analyze.

Thelma (Trier): 54. Not sure “It's a *Good* Life” really works as a romance. Maybe with a more distinctive performance in the title role.

Mom & Dad (Taylor): 41. An inspired idea rather poorly executed. Came for nutso Cage, wound up preferring feral Blair.

The Day After (Hong): 37. His blandest film ever, both formally & structurally. The reason he favors diptychs becomes glaring via absence.

The NYFF has two Hong Sang-soo films this year, and from the festival blurb they seem to be connected. The other is On the Beach at Night Alone. I am a fan of Hong Sang-soo and hope to see these, but others understandably find his work repetitious and bland.

Mom & Dad: "A teenage girl and her little brother must survive a wild 24 hours during which a mass hysteria of unknown origins causes parents to turn violently on their own kids." WIth Nicolas Cage, Selma Blair, Anne Winters. It sounds like a thoroughly unpleasant experience and a film to avoid.

Jane is about Dame Jane Morris Goodall DBE, formerly the Baroness Jane van Lawick-Goodall, now plain Jane Goodall to most, the primates expert, now 93. Directed by Brett Morgan. IMDb entry for this documentary: "Using a trove of unseen footage, the film tells the story of Jane's early explorations, focusing on her groundbreaking field work, her relationship with cameraman and husband Hugo van Lawick, and the chimpanzees that she studied." Directed by Brett Morgan, an interesting documentary filmmaker. His previous films: Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015), The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002), the latter about legendary Paramount producer Robert Evans. Jane Goodall is a fascinating figure and a pioneer in simion studies and this one surely is worth seeking out.

On Joachim Trier the Norwegian filmmaker's Thelma, see Dave Erlich's Indiewire piece, "'Thelma' Review: Ingmar Bergman Meets Stephen King in Joachim Trier’s Beguiling Lesbian Horror Movie. The film is Norway's Best Foreign Oscar entry

Trier's first two films were brilliant. His last one , in English, was a relative disappointment to me.