After a blow-up at a house party over a drunken bad decision, brothers Luke and Travis (Andrew Rotilio and Charlie Hamilton) drive home in a huff and are struck by a pick-up truck. Travis receives minor injuries, but The Hotel Dieu follows a blinded Luke as he endures a strenuous recovery and discovers romance while staying at the hospital.
The People vs. Fritz Bauer is a good film driven by a stellar central performance by Burghart Klaussner (Good Bye Lenin!).
The David Dance is a stage-to-film adaptation from actor/screenwriter Don Scimé. I haven’t seen his original stage play, but I can figure out a couple of things from the movie: Scimé is a passionate artist who cares very deeply about the themes acknowledged in his work, but not enough compromises have been made by director Aprill Winney to make his original material fill feature film britches.
As the Gods Will (DIR. Takashi Miike) Takashi Miike has two modes of filmmaking: a deadly serious style that’s evident in films like Audition, and a goofy, over-the-top style visible in films like Ichi the Killer. In As the Gods Will, it takes the viewer mere minutes to figure out which category Miike’s latest falls into (for me, it was the moment when a student gets decapitated and bleeds red marbles).
Shorts After Dark – a program of carefully selected international short films – returned to the Toronto After Dark Film Festival on Saturday, October 15. In the past, these shorts usually run the gamut of subgenres, as well as the gamut of quality, with the spectrum ranging from brilliance to downright horrendous. This year’s selection was solid. Even in comparison to past showcases, this year’s worst short was still better than former duds that have made the cut.
Who Gets the Dog? is destined for cable. And, not even for high profile airtime. It’s the type of fodder that plays in the background while you wrap this year’s Christmas gifts.
Blood Father (DIR. Jean-François Richet) Mel Gibson was once one of Hollywood’s biggest stars. Now, he is staging a comeback which includes a few directorial efforts. Preceding those is his starring role in Jean-Francois Richet’s Blood Father, a film which could be cynically viewed as an attempt to get Gibson back on the public’s radar and nothing more, if only it was not so entertaining and memorable.
Bed of the Dead (DIR. Jeff Maher) It’d be easy to call Bed of the Dead wooden, but that would only be a cheap dig. It is, however, hollow and unbelievably convoluted for a film that should be simple. It’s a killer bed, for crying out loud.
Train to Busan (DIR. Yeon Sang-ho) Sometimes, a film fails at everything – an abject failure. Sometimes, a film fails at the majority of its goals while succeeding in some, earning a designation of mediocrity. Then, there are the rare cases of films failing in a majority of ways with a few successes, wherein those successes manage to outshine the failure. Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan fits into that final example, a film that comes…
Victor Kanefsky’s Art Bastard asks broad questions about the relationship between art and politics. Its subject, American artist Robert Cenedella, serves a micro-answer to some of these broad questions. Although Kanefsky is successful in arguing for Cenedella’s work as critical satirical representations of U.S. political culture, the film lacks energy.