The succinct, Neneh Cherry-worthy “Tiny Garden” is one of this year’s best singles, but Woods’ third album offers a lot more to love. Reallocating her focus from the cultural essaying of 2019’s LEGACY! LEGACY! towards the intimacy and fragility of relationships, she tempers her alternative R&B/folk with nifty poetic interludes (“I Miss All My Exes”, “Let The Cards Fall”) and simple hooks that exude restraint but also undeniable pleasure (“Practice”, “Boomerang”). While not necessarily an innovator nor yet an icon, her natural talent and deeply felt point of view are in ample supply.
14. The Tubs, Dead Meat
For sure, the vocalist bears a heavy resemblance to Richard Thompson but within thirty seconds of rousing opener “Illusion pt. II” it’s obvious this foursome is no mere homage or tribute act; their welcoming melodies, intricate guitar lines and rarely obvious chord changes all sound effortless like good pop music should but seldom does. I suppose one could argue the originality of things like the spiky riffs of “Sniveller” which conjure up postpunk to a degree bands like Franz Ferdinand have been trading in for decades now, but that doesn’t render it any less of a thrill to hear.
13. Sufjan Stevens, Javelin
Not a return-to-form in the style of Carrie and Lowell, just as that record wasn’t one in relation to Seven Swans. Apart from the uninspired, simplistic lyrics of 2020’s The Ascension, he has never been one to rest on his laurels; what makes Javelin so intriguing is in how it resolutely sounds like a Sufjan Stevens LP while also a push forward to reassess and explore what that means in 2023 (and beyond.) Knowledge that it’s a tribute to a recently deceased partner adds unignorable context but even without that news, this shows him refusing to be complacent and remaining engaged with wherever his muse(s) take him.
12. Alex Lahey, The Answer Is Always Yes
What can you do after two ten-track, near-perfect power/punk-pop albums? Logically, you’d shoot for a third, but on her first release in four years, this Aussie singer/songwriter takes a slightly different approach, opting for more looseness and impulsivity on introspective, pandemic-era observations like “Permanent” and “The Sky is Melting”. Rest assured, she still brings the hooks (the latter’s ascendant chorus is one of her best) and her never-wavering sense of economy, but from “Good Time” to “Shit Talkin’”, she’s refining her craft while never obscuring a sense of who she is, which is no small feat.
11. Mitski, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We
She nearly turned into a more elusive Pat Benatar over her increasingly slick past two records (note: this was not a good thing), so her about-face here is a bit of a relief. It also reminds me of the similar shift Sam Phillips made on Fan Dance two decades ago but far less minimalist, employing choirs and strings, pedal steel guitar and more atmosphere than those last two albums together offered. “My Love Mine All Mine” is one of the least likely fueled-by-Tik Tok crossover hits and that it could’ve easily happened to any of these 11 tracks reveals this collection’s consistency.
20. Yves Tumor, Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds)
According to my Spotify “Wrapped” for this year, my favorite genre was “Art Pop”; thus, it seems right to kick this countdown off with something fully of that description, near Fiona Apple-length LP title and all. I highlighted effusive single “Echolalia” in my mid-year report, but Sean Lee Bowie’s fifth album under this moniker is often as catchy as it weird, spiced with vintage samples, shape-shifting song structures and in “Operator”, a cheerleader chant previously adopted/rendered demented by Faith No More three decades ago (and in this artist’s hands, just as effectively today.)
19. Meg Baird, Furling
I felt moved to hear this after Dusted Magazine praised it mid-year and opener “Ashes, Ashes” registered with me in no time. A languorous six-minute comedown of wordless sighs over a piano-and-rhythm-with-vibes vamp, it’s a perfect mood-setter for this gentle, gauzy, occasionally devastating folk opus. Like The Sundays’ Harriet Wheeler, Baird’s breathiness and cheery but sustaining high tone contrast skillfully with the minor chord progressions and pastoral acoustic settings. An affable companion to my top album of last year, Beth Orton’s Weather Alive.
18. Paul Simon, Seven Psalms
Five years into his retirement from touring, octogenarian Simon made an unexpected return with a record unlike anything else he’s done: a 33-minute song cycle inspired by the Book of Psalms featuring seven movements and released both physically and digitally as one unbroken track. Potentially a challenging listen for those looking for another addition to the man’s voluminous songbook, it’s also a reminder of his innate talent, with both words and music continually revealing nuance and something approaching enlightenment on each listen. If this proves his final word, it’s one of his most profound.
17. The National, Laugh Track
I am among those wondering why these Dad Rock Gods opted to put out two albums six months apart this year instead one killer release. First Two Pages of Frankenstein hit my honorable mentions list (“Tropic Morning News” might end up their deserved legacy hit) but I’ve come to prefer Laugh Track for being a bit roomier and also a whole lot more ambitious. The seven-minute “Space Invader” with its thunderous coda is the peak, but diversions on either side of it (a Bon Iver duet; scrappy, improvised closer “Smoke Detector”) make the case that these are much better than mere leftovers.
16. Meshell Ndegeocello, The Omnichord Real Book
Thirty years on from her debut album (and nearly ten since her last set of original songs), Ndegeocello returns with a lengthy, typically genre-averse collection. Although the titular electronic instrument is present throughout, it is but one ingredient in a blend of soul, funk, jazz, folk and rock that no matter how spacy or boundary pushing rarely drifts off into the ether or loses focus. She’s endured as an artist not only for her capacity to explore but also for her ability to connect, a distinction that often separates a legend from a flash-in-the-pan.
Regarding my favorite music this year, I’m counting down a Top 20 Albums list (instead of my usual Top 10 or 15) over the next few days. I wouldn’t say that I was necessarily more engaged with new music compared to past years, but I can’t deny the effort I put into looking for it. Spotify provides numerous paths towards finding it (particularly through its personalized “Discover Weekly” playlists) and naturally not everything clicks (I made it one-and-a-half songs through that much-praised Wednesday album before moving on.) To stumble upon a great new song/album or for longtime artists to seemingly emerge with one out of the blue is what keeps me stimulated and also motivated in the pursuit of more.
Here are some albums that didn’t make my Top 20 but are still worth further delving into (with a few footnotes):
Boygenius, The Record
Caroline Polachek, Desire, I Want To Turn Into You
The Coral, Sea of Mirrors*
Depeche Mode, Memento Mori**
Fever Ray, Radical Romantics
Jake Shears, Last Man Dancing
Jungle, Volcano
Kara Jackson, Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love?*
Kate NV, WOW
Kylie Minogue, Tension
MAN ON MAN, Provincetown
Metric, Formentera II
The National, First Two Pages of Frankenstein
Peter Gabriel, i/o***
PJ Harvey, I Inside The Old Year Dying
Shamir, Homo Anxietatem
Troye Sivan, Something To Give Each Other
US Girls, Bless This Mess
*Seriously considered placing these two in the Top 20.
**Entirely, unexpectedly their best in over two decades for what it’s worth.
***This came out on 12/1, so I may need more time to absorb it (even if it was released track-by-track throughout the year.)
“Write what you know” is the most basic and profound advice I’ve received as a would-be author. For some, it’s essentially a jumping-off point, an ability to create entirely fictional worlds still informed and inspired by one’s own sensibility and lived experience. For others, the implication is less abstract—an invitation to write directly about yourself and what you’ve experienced without the pretense of hiding behind a pseudonym or a composite. As evidenced by this project and my blog’s pull towards critical writing and memoir, I tend to fall into the latter camp. Nonfiction has just come easier to me even as I’m often influenced by novels as much as autobiographies and books about film and music (among other arts.)
A preference for fiction or nonfiction can also apply to filmmaking. A director may choose to create new worlds aided by an original (or sometimes adapted) screenplay or relay a true story via a documentary or essay film. Some possess the talent or at least the interest and appetite to do both: Jonathan Demme following his iconic Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense with the near live-action cartoon fantasy of Something Wild, or Werner Herzog mostly pivoting to documentary in his later career while still making time for the occasional fiction feature such as Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans or Rescue Dawn (the latter a fiction remake of his own doc, Little Dieter Needs To Fly.) As regarding anything offering a binary as recognizable as fiction vs nonfiction, one doesn’t necessarily have to choose sides.
Where this becomes tricky and often more fascinating occurs when one blurs the line between these two approaches. Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up, for instance, recounts a true-life story by enabling its participants to reenact the events. The end result was by no means a documentary—technically, it was a work of fiction, for a viewer simply couldn’t know if the film’s events all actually happened, whether Kiarostami says they did or not. Some actual documentaries such as Man On Wire and The Act of Killing take a near-opposite approach by including explicit reenactments that are not fully meant to stand in for the real thing; the latter’s assemblage of former members of Indonesian death squads are asked to recreate their genocidal 1960s murders of the country’s communist citizens as if they were scenes in a movie. Also consider mockumentaries like This Is Spinal Tap, which clearly read as fiction… except to those who don’t know that they are and get swept up in their convincing, deadpan approach.
Guy Maddin is not what one would deem a documentarian in the traditional sense. Nearly all of his output is explicitly fantasy—even his works one could describe most as “realistic” and traditionally narrative-driven such as Keyhole (2011) or The Saddest Music In The World (2004) are not too far off from fever dreams (the latter features Isabella Rossellini as a beer baroness whose prosthetic leg is literally a glass boot full of her product!) Emerging from the ultra-indie Winnipeg film scene with his 1988 debut feature Tales From the Gimli Hospital, he had his peculiar, specific style already in place. Heavily influenced by silent film aesthetics (black-and-white cinematography, intertitles, archaic techniques such as iris-in, iris-out transitions between scenes), Gimli would appear to be a silent cinema pastiche except that there is sound (some occasional dialogue, even!) and an overarching surrealist sensibility that, while not at all modern, is something one would rarely mistake for being just from the silent era—contrarily, it’s more out of time and very much its own thing.
Maddin made three more features and a smattering of shorts over the next decade, but I did not even hear of him until 1998. He was in Boston for a career-to-date retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts and visited my Avant-Garde Cinema class at Boston University for a Q&A after a screening of Careful (1992), his first color feature and most dialogue-heavy effort to date. Naturally, it was shot in two-strip technicolor (limiting the palette to two hues (and an occasional smidge of yellow) at all times) and the stilted dialogue had been translated from English to Icelandic and back to English again. In the classroom, Maddin came off as an affable (if somewhat bewildered) Canadian, just as my classmates and I festooned him with questions about his bewildering film. The premise? An isolated town that’s continually threatened by avalanches triggered by either loud noises or outwardly expressed emotions!
Careful
Like much of what I saw in that class, I didn’t fully know what to make of Careful, though it was unique without being obscure or off-putting; I duly rented the rest of Maddin’s features from my local VideoSmith. Two years later, his produced-for-TIFF short The Heart of The World won ample acclaim including the Genie Award (Canadian Oscars-equivalent) for Best Live Action Short Film plus accolades at film festivals from San Francisco to Brussels. Relaying a love triangle/end times/cinema-as-savior chronicle in the style of early 20th Century art movement Russian Constructivism (a precursor to Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera and the films of Sergei Eisenstein), the short’s exhilarating, rapid-fire editing encompasses a dizzying amount of plot in just six minutes.
From there, Maddin was on a roll. With Dracula: Pages From A Virgin’s Diary (2002) he transformed a filmed ballet adaptation of Bram Stoker’s iconic novel into an experimental tone poem in his phantasmagorical style, while the aforementioned The Saddest Music In The World, featuring such marquee names as Rossellini and Mark McKinney not only received widespread acclaim but became something of an indie “hit”. These features were interspersed with a slew of shorts ranging from My Dad Is 100 Years Old (made with Rossellini about her famous filmmaker father Roberto) to Sissy Boy Slap Party (everything the title says it is and somehow more.) Cowards Bend The Knee (2005) and Brand Upon The Brain! (2006) kept the momentum going while also finding Maddin, perhaps influenced by his short with Rossellini turning inward and ostensibly autobiographical: both films had characters named after himself and took inspiration from his own memories (no matter how distorted.)
My Winnipeg felt like a natural progression from those self-referential works. Commissioned by the Documentary Channel (a now-defunct cable network), Maddin was given one directive for the project from his producer: “Don’t give me the frozen hellhole everyone knows that Winnipeg is.” Maddin gleefully obliged, crafting an unusual hybrid of an essay film that he described as a “docu-fantasia”. Filmed almost entirely in black-and-white, the final product is a mélange of archival footage, re-creations and new material shot to appear like it’s from the past (or some unspecified limbo) continually shepherded by Maddin’s voiceover narration. In other words, he made a Maddin film—a bittersweet love letter to his hometown like past cine-essayists such as Chris Marker or Agnes Varda might’ve conceived but full of potential tall tales and a liberal dose of magical realism. Did “Man Pageants” actually occur at the Paddlewheel Room in The Bay department store? Did “If Day”—a World War II-era demonstration involving a simulated Nazi invasion of the city (covertly serving as a cover to buy Canadian war bonds) really happen? “What if, what if…” ponders Maddin’s narration as a reoccurring refrain throughout; like Kiarostami in Close-Up, he leaves it to the viewer to decide what to believe and/or dismiss.
Brand Upon The Brain! implemented voiceover narration from Rossellini in its theatrical release, though alternate audio tracks featured other narrators, among them oddballs like Crispin Glover, Laurie Anderson, Eli Wallach, Louis Negin (a member of Maddin’s stock players who appears in My Winnipeg as Mayor Cornish) and Maddin himself. For this immediate follow-up, however, Maddin was pretty much the only narrator (even if some screenings purportedly substituted him with live readings from British “Scream Queen” Barbara Steele and the inimitable cult legend Udo Kier(!)) I was lucky to first see the film at one of its premiere screenings at TIFF in 2007 with Maddin himself narrating live on stage at the Winter Garden Theatre. While not as distinct a vocal performer as Rossellini or Glover, it only seemed right to hear these intensely personal words spoken by the man who wrote them, no matter how much “truth” they contained.
Guy/Darcy
“Guy Maddin” also appears onscreen in the guise of actor Darcy Fehr (who played another version of the director in Cowards Bend The Knee.) In the world of My Winnipeg, as a throughline narrative, a drowsy Guy/Darcy, slumped in this seat on a moving train looks to escape his hometown (“What if I film my way out of here?,” asks Maddin’s narrator at one point.) The city as blurred imagery through the train windows emerges as a dreamscape of memories that do not fully coalesce; the whole thing is made further bizarre by a few sausages inexplicably hanging from the train car’s ceiling on strings, gently bobbing back and forth over Guy’s/Darcy’s head. Maddin’s fragmented phrasing provides unsentimental but near-lyrical reverie acknowledging “The Forks (of intersecting rivers)… The Lap (of the land)… The Heart of the Heart of the Continent” that establish geographically-centrally-located-but-still-isolated Manitoba capital Winnipeg, a place where it’s “Always winter, always sleepy.”
Whereas some other filmmakers might confine themselves to Winnipeg lore and landmarks constituting a shared experience (The 1919 General Strike, Happyland amusement park, the saga of the doomed effort to save the Wolseley Elm), for Maddin, his own personal experience is inextricable from the whole (hence the declarative “My” in the film’s title.) Not only does he delve deep into places and events that had a formative effect on his psyche (such as the three-story Sherbrook Pool, one public pool stacked upon another and another with the bottom, subterranean level restricted to boys), he goes so far as to sublet his childhood home, a “white block house” connected to what was once his Aunt Lil’s beauty parlor. As part of a drive to “properly recreate the archetypal episodes” of his family history, he casts actors to portray his three older siblings, circa-1963 (when he would’ve been seven years old); his father is excluded, but not Mother.
For her, Maddin travels further down the rabbit hole in clouding the real with the imagined. The Mother we see on screen is to all intents and purposes for Maddin his mother. However, she’s actually octogenarian Ann Savage, an actress best known for portraying arguably the most frightening film femme fatale of all time in Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1945 poverty row classic Detour. Maddin actually gives the game away at the onset: My Winnipeg opens with footage of an off-camera Maddin directing Savage as she rehearses some dialogue. That he drops the pretense of filming his actual mother vs. casting a professional actress to play her sets an expectation that what follows is a fusion of facts and legends. It’s in line with Maddin’s long-running tendency to present modern day films as if they were remnants from the past or for that matter, casting other people to play versions of himself and his siblings (though he notes of the latter, they do “bear uncanny resemblances to the originals.”)
Ann Savage in Maddin’s homage to Ed Wood.
In Maddin’s accompanying book of the film, he says of Savage, “I knew there was only one person alive, who had ever lived, who could play the role of my mother.” He was fortunate to get her, as she’d retired from acting in the 1950s. The idea of casting the terrifying succubus from Detour as your mom is a twisted, brilliant joke viewers familiar with that film will immediately get, but Maddin doesn’t relegate her to a punchline. In one of the film’s more outrageous and entertaining fabrications, we do see how Mother made a living starring in Ledgeman, “the only TV drama ever produced in Winnipeg,” on the air since 1956 (Maddin’s birth year.) Every day at noon, viewers could watch Mother talking her son out of threatening to jump off a window ledge he had just climbed out on, driven by some sensitive fear or malady (usually instigated by Mother, naturally.) It neatly sums up a perceived dynamic between Maddin and his mother as depicted by an actress playing a mother who is also an actress.
However, the set piece that places Savage’s performance in nearly the same league as her Detour work arrives later with the scene she rehearsed at the beginning—a re-creation of the time after Maddin’s older sister Janet hit a deer on the highway coming back from a trip. As Janet confesses her accident to Mother, the old woman is not buying any of it. She suspects her daughter’s tardiness was due to something more sinister, more sexual. To watch Savage-as-Mother snarl accusations at Janet (“Where did it happen? In the back seat?… Did he pin you down, or did you just lie back and let nature take its course?”) is to see her young, dangerous Detour spirit flicker back to life. No matter how outrageous the exchange may seem, one immediately detects why Maddin cast Savage for the part and how her spitfire and dominance vividly embody his own idea of his mother (if not how the actual person might’ve appeared to us strangers.)
Citizen Girl!
As with many essay films about one’s own past, My Winnipeg is a pining for the way things used to be and what’s been lost. Nostalgia is perhaps unavoidable in such explorations, even if the ambiguity with which Maddin presents what’s real and what’s fabricated is a tonic revealing how layered and complex such thoughts can be. He spends the whole of the film thinking about release and moving on, but he has good reasons as to why he continues to live and work in Winnipeg to this day. One is a modicum of hopefulness, even if it means conjuring up a figure called “Citizen Girl”, a bold, beautiful warrior who with the touch of her wand could triumphantly restore the city to its former glory (including turning on the neon sign at Clifford’s, a defunct ladies’ apparel store that is a well-beloved piece of iconicity for certain generations of Winnipeggers.)
Still, one senses Maddin knows such conceits are just wishful thinking. Some things can never come back, like his teenaged brother Cameron whom we’re told died of some undisclosed cause not long after the period re-created with Savage. My Winnipeg ends rather wistfully with Savage and the actor playing Cameron in a surprisingly intimate, tender mother/son embrace. “What is a city without its ghosts?” Maddin’s narration asks and it’s the film’s central thesis. It lends weight to what simply could have been a kooky look at a quirky childhood. Indeed, the fluidity of ghosts and shifting, occasionally unreliable memories in this “docu-fantasia” hybrid seem to contain (as Maddin notes Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once said of Winnipeg) the “greatest psychic possibilities.”
At the start of 2022, a new job gave me a reason to cross the Longfellow Bridge across the Charles River in Boston on a regular basis.
I often prefer walking it to taking the ever-more undependable Red Line T along it, except when it’s too cold, of course.
In the warmer months, however, it’s a treat. I often feel moved to take a few shots of the Back Bay skyline.
Granted, I can also see the skyline along Memorial Drive on the Cambridge side of the river.
Still, this angle from the Longfellow Bridge, with its particular composition is one of the city’s best, even in the morning as a rare fog gradually lifts.
I’ve usually left the area before dark, but on one unseasonably warm evening last December, I found myself impulsively walking across the bridge before catching the T home at Charles/MGH station. Sometimes I grumble about having to cross this bridge; more often, I’m just happy to revel in the beauty of my adopted city.
In midlife, I find myself more receptive to aesthetics I would have deemed inconceivable in my youth: adventurous cuisines and libations (the twenty-year-old me would’ve shuddered at a sushi dinner or a glass of rye whiskey), facial hair as an attractive feature (though not necessarily on myself) and most of all, music deemed seriously unhip by my peers. I mean, at 21, I listened to Dionne Warwick as often as I did Blur or XTC but in the past few years, I’ve had a newfound craving for mid-20th century instrumental Lounge and Exotica, not to mention that terminal scourge of a genre, Easy Listening.
I wonder if it’s an attempt to return to early childhood. At that impressionable age, I’d often find solace in WEZW (“E-Z 104 FM” (actually 103.7)), Milwaukee’s own easy listening station. A few years back, I came across a recording from it circa June 1980 on YouTube and with it, a flood of long-dormant memories. My parents would play it in the car (not as often as their beloved “Mix” station WMYX, which unlike WEZW is still on the air) and I’d occasionally hear it out in the wild (mostly at barber shops, doctors’ waiting rooms, even in the principal’s office once when I was sick in fourth grade.) It was practically a staple all through December when it would (mostly) switch over to a holiday music format.
Last year, I began compiling a Spotify playlist called “Elevator to Bliss”, generally adding tracks via the app’s “Let’s Find Something For Your Playlist” algorithm. Whittled down from 50-odd tracks and retitled to fit its space-age vibes (in many senses of the term), some of the thirty selections below might’ve appeared on WEZW back in the day, but not all. As one digs deeper into the notion of “Elevator Music” (Joseph Lanza’s book of the same name is an enlightening resource), one excavates genres upon subgenres. Often, what separates the (mildly) stimulating from the merely soothing comes down to a matter of personal taste; this is the sort of playlist that is also effective when left on shuffle. However, I’ve attempted a trajectory of sorts, beginning and ending with different versions of the same tune, exhibiting how easily an instrumental shlock hit can be gently repurposed as sci-fi camp (by Mr. Spock, no less!)
In between those alternate-world bookends sits a cornucopia of film music from renown masters (John Barry, Henry Mancini, Lalo Schifrin) and more cultish figures (Riz Ortolani, Sven Liabek, Carlos Rustichelli) along with a few selections from the early 70s (themes from Airport and Klute) that anticipate primetime soap opera scores from later in that decade. Cool Jazz is also represented with vibraphonist Cal Tjader rubbing shoulders against Bossa Nova king Antonio Carlos Jobin and flautist Herbie Mann. If we’re including the 70s, we have to make room for some instrumental funk (Charles Stepney) and such genre-bending oddities as Michel Polnareff’s “Voyages” and Alain Tew’s spare but sex-x-y “The Fence”.
I turn to this playlist when I want to zone out to instrumental music, whether while writing, working, walking or drifting off to sleep. Still, it’s not exactly the same as background or ambient noise. I no longer believe in “guilty pleasures”—all that matters to me these days is how pleasing I find the music; this playlist does the job.
IFF Boston’s annual Fall Focus is always a good bet: this year, I got to see four movies I couldn’t get tickets to at TIFF, and all of them were good-to-great (and three were filmed in Japan, coincidentally.)
FALLEN LEAVES
From its opening shot, there’s no mistaking this for the work of anyone other than veteran Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismaki. A purveyor of humor so deadpan, less attentive viewers might not even detect it on occasion, he’s influenced many kindred spirits and followers from Roy Andersson to Jim Jarmusch (whom he pays a somewhat twisted yet hilarious tribute to here.) His first film in six years is one of his most deceptively straightforward: a burgeoning middle-aged romance between supermarket worker Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and alcoholic laborer Holappa (Jussi Vatanen). The Helsinki settings look like they’ve been etched in time over the past fifty years, although occasional radio broadcasts reporting the current Russia/Ukraine war are scattered throughout. Happily, this fully plays to Kaurismaki’s strengths: of the handful of his films I’ve viewed, this is easily the funniest, especially the karaoke bar scenes featuring Holappa’s self-assured (if only to a point) co-worker/pal Huotari (Janne Hyytiäinen). As usual with this director, what would often come off as affectations for most filmmakers are in his hands fully realized and seamlessly essential to the entire fabric. (Grade: 8/10)
EVIL DOES NOT EXIST
So, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, what are you doing now after all that acclaim (including the Cannes Palme d’Or and an Oscar) for DRIVE MY CAR? A study of an environmental threat towards a remote community where a corporation wants to open a glamping (ie-glamourous camping) site, you say? Far more Tarkovsky than Ozu, EVIL DOES NOT EXIST is leisurely paced, visually stunning and and in the end, near-impenetrable–not entirely a deficit depending on one’s expectations. Arguably no other filmmaker would so totally depict the utter futility of “information meetings” where the concerns of said community are both heard and blithely dismissed, or take two characters who initially seem buffoonish and unexpectedly flesh them out until they’re nearly as sympathetic as the two protagonists. Those looking for another cathartic wonder like DRIVE MY CAR won’t find it here, but it offers a lot to unpack and ponder; at a mere 106 minutes, it also more conveniently lends itself to a rewatch or two. (8/10)
MONSTER
This is Hirokazu Kore-eda’s first film set in his native Japan since SHOPLIFTERS and also his first that he hasn’t written himself since MABOROSI, his 1995 feature debut. Rest assured, MONSTER is completely in the director’s wheelhouse of domestic dramas, although screenwriter Yuji Sakamoto’s ambitious, RASHOMON-esque structure is something new for the director. The first third or so comes off as a darkly comic fable about a fifth-grader being bullied by his teacher; what happens next sets the momentum for a narrative only fully revealed one all of its pieces gradually fall into place–one that also makes it tough to write about without any spoilers. I’ll just note that the end result is one of Kore-eda’s most accessible works in part due to its swift pace where the rhythms are enhanced by its unique structure, but also one of his warmest and most resonant. You can sense his humanist approach towards nearly every character as the story unfolds. In some ways, it’s a good companion to Alexander Payne’s THE HOLDOVERS as it similarly clinches one’s attention with humor and a tricky premise but then extends an invitation to learn the full story and witness how we can instill change in one another. (10/10)
PERFECT DAYS
Well, this was an unexpected late-career triumph from Wim Wenders, who arguably hasn’t made a good narrative film in over three decades; that it’s simply a character study about Hirayama, an aging man who cleans Tokyo public toilets for a living only adds to its allure. Featuring a powerful lead turn from SHALL WE DANCE star Kōji Yakusho (appearing in nearly every scene), this might be the closest Wenders has come to successfully making “slow cinema”. Scene after scene unfolds of Hirayama methodically cleaning a wide array of the city’s public toilets (many of them built for the delayed 2020 Summer Olympics) with pauses for how he spends his leisure time by bicycling, picking up paperbacks from his favorite book store, reading them as he has lunch in a leafy, secluded spot and listening to music on cassette tapes (!) while driving through greater Tokyo. It’s this last activity that’s most significant–not only does it give an outsider a vivid sense of what the city is really like, the music (mostly English-language rock from the 1960s and 70s) and its curation almost tells a parallel story. I’ve rarely seen such an extensive depiction of a character’s relationship to music and how it informs and fortifies his well being. While overall this could’ve been perhaps 20-30 minutes shorter, it almost feels hypnotic if you stick with it. The last shot, which returns to Hirayama and his music is a great one and also confirmation that this gentle, beatific but wonderfully human and flawed man embodied by Yakusho is a career-best performance. (9/10)
After a morning in Peggy’s Cove, we drove 100 km along Nova Scotia’s Atlantic coast to the town of Lunenburg.
With a population of 2,200, it’s an idyllic Maritime province village. In 1995, it was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site; more recently, it was a prominent filming locating for the (ostensibly Massachusetts-set) Netflix series Locke and Key.
From Lunenburg Harbour, a picture-postcard view of the backs of buildings along main drag Montague Street.
Bright, bold colors distinguish Lunenburg’s historic buildings, like the red one in this essay’s first photo and the aquamarine one directly above.
Occasionally, perhaps a little too bright and bold…
…but not everywhere. This hulking stone fortress of a bank is unlike anything I’ve spotted in all my years as a New England resident.
Walk a little further away from the harbour and you’ll reach the Lunenburg Heritage Bandstand and War Memorial.
As usual, the town’s cool signage caught my eye.
Five years on, gift shop Dots & Loops is still in business, albeit online only.
Fortunately, Stan’s Dad & Lad (est. 1955) is still physically open for business.
Alas, this homage to a certain British sitcom (whether an actual hotel or not) is permanently closed according to Google. Upon seeing this sign, my first thought was, “Basil! What are you doing in Canada?”
Your requisite Canadian flag and fish hanging from a utility pole.
Naturally, Lunenburg Harbour is as beautiful as the town that borders it.
I believe this is the Bluenose II Ship, more information about which can be found here.
Across the harbour, the green expanse of the Bluenose Golf Club. In retrospect, we could’ve used more time to explore Lunenburg, but we had another coastal town to see on that day’s itinerary…
Day 6 began with a favorite that was expected, another that wasn’t and a third film that wasn’t in the same league but still deserves to find an audience. I squeezed in one more title on Day 7 before leaving Film Fest Land once again, returning to normal life.
THE HOLDOVERS
If Alexander Payne’s last film, 2017’s sci-fi allegory DOWNSIZING was a big swing and a miss, his latest plays it much safer for the benefit of everyone involved. A return to smart, dyspeptic comedy, THE HOLDOVERS also reunites Payne with another master of the form, Paul Giamatti, the star of his 2004 hit SIDEWAYS. Together, they’re a director/actor pair in sync with one another as much as Scorsese and De Niro or Holofcener and Keener.
The setting is an elite all-boys boarding school in Massachusetts 1970 (it was shot throughout the state, including a side trip to Boston.) Giamatti plays Paul Hunham, an ornery, pompous teacher who, like his Miles in SIDEWAYS is really just another masochistic, insecure underachiever. He gets stuck staying on campus for Christmas break to supervise the few students unable to go home. One of them, Angus (Dominic Sessa) is as intelligent as he is belligerent with a history of antagonizing Paul (and vice-versa.) Also staying on campus for the break is Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), a cafeteria manager whose own son was recently killed in Vietnam. Angus and Paul evolve from being enemies to gradually understanding one another but David Hemingson’s screenplay presents this organically, further made convincing by the three central performances. In addition to Giamatti just doing what he does best, Sessa in his film debut is a great find on the order of, say, Lucas Hedges in MANCHESTER BY THE SEA while Randolph (MY NAME IS DOLEMITE) beautifully inhabits a complex character working through her grief.
Not only set in 1970, THE HOLDOVERS also looks and feels like a film from that period with its painstakingly correct stylistic touches such as its opening credits font, slow dissolves and winsome, period folk-rock soundtrack. At the TIFF Q&A, Payne mentioned that he always thought of himself as a 1970s New Hollywood-influenced director, so why not make a movie set in that decade. The highest praise I can give him is that he fully captures the feeling and substance of a good Hal Ashby film or one of Robert Altman’s smaller ensemble pictures. Though not exactly groundbreaking, it’s a solid, satisfying throwback and also a comeback for Payne as I haven’t liked anything from him this much since, well, SIDEWAYS. (Score: 9/10)
THE TEACHERS’ LOUNGE
A junior high school is as ideal a setting as any for a taut thriller and this German film gets all the little details right as to why—in particular, a mounting, no-going-back pressure of the sort easily egged on by early adolescents, although it comes just as swiftly from their parents and teachers. One of the latter, Carol (Leonie Benesch) has just taken her first job out of teaching school. She’s initially a natural—her control of and engagement with her students is readily apparent and impressive for such a novice. The trouble begins when a thief starts stealing money from various faculty. Carol is vehemently against the interrogation techniques the principal and her colleagues use on suspected (targeted, really) students. As more money goes missing, she decides to take matters into her own hands, making a shocking discovery in the school’s titular space. She’s also left immediately blindsided (and also targeted in a different way) by her action’s consequences.
I didn’t know what to expect coming into THE TEACHER’S LOUNGE, only mildly intrigued by its title and premise. I left it nearly buzzing with excitement from its cunning trajectory: in solving a mystery, good intentions end up backfiring magnificently for all parties involved. Meanwhile, due to opposing, unwavering stances exacerbated by public shaming conducted both in person and over social media, the tension ramps up until it reaches a near-breaking point. Suspicion, paranoia, desperation and hysteria all factor into how a seemingly straightforward conflict gets blown way out of proportion and the film rarely wavers in holding one’s attention. It may even go a little too far for some in the last act, though the final scene satisfyingly offers a modicum of closure for a seemingly unresolvable situation. (8/10)
WE GROWN NOW
Set in a re-creation of the now-demolished high rise towers of the notorious Chicago housing project Cabrini-Green in 1992, Minhal Baig’s film focuses on two 12-year-old boys living there: Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez). When not partaking in such activities as pushing a mattress down a dozen flights of stairs to use as a playground implement or playing hooky from school to explore the Loop, they’re faced with the harsher realities of this world: drug-ridden crime, drive-by shootings, reactionary police raids. As Malik’s mother Delores (Jurnee Smollet) looks for a safer environment for her family, what was once an inseparable friendship between the two boys begins to fray. While it doesn’t come close to achieving the rare poetry of obvious influences such as KILLER OF SHEEP or the fourth season of THE WIRE, this evokes a time and place in vivid enough detail (especially in the dimly lit, sparsely furnished apartments); James and Ramirez, both in their film debuts are also well cast. Still, it’s a type of story that’s been told many times before and far less predictably. (6/10)
THE BEAST
In past films like SAINT LAURENT and NOCTURAMA, I’ve admired director Bertrand Bonello’s approach and elements of his heightened style without finding them complete or entirely convincing. His latest gets closer than ever to feeling whole but that’s primarily due to star Lea Seydoux appearing in nearly every scene. Her Gabrielle is paired with Louis (George MacKay) principally across three time periods: 1904 France, 2014 Los Angeles and a near-future heavily shaped by artificial intelligence. Bonello will also occasionally and briefly shift to 1980 or the mid-1960s for scenes that seem present mostly to indulge in era-appropriate music or fashion. The constant throughout this is how Gabrielle and Louis spin in orbit but can never fully connect with each other for reasons not fully apparent until late in the film.
Very loosely adapted from the Henry James novella THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE, the film is perhaps overlong but rarely boring. It’s mostly a showcase for Seydoux and MacKay as they inhabit different personas in alternate time periods (the latter especially effective when shifting from a European aristocrat to a 21st Century incel) and, as usual, also one for Bonello’s depiction of worlds only possible through a camera lens. I’m not sure what it all adds up to although its fixation on AI seems especially timely and considered; let’s just hope it doesn’t start an accidental trend by way of its high-concept end credits “roll”. (7/10)
Day 5 was my one four-film day at TIFF 2023; it’s also when I saw both my favorite and least favorite films of the festival.
PICTURES OF GHOSTS
Sifting through and reminiscing about one’s own past is easy; contextualizing these memories and enabling them to resonate with an audience is trickier, as one has likely experienced in many an autobiographical narrative or essay film (Chris Marker and Agnes Varda were the gold standards for pulling the latter format off.) In his follow-up to the phantasmagorical horror epic BACURAU, Kleber Mendonça Filho utilizes the essay film to both celebrate and scrutinize his coastal hometown of Recife, Brazil, the setting for his breakthrough feature AQUARIUS starring Sonia Braga.
Structured as a triptych, the film first considers Mendonça Filho’s childhood family home before shifting to the cinemas (some still standing, others long gone) that were formative in cultivating his love of film (he was a critic before becoming a filmmaker.) The third section builds on the previous two, considering cinema as a church and the symbiotic relationship between the two in a predominantly Catholic country such as Brazil. Abetted by his own narration, the film is a marvel of editing as the present day often mirrors and occasionally contrasts with archival footage he and his family shot of his home, the cinemas he once worked in as a projectionist and other imagery of Recife throughout the past five decades from a cornucopia of sources.
It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what makes PICTURES OF GHOSTS so effective in inviting the viewer to partake in and comprehend one artist’s own past. In his last two features, Mendonça Filho exhibited an enthusiasm about cinema and proved how bold stylistic choices could enhance a story without distracting from it. In relaying his own story, he’s made his most complete and compelling work yet—all the way to a playful, metaphysical finale that not only re-emphasizes the meaning of the film’s title but also comes to life with an unlikely but evocative needle drop for the ages. (Score: 10/10)
CLOSE TO YOU
When Elliot Page announced his transition, I was curious as to how this might change his acting career; his first major film role since then does suggest a new phase, returning to the small-scale, nuanced indie dramas that showcased his talent before JUNO made him a household name. This Canadian production from British director Dominic Savage gives Page an opportunity to play an out trans character and one immediately senses how at ease he is in the role, more so than anything he’s done since he was a teenager. While his character, Sam, who returns to his small hometown to visit family for the first time since his recent transition is obviously a role written with him in mind, at a post-screening Q&A, Page was quick to point out that while he obviously related to his character, his own coming out and post-transition experiences were entirely different.
In that Q&A, I was also surprised to find out that much of the film was improvised in a Mike Leigh-like fashion, consisting of the best bits of long, unscripted takes. It makes the final product’s apparent seamlessness all the more impressive as the ensemble emits a lived-in familial dynamic. It’s slightly more convincing than the parallel narrative where Sam runs into and deeply reconnects with Katherine (Hilary Baack), a hearing-impaired friend from high school. This could’ve been a separate film, although Savage just gets away with incorporating it beside the main plot. While multiple conflicts and their resolutions are a bit on the nose (to the point where decades from now, I can imagine how simplistic or dated they may come across), this is most significant and effective as a reintroduction to Page and a reminder to why he became such a major onscreen presence to begin with. (8/10)
FRYBREAD FACE AND ME
Billy Luther, a Navajo, Hopi, and Laguna Pueblo filmmaker best known for documentaries (MISS NAVAJO) makes his fiction feature debut with this gentle coming-of-age tale. 11-year-old city kid Benny (Keir Tallman) is sent to spend the summer with his relatives living on a ranch in isolated Northern Arizona. A bit of a naïve misfit often cloaked in a Stevie Nicks t-shirt, he gradually befriends his worldlier cousin Dawn (Charley Hogan) the “Frybread Face” of the title who has also been dropped off for the summer. Set in 1990, the film often comes off as something that could’ve been made back then, complete with lessons learned and somewhat overdone narration. If that sounds like faint praise, note that Luther has also crafted an affable, family friendly story with the occasional conflict/melodramatic detour that nonetheless remains pleasantly low-stakes. Tallman and Hogan are both fine, but Sarah H. Natani leaves the most lasting impression as Lorraine, Benny’s beatific, Navajo-speaking grandmother. (6/10)
SOLO
Simon (Théodore Pellerin), a talented young performer in Montreal’s close-knit drag community is immediately smitten by Oliver (Félix Maritaud), a fellow drag queen freshly transplanted from France. They pursue a whirlwind romance while also collaborating together onstage, although their vast differences in temperament cause more conflict and drama than anything resembling a healthy personal or professional relationship. Meanwhile, Simon still courts the attention of his mother Claire (Anne-Marie Cadieux) who long ago left his family behind to become a renowned opera singer. This premise has some potential, but not with such one-dimensional characters (Simon is a doormat, Oliver is a prick.) The more glaring problem, however, is that writer-director Sophie Dupuis brings little new to this type of narrative. It’s set in the present, but SOLO could’ve easily come out twenty or thirty years ago; sure, the costumes and drag performances (Pellerin deserves a better vehicle) are lively and entertaining, but it’s a shame to waste them all on a story so wafer-thin and by now overly familiar—I’ve already seen RUPAUL’S DRAG RACE UNTUCKED, thank you very much. (4/10)
Haunted Jukebox 