Fest free-for-all

Asian action, spectacular soul and
explosive drama in the last days of TIFF ’08

by MARK SLUTSKY

There are always a couple of funny oddities that pop up in the last few days of the Toronto International Film Festival, once most of the prestige pictures have packed up and gone home. They’re a good antidote to the self-seriousness that can infect the rest of the fest, and in a year like this, that saw no Juno- or No Country for Old Men-sized breakout hits, the strange little movies have become the most memorable.

Korean hit The Good, the Bad, the Weird is one of the, well, weirdest Westerns I’ve ever seen. Directed by Fantasia favourite Kim Ji-Woon (A Tale of Two Sisters, A Bittersweet Life), The Good is an over-the-top homage to the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone, though its frantic set pieces owe more to the recent explosion of Korean weirdness in films like The Host.

BAT’S ENTERTAINMENT: Sugar

There was more Asian action to be seen in Chocolate, the newest film from Ong-Bak director Prachya Pinkaew and action choreographer Panna Rittikrai. This time, Pinkaew’s protag is, of all things, an autistic teenage girl (the spectacular “JeeJa” Yanin), who learns to kick ass from watching movies and goes on a mission to save her sick mom. The pathos is at times unbearable, but once the film gets into super-mega-fight-mode, it’s pretty awe-inspiring.

Perhaps the festival’s most mood-lifting, invigorating entry was Jeff Levy-Hinte’s Soul Power. Levy-Hinte was an editor on 1996’s “Rumble in the Jungle” doc When We Were Kings, aka one of my favourite movies ever, and what he’s done here is taken some of the many hours of unused footage and cut together a whole new doc focusing on the music fest that preceded the 1974 Ali-Foreman fight. There’s performances by Bill Withers, B.B. King, Celia Cruz and of course Soul Brother #1 James Brown.

TOTALLY TENSE:
The Hurt Locker

The most unexpected comeback of the festival has to belong to Kathryn Bigelow, director, of course, of classics like Near Dark and Point Break, but who hasn’t made a feature since 2002’s K-19: The Widowmaker. Set in Iraq, The Hurt Locker follows the lives of a three-man team of explosives experts responsible for clearing IEDs. It’s incredibly tense stuff, and the suspense scenes are really the work of a master filmmaker. A smart and interesting movie, and hopefully one that won’t get overlooked because of its subject matter.

Sugar is the latest from the creative team behind 2006’s much-praised Half Nelson, writer-directors Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden. Set in baseball’s bush leagues, it follows the journey of a pitcher from the Dominican Republic (Algenis Perez Soto) as he makes his way up the minor-league ranks. At once a sports movie, an immigration story and a coming-of-age drama, this is a really strong film with a true humanist vibe, and props for making a film set in the U.S. in this day and age that’s mostly in Spanish.

Props, also, to the Quebec filmmakers who cleaned up at the fest’s Awards Reception. Denis Villeneuve got a special citation for his short Next Floor, Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Madeline Piujuq Ivalu’s Before Tomorrow scooped up the Best Canadian First Feature prize (with a special citation for Lyne Charlebois’s Borderline), and the Best Canadian Feature award went to Rodrigue Jean’s Lost Song. Way to go, QC!

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