SPECIAL: The Best of the Fest

By Chris Luckett

Image property of Fox Searchlight Pictures

The 2012 AGH BMO World Film Festival proved a success, showcasing award-winning indies and giving glimpses of buzz-worthy new films.

The Art Gallery of Hamilton’s fourth year of presenting films from around to world yielded a varied selection of films from Canada, Sweden, Italy, Japan, France, England, Spain, Norway, Ireland, New Zealand, Germany, and the U.S.

Over the course of ten days, nearly thirty movies were screened at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Empire Jackson Square 6, Ancaster SilverCity, and Westdale Theatre.

With approximately 10,000 tickets sold during this year’s festival – a 60 per cent increase over 2011’s festival ticket sales – the AGH has nearly perfected their formula for selecting films. As such, many fantastic movies were screened, like the underworld thriller Easy Money, the heart-warming crowd-pleaser The Intouchables, the entertaining comedies The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Moonrise Kingdom, and the fascinating documentary The World Before Her.

The following five movies led the pack, however, as the best films of the 2012 AGH BMO World Film Festival:

5) Hysteria – A delightful comedy about the era when dissatisfied women were diagnosed with hysteria, leading to the inadvertent invention of the vibrator. It’s one of the most genuinely enjoyable movies of the year.

Image property of Magnolia Pictures

4) 2 Days in New York – A fish-out-of-water/culture-clash comedy superbly written and acted. Julie Delpy and Chris Rock play a couple in the Big Apple whose lives are perfectly on-track until Delpy’s family visits from France. It deftly juggles farce and a 1980s Woody Allen feel.

3) Your Sister’s Sister – A gripping three-person dramedy involving a grieving, thirty-something guy, his female best friend, and her sister. One by one, they all end up in a Washington cottage, where they unwind and bond, until a shattering secret comes out that affects all three.

2) Beasts of the Southern Wild – An otherworldly tale about a community existing outside the New Orleans levees, living off the grid and on their own. The whole movie is seen through the eyes of six-year-old Hushpuppy, a young girl trying to understand the world around her.

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1) Headhunters – Stuffed full of red herrings, double-crosses, and bait-and-switches, this is a movie that expertly unfolds its plot and leaves you guessing at every turn. The plot twists are many and frequent, but all fit together by the end. It’s the best thriller in a year or two, and possibly the best film of 2012.

WORLD FILM FESTIVAL: Day 10

By Chris Luckett

The final day of the 2012 AGH BMO World Film Festival didn’t have the spectacle or power of the opening days of the festival, but it was an excellent way to end the festival on a lighter note.

The World Before Her began the day very interestingly, examining two totally different walks of life in modern India. The most well-constructed documentary so far this year, it follows two young women both doing what they feel they must to assert some control over their lives and escape their conditions.

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Ruhi Singh has been selected as one of the 20 competitors for the title of Miss India beauty pageant. To win the title means fame and money, two things she can use to better her and her parents’ modest lives. Conversely, Prachi Trivedi is a leader at a Hindu fundamentalist camp, training young girls for the Durga Vahini.

Both Singh and Trivedi are running, in their own ways, from the life they would be stuck with if not for the power and self-confidence such things as beauty pageants and military camps imbue them with.

The World Before Her traces two very different lives’ paths, but never uses those lines to draw any conclusions. Audiences are left to connect the dots themselves, making the witnessed experiences all the more powerful.

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Lightening the mood up afterward was Boy, a delightful coming-of-age dramedy from New Zealand.

Taking place in 1984, just after the release of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Boy follows an 11-year-old who goes by the very name of Boy (James Rolleston). Boy lives with his grandmother, younger brother, and several cousins; his mother died years earlier and his father left a while back and hasn’t returned.

When his father, Alamein (Taika Waititi), does return, Boy is thrilled. After telling so many stories to friends and teachers about his heroic dad, Boy finally would be able to spend time with him and see just how amazing he is. Alamein’s real reason for returning, though, turns out to be more complicated than Boy expects.

Boy is the highest-grossing New Zealand film of all time, and it’s not hard to understand why. The skilled and humourous performances, plus the light-hearted score and the whimsical screenplay, make it one of the best coming-of-age movies in years.

Closing the festival was Pina, a half-documentary/half-dance performance. Nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar last year, it’s a fascinating viewing experience.

Image property of IFC Films

Wim Wenders was already preparing to film a documentary about dance choreographer Pina Bausch when Bausch unexpectedly died in 2009. Instead of scrapping the picture, Bausch’s dance company convinced Wenders to reshape the film as both a demonstration of Bausch’s ground-breaking choreography and a memorial for her, told through the dancers’ stories.

The dance scenes themselves are breathtaking and an excellent reason for the movie being filmed in 3D. The intercut testimonials and remembrances, though, while sometimes interesting and surely cathartic for the interviewees, tended to slow the film to a crawl and interrupt and building pace.

For a final selection in the festival, Pina didn’t wow, but that served the festival well. Instead of audiences’ thoughts gravitating towards a particularly memorable last film over all earlier ones, patrons were left more able to reflect over all the films shown over the last ten days.

Whether measured in tickets, happy audiences, film selection, or stimulating post-movie conversations, The 2012 AGH BMO World Film Festival proved to be a great success. The task ahead for the Art Gallery of Hamilton will now be topping it in 2013.

(Check back for a “Best of the Fest” wrap-up, coming soon.)

WORLD FILM FESTIVAL: Day 9

By Chris Luckett

The penultimate day of the 2012 AGH BMO World Film Festival took us through the home stretch in a limping shuffle. The day’s trio of films wasn’t a complete bust, but today’s selection of films was certainly the most melancholy of the festival.

Marécages (Wetlands) is a Canadian film, filmed on and set on a rural Quebec farm. Gabriel Maillé plays Simon, a teenage boy just beginning to explore his dominance and his sexuality.

Image property of Metropole Films

Simon watched his younger brother drown, which his mother (Pascale Bussières) has always blamed him for. When Simon’s father (Luc Picard) is crushed by a tractor, Simon once again has to live with the guilt and blame for a family member’s death.

What begins as an interesting examination of a tumultuous mother-son relationship soon devolves into standard drama, with a new man stepping into the stepfather role and Simon rebelling against him. By the end of the movie (dark undertones of the finale aside), Marécages (Wetlands) has failed to create interesting characters or much of an original story.

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Take This Waltz arrives with the anticipation built in by the fact it stars 2011 Best Actress Oscar nominee Michelle Williams and a mostly serious Seth Rogen, and is the second feature directed by Sarah Polley (whose other movie was the heart-wrenching Alzheimer’s drama Away from Her).

Like Marécages (Wetlands), Take This Waltz begins seeming more original than it ends up being. Margot (Williams) is married to Lou (Rogen), and the two appear to have a pretty good relationship; they talk, they cook together, and the banter they have feels absolutely real.

Appearances are deceiving, though, for once Margot discovers a more traditionally handsome man across the street (Luke Kirby), she begins spending more and more time with him, while Lou waits at home for his wife, oblivious to what she’s doing behind his back.

If Lou was a jerk, like Ryan Gosling in Williams’ own Blue Valentine, one could understand Margot’s motives and justification. Yet Rogen naturally imbues Lou with a likability that projects him into the sympathetic role, leaving Margot as the unsympathetic character the audience is still shackled to.

By the time of the film’s end, no character is happy, and none in the Westdale Theatre audience seemed to be, either.

Cleansing the palate to an extent was Luc Besson’s The Lady, a bio-pic about the woman at the heart of Burma’s decades-long fight for democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi. The Lady may not be much lighter in tone than Marécages (Wetlands) or Take This Waltz, but it’s skilfully crafted, well acted, and gorgeous to watch.

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Michelle Yeoh earned much-deserved awards attention for her portrayal of Aung San Suu Kyi, probably the most accomplished performance of her already impressive career. David Thewlis is also fantastic as her husband Michael, loving enough of his wife to let her put a cause ahead of himself.

The Lady’s biggest problem is simply its bloated nature, covering 61 years and running 135 minutes. Riveting performances and lush cinematography ultimately can’t distract from the weight of the complete tale and the gruelling subject matter. Yeoh is downright radiant in a career high and The Lady is a well-made bio-pic, but it falls short of being a truly great true story.

WORLD FILM FESTIVAL: Day 8

By Chris Luckett

Tonight double-feature was a pair of adaptations that couldn’t have been much different, both because of their subjects and because of their general quality.

Trishna is a modernization of Thomas Hardy’s 1891 novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles, set in modern India. The central and titular character, played by Slumdog Millionaire’s Freida Pinto, is modelled after Hardy’s protagonist and her story is mostly that of Tess.

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What may have worked as a century-old book, however, does not work for this film. Trishna ends up being an endurance challenge, of sorts, to see if the audience can sit through each and every cruel and unfair injustice Trishna is subjected to or made to bear witness of, from murder to suicide to broken limbs to kidnapping to countless rapes.

If the movie went somewhere with its story, had a moral beyond general misanthropy, or even was nice to look at, it would have been palatable. As it is, though, Trisha is an unenjoyable and unrewarding slog.

Off the heels of the Swedish masterpiece The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Headhunters is another thrilling adaptation of a Scandinavian thriller. It manages to surpass its predecessor, in fact.

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It is rare to see a thriller with this many great plot twists. The film is 90 per cent red herrings, double-crosses, bait-and-switches, and fake endings. After about halfway through, it becomes pointless to even try and predict when and how they’ll come, and easier to just sit back and let the masterful storytelling unfold.

Admittedly, Headhunters is quite bloody by the end of it. Good comparisons would be The Departed or The Town; if those films weren’t too much to watch, Headhunters shouldn’t be, either.

Even for the squeamish, though, Headhunters is a phenomenal cat-and-mouse game that people should go out of their way to see. The tension it builds is practically palpable at times, and the clever plot is always four or five steps ahead of the audience. There simply hasn’t been a thriller this well-plotted and -executed in years.