The Runaways (Director: Floria Sigismondi): I grew up just a few years after the members of The Runaways, and so not only did I listen to their music, but also to the music they grew up on. That being said, I had very reasonable expectations for this film. No disrespect to Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning, or director Floria Sigismondi, but I saw it as a film pitched at young women with no knowledge of the music or the era. All I was hoping was that the film would deliver the same energy and fun that the music did for me. Which is why I was so pleasantly surprised by the film’s careful reconstruction of the era, down to the tiniest details, as well as by the believable and energetic performances. Though it’s not in the same echelon as something like Almost Famous, The Runaways deserves to reach audiences far beyond the teenaged demographic.

The arc of a rock and roll movie is pretty standard. The band is formed, learns to play, performs in scruffy dives, achieves breakthrough success, gets into trouble with drugs, booze, and/or sex, begins to hate their success and each other, and then breaks up. Sigismondi doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, but she does make sure that each stage of the standard rock and roll story feels authentic to the experience of one of the first all-girl rock groups in history. But this is also no straight-ahead girl power tract, for that wouldn’t be historically accurate.

In 1975, the glam rock movement was coming to an end. For the previous five years, male rockers had felt free to experiment with their styles and their sexuality, at least on stage. The success of androgynous rockers like Bowie and Marc Bolan had actually opened the door a crack for women to get into this previously boys-only territory. Performers like Suzi Quatro had ventured into guitar rock, but were always backed by male bands. So when we meet Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) practicing electric guitar licks in her bedroom, her only career path seems to be to find some guys to play with. Except that’s not what she wants at all. When she spots producer Kim Fowley (a perfectly creepy Michael Shannon) outside Rodney Bingenheimer’s English Disco (an influential club owned by LA disc jockey Bingenheimer, a man worthy of his own film), she brashly approaches him with her idea for an all-girl rock band. He’s all over the idea, and puts together a four-piece band in short order. But he’s missing the vital piece, a frontwoman who is both sexy and glamorous. When he finds 15-year-old Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning), he gets all that with the added bonus of her “jailbait” status as forbidden fruit.

Earlier, we’d seen the awkward Cherie attempting to crawl out from under her older sister’s shadow. Her love for Bowie gives her a protective mask of glam style, and this is just the look Fowley, Jett, and the newly-christened Runaways are looking for. Sigismondi does an excellent job with both Jett and Currie’s “origin” stories, tapping into the deep feeling of being different from your peers that most creative people feel in high school. Despite their very different appearances and motives for joining the band, the girls quickly bond, with Jett’s interest obviously a little more than friendly.

Fowley is an absolute bastard, and we know early on that he cheats them out of their earnings. But he is dead-on when he tells them that they need to toughen up if they want to play in a man’s world. He has local kids collect trash (including metal cans and pieces of dog shit) to pelt them with while they perform. This isn’t a typical “girl group,” he tells them, they’re learning to play the cock rock that he feels men have been neglecting by wearing lipstick the past few years. “It’s not about women’s lib, it’s about women’s libido,” is his memorable credo for the band. They’re selling sex, the image of out-of-control underage bad girls, and he knows it will be huge. Turns out he’s right. But it will take the band years to get away from his control. For them, female self-empowerment starts as a gimmick and only gradually becomes a truth they can live by.

Their success leads to a recording contract and eventually a tour of Japan, where the wheels start to come off. Jealousies erupt over a sexy photo shoot Fowley arranged just for Currie, and her response is to retreat further into booze and drugs, despite the fact her own father is at home dying from his alcoholism. Though Jett had been her sometime lover, she feels abandoned by her when the band accuse her of being too self-centred. Tired of Fowley’s control and the band’s resentment, she quits.

For Jett, it’s only a temporary hiccup. She’s only ever wanted to play rock music, and her drive will take her to the top of the charts a few years later with her new band, the Blackhearts. Currie continues to struggle with her addictions and after failed attempts at both a solo singing and an acting career, leaves the entertainment business entirely. Years later, she writes her memoir, “Neon Angel,” on which this film is based. As well, Joan Jett served as an executive producer, so hopefully that means both women’s remembrances are accurately portrayed in the film.

Though the story is an old and somewhat predictable one, The Runaways tells it with sass and energy. It’s helped by an amazing soundtrack and as I mentioned above, by authentic performances, both dramatic and musical. Old rockers, take your daughters to this one. You’ll both love it.

Note: Though I haven’t seen the final poster, I assume they’ll use the above one with the stars in it. Sadly, we probably won’t get to see this amazing teaser poster in the theatres.

The Runaways opens in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal on March 19th, expanding nationwide on April 9th.

Official site of the film

(8/10)

Post from: Toronto Screen Shots

The Runaways

Max Manus (Directors: Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg): Here is a Norwegian film about a hero of that country’s World War 2 resistance movement that is as slick and polished as any Hollywood blockbuster. Unfortunately, it also has all the brains of a typical Hollywood blockbuster. Not surprisingly, this film has broken box office records in Norway, becoming the highest-grossing domestic film there since 1975. I think the real Max Manus deserved better.

As the film begins, Max Manus (Aksel Hennie) is an uneducated but patriotic young man who volunteers to help the Finns repel an invasion from Stalin’s Russia in 1940. After being wounded in that conflict, he returns home to find Norway occupied by the Nazis, and the King and his government in exile in Britain. Gathering a group of young men around him determined to resist the occupation, they begin publishing leaflets denouncing the Germans and their collaborators. After being ambushed in his second-storey apartment by the authorities, he jumps out the window and falls to the street injured. While in hospital being treated for his injuries, he is able to get messages out to his friends, and soon escapes in spectacular fashion. After this, he is hustled out of the country eventually making his way to Scotland, where he joins the Norwegian Independent Company. Further training in sabotage techniques follow, and in 1943 he parachutes back into Norway with a small team of saboteurs. From then on, he determines to do as much damage to the occupying forces as possible, and he succeeds in destroying numerous German boats and ships in Oslo harbour, including a huge transport ship called the Donau in 1945.

By all accounts, Manus was a brave and resourceful man, and is a national hero in Norway. After the war, he wrote two autobiographical books detailing his very real exploits. Why, then, does Max Manus
feel so artificial? Succumbing to the usual pitfalls of the biopic, the film hurries through all the major events in his wartime career, a period of five years. In that time, Max fought both the Russians and the Germans, formed a strong bond with his group, especially his best friend Gregers Gram, and fell in love with Tikken Lindebrække, who would later become his wife. The script sketches all of these things in, but fails to colour them in with details which would add emotional and historical depth. The film seems primarily concerned with showing the spectacle of Manus’ acts of sabotage, and here it mostly succeeds. Two set pieces involving the mining of ships in the harbour are well-directed, although it’s telling that there is a curious lack of preparation shown in the film.

Despite that, the characters are all badly underwritten, even Max who, despite a good performance from Aksel Hennie, still seems too artificially heroic and one-dimensional to be a real person. His reckless machismo as his friends are captured and killed seems false, and his romance with Tikken is hardly written at all. It’s hard to say who the filmmakers are trying to reach with this film. Norwegians would likely know some of the outlines of Max Manus’ life, so a more focussed film which zeroed in on, for instance, the destruction of the Donau would have been far more interesting. But I suspect the filmmakers were trying to reach an international audience and so felt they needed to cover a lot more ground. Unfortunately, they’ve created nothing more than a shallow, melodramatic and rather conventional war movie that borders on hagiography. I think that’s the worst kind of self-sabotage, and something a truly interesting character like Max Manus doesn’t deserve.

We’re notified in an end title that after the war, Max Manus established a successful office supply company, and the bathos of that detail alone punctures much of the mythmaking of the previous two hours.

Max Manus opens in Toronto, Vancouver and Halifax on April 2nd.

Official site of the film

(6/10)

Post from: Toronto Screen Shots

Max Manus

Beyond Ipanema (Director: Guto Barra): Early on in this documentary about Brazilian music, David Byrne points out that unlike many other countries, Brazil’s principal export has been culture, especially music. The film patiently traces the influence of Brazilian music on North American culture beginning with Carmen Miranda’s first performance in New York City in 1939. Miranda’s string of films throughout the 1940s were immensely popular, and she always insisted on singing a few songs and saying a few lines of dialogue in Brazilian Portuguese. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, American jazz music was influenced by the sounds of bossanova, and a collaboration between Joao Gilberto and Stan Getz led to a huge hit song, “The Girl from Ipanema,” sung by Joao’s wife Astrud. Sergio Mendes and his band Brasil ’66 were also hugely popular in North America during the ‘60s.

Brazilian influence was dormant for nearly the next two decades until David Byrne’s Luaka Bop record label began releasing (or in many cases re-releasing) Brazilian artists in North America again, in the late ‘80s. Since that time, the influence has gone in both directions, with many artists utilizing “mashup” methods to incorporate different elements into their music. As many of the Brazilian commentators note, Brazil has a long history of ingesting outside influences and making them Brazilian, so the birth of DJ culture has been welcomed with open arms.

Unfortunately, the last 15 minutes of the film were unplayable on the screener I received, so my review will not be entirely complete, but my largest criticism of the film to that point is that there just wasn’t enough actual music. This was more of a problem with the classic artists of the ‘50s and ‘60s, and is likely the result of expensive licensing issues, but it detracts in a major way from the film. If any music documentary deserves more than talking heads, even ones as famous as Byrne, Devendra Banhart, and Gilberto Gil, it’s one about a musical culture as vibrant and alive as Brazil’s. Though I was able to note a few bands worth following up (CSS, Garotas Suecas, and almost-forgotten psychedelic pioneers Os Mutantes), I would have loved to see and hear more performances and fewer talking heads (and Talking Heads).

Official site of the film

(6/10)

Post from: Toronto Screen Shots

Beyond Ipanema

Higglety Pigglety Pop! or There Must Be More to Life (Directors: Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski): From the makers of Madame Tutli-Putli comes another innovative short film with a rhyming title. Based on a story by Maurice Sendak, this short (24 minute) film will be included on the Blu-ray DVD release of Where the Wild Things Are, coming out this Tuesday here in Canada.

The story concerns a terrier named Jennie (voiced by Meryl Streep) who senses that something is missing in her life, even though she leads a pampered existence. “There must be more life than having everything,” she says, and sets out to find adventure. When she applies for the job of leading lady at the World Mother Goose Theatre, she’s told she needs more experience. It soon arrives when she hitches a ride with a feline milkman (a milkcat?) and gets a job as a nurse to a baby who won’t eat.

I haven’t read Sendak’s story, but it seems he is taking some familiar fairytale elements and mixing them together with a rather modern heroine. Jennie is bored and spoiled and always hungry. Her rude behaviour and selfishness don’t lend themselves to the reader’s (or viewer’s) sympathy. The directors use a mixture of puppetry and live action to create a very unsettling atmosphere, and soon the action turns frantic, dark, and a bit scary. Certainly younger children might be pretty frightened by this. Unfortunately, the story failed to draw me in and the puppetry never seemed quite as impressive as the stop-motion work the same filmmakers used to great effect in Madame Tutli-Putli. In the end, the film succeeded in creeping me out but never really engaged me.

Official site of the film

(7/10)

Post from: Toronto Screen Shots

Higglety Pigglety Pop!

Toronto’s NFB Mediatheque (150 John St.) presents French-language films (with English subtitles) the first Thursday of each month, in partnership with Alliance Française de Toronto, le Bureau du Québec à Toronto, Cinéfranco, the Consulate General of France in Toronto and Théâtre Français de Toronto. Each film screens with one of the NFB’s acclaimed shorts preceding it, and tickets are a ridiculously cheap $6 for adults and $4 for students, seniors, NFB and Alliance Française members. Check out this upcoming schedule:

Thursday March 4, 2010 at 7:30pm

Persepolis (Directors: Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi. 2007, France, 96 minutes.)
Winner, Jury Prize, 2007 Cannes Film Festival.

The poignant story of a young girl in Iran during the Islamic Revolution, based on the award-winning graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi.

preceded by
Conte de quartier (Director: Florence Miailhe. 2006, NFB, 16 minutes.)

A crazy day in a neighbourhood under reconstruction: seven characters and a rag doll are swept up in a dizzying chain of events.

Thursday April 1, 2010 at 7:30pm

L’âge de Tènébres (Days of Darkness) (Director: Denys Arcand. 2007, Canada, 104 minutes.)
Nominee, Best Motion Picture, 2008 Genie Awards.

Stuck between dream and reality, a civil servant reinvents himself as a celebrity, escaping from his quiet and desperate life.

preceded by
L’ondée (Rains) (Director: David Coquard-Dassault. 2008, NFB, 8 min.)
Jury Special Mention, Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, 2009.

Everyone seeks refuge as a sudden rainstorm is unleashed on a city.

Thursday May 4, 2010 at 7:30pm

Entre les murs (The Class) (Director: Laurent Cantet, . 2008, France, 128 min.)
Winner, Palme d’Or, Cannes Film Festival, 2008.

A well-intentioned teacher’s classroom ethics are put to the test when his students begin to challenge his methods.

preceded by
Train en folie (Runaway) (Director: Cordell Barker, 2009, NFB, 9 min.)
Winner, Petit Rail d’Or for Best Short Film, Cannes International Film Festival, 2009
One of Canada’s Top Ten Films of 2009 (Short Films)

Happy passengers have a great time on a crowded train, oblivious to the unknown fate that awaits them around the bend.

Post from: Toronto Screen Shots

Ciné-Jeudi at the NFB Mediatheque