Our Lady of Perpetual Hell

I was invited to Chase The Buzz again this year.

Toronto Star film critic Pete Howell takes an annual pre-festival poll of film critics, industry folks, festival programmers, bloggers, and buffs to get a feeling about which films are the most highly anticipated at the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival. He limits you to 3 films, and your justifications are limited to a single sentence for each.

This year’s fest starts today and runs to the 19th, and I’m heading to town from tomorrow ’til the 14th. Normally, my visit to the festival is planned around the films I wanna see. This year, however, my visit to the festival is planned around a concert I wanna see.

And that’s the Minus 5/Baseball Project/Steve Wynn IV show at the ’shoe on Sunday night.

When Pete asked me for my 3 films, though, I chose them without regard to whether or not I would actually be able to see them at the festival. That was beside the point. The point was to choose 3 films I was really keen to see. Which I did. But, as it happens, I won’t be able to see any of ‘em while I’m there. Argh!!

A Town Called Panic
This puppetoon plays as part of the Midnight Madness programme. It is based on a Belgian tv show of the same name, created by Vincent Patar and Stéphane Aubier. As a kid, I was much more apt to pull the cowboys and indians and horses out of the toy box than the Barbies, so it really does look like my childhood toys got together to put on a show. It is stop-motion animation that is charming in its crudeness (I’ll post a couple eps of the show here so you can check it out yourself). In fact, it is, perhaps, that very “backwardness” of the look of it that makes it so appealing to me. Well, that and the absurdity of it.

Life During Wartime
Writer/Director Todd Solondz has made some films I love and when he describes this as being somewhat related to two of my favourites (Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness), I am curious to see what he does with the characters that recur. Darkly humourous (what some more gentle souls might call scabrous) satire is Solondz’s gift… the screenplays are so smart, the narrative structures so interesting, the honesty so startling.

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done
Well, you already know how I feel about Werner Herzog… He actually has two films appearing in this year’s festival. One of them makes me a little nervous–something called Bad Lieutenant, which may or may not have anything to do with Abel Ferrara’s film of the same title (it certainly appears to be related), starring the frequently execrable Nic Cage. It could be great or it could be horrendous. I can’t quite picture it being anywhere in between…

But Pete would only let us pick three films, remember, so I reached for the other new Herzog instead. I hadn’t even heard of it before it was announced for TIFF.

It is based on a true story (which will certainly not stop Herzog from inventing most of the story–on a search for the ecstatic truth, the real truth is just a starting point for him) about an actor who takes a role much too seriously.

David Lynch is the producer. Lynch and Herzog: now, there’s a match made in either heaven or hell, depending on your P.O.V.

After much thought, I decided I would go down to Toronto for at least a bit of the Hot Docs film festival this year. For quite awhile, I have been trying to decide about it—not really feeling like I was in the mood for it this year, but thinking I’d regret it, later, if I didn’t make the effort. Plus, I’ve read that it can be good to not let grief stop you from doing what you enjoy even if you don’t think you feel like doing it. Apparently, chances are you’ll end up enjoying it despite everything, y’know? Now, normally, I go for the whole 10-day festival, but I decided I would just go for the first Friday-Monday (May 1-4 inclusive) this time. So I got a smaller festival ticket package than usual (10 films + I get in free to all the screenings after 11pm) and made a hotel reservation.

I really hadn’t paid much attention to the newsletters that I’d been receiving from Hot Docs over the past few weeks, so I was delighted to discover that two directors whose films were among my favourites at Hot Docs ‘07 are back this year with new films! And both of them are screening during the period when I’ll be there, hoorah! So I’ve reserved tickets for each screening.

A Hard Name is the new film by Alan Zweig–whose previous film, Lovable, I told you about a couple years ago. Based on that film, a ticket to the world premiere of A Hard Name on May 3rd was the first one I reserved.

I expect this will be very different from Lovable and its two companions in his “mirror trilogy”, Vinyl and I, Curmudgeon, however–this one’s not about himself. In fact, he doesn’t appear onscreen and I’m not sure if we will even hear him offscreen. It features interviews with eight ex-cons who talk about their lives inside and outside. I will go into this film with high expectations.

Unfortuately, I can’t find a trailer to post here. Booooo!

(Incidentally, if anyone reading this happens to have copies of Vinyl and/or I, Curmudgeon and/or Lovable, please let me know. I do have the latter, but only on VHS (!). And, seeing as I never even unpacked my VCR after I moved, the tape is little more than a paperweight.)

Objectified is the new film by Gary Hustwit–whose previous film, Helvetica, I have also told you about. This is the other screening that was important enough to me to make sure I had a ticket in advance.

Objectified is about the design–and the designers–of objects that surround us every day. Director Hustwit: ‘Objectified is a documentary about industrial design; it’s about the manufactured objects we surround ourselves with, and the people who make them. On an average day, each of us uses hundreds of objects. (Don’t believe it? Start counting: alarm clock, light switch, faucet, shampoo bottle, toothbrush, razor…) Who makes all these things, and why do they look and feel the way they do? All of these objects are “designed,” but how can good design make them, and our lives, better?'’

To be honest, though, the first film that caught my attention when I started to look through this year’s schedule was Cat Ladies. As a longtime fan of Cute With Chris, the sight of a film about “cat ladies” (the “crazy” adjective left unsaid) made me practically leap from my seat. It appears to be a relatively sympathetic portrait of four women whose cats fill some kind of emotional void in their lives. One household has only 3 cats… but another has hundreds of them.

And each one comes with a box of poo.^©

I also hope to see Necrobusiness, a film by Swedish filmmakers Richard Solarz and Fredrik von Krusenstjerna. Set in Lodz, Poland, it features feuding funeral home directors, paramedic poisoners, murderous morticians… and it sounds very blackly humourous. Right up my alley, in other words.

I can only find a trailer with its Swedish subtitles but it at least conveys the tone of the film…

Over the Hills and Far Away looks really interesting to me, too. This film, directed by Michael Orion Scott, is about a family dealing with an autistic son who they discover has an unusual bond with horses, and their horseback journey through Mongolia in search of a shaman who can successfully treat him.

Could you love a robot? Should you love a robot? Or, rather, a geminoid, as its creator, Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, calls it. That’s one of the questions posed in Phie Ambo’s Mechanical Love.

Ishiguro built his geminoid in his own image. Make of that what you will.

In fact, he coined the word “geminoid” from the Latin geminus, meaning “twin” or “double” and oid, which indicates “similarity”. And the damned thing does really look like him. If he were a robot, that is.

Apparently, he got the idea for this because he is so busy. He can’t be in two places at once, after all. So he built this copy of himself–sculpted from casts of his body–so that it could, say, sit in a meeting at the office while he was working elsewhere, and it would stand in for him as he spoke through it and manipulated it via remote control. ‘If I could have one at the university, and one at ATR, I would just do all my work from a hot-springs resort.’ Well, okay… it makes sense when he puts it that way. But he also wonders if people could come to have feelings for these things.

His thought was that something that looked like him and spoke in his voice could carry sonzai-kan, or “presence” in a way that his mere voice over a conference call couldn’t.

But I dunno… this thing made my skin crawl. I wouldn’t want it anywhere near me. When he introduces his young daughter to it for the first time–after having told the documentary film crew that he is certain that she will be able to accept it easier than an adult would–she shies away from it and doesn’t even want to look at it. She refuses to touch it and can’t wait to get the hell outta the room.

I can’t blame her. I mean, I don’t wanna pick it apart–it’s a remarkable piece of engineering–but the face simply does not work. And it looks like the “skin” is rubbery in a naaasty way. While we do see Ishiguro complain about an earlier version’s inability to form its lips to match the words he is speaking through them, the finished version looks no better. I can understand what he’s trying to achieve, but I don’t think he’s there yet. And, frankly, I don’t see how having this thing sitting in a room while he is manipulating it by remote control from elsewhere is somehow better than just being there via videoconferencing. Surely the image of the real person has more sonzai-kan than this bucket of bolts does. Or mebbe that’s just a film-lover’s opinion.

Anyway, this doppleganger is not the only robot in the film. There is also Paro.

Paro is what’s called a “mental committment robot”:

Unlike industrial robots, “Mental Commitment Robots” are developed to interact with human beings and to make them feel emotional attachment to the robots. Rather than using objective measures, these robots trigger more subjective evaluations, evoking psychological impressions such as “cuteness” and comfort. Mental Commitment Robots are designed to provide 3 types of effects: psychological, such as relaxation and motivation, physiological, such as improvement in vital signs, and social effects such as instigating communication among inpatients and caregivers.

Why a baby seal, you ask? Well, they tried it first as a cat. But the designers found that people are so familiar with cats that all they could see was how fake the kitty-Paro was. So they figured that fewer people were familar with baby harp seals… and they were right. People no longer focussed on what was “wrong” with it and focussed, instead, on how “cute” it was.

We see Paro introduced to nursing home resident Mrs. Körner who, while she knows it is not a real animal, nevertheless forms what appears to be a genuine emotional bond with it. To be honest, these sequences were really upsetting to me… The repulsion I felt towards Professor Ishiguro’s geminoid was nothing next to the horror of the thought of being so alone in this world that I have to resort to artificial companionship. I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach as I watched this genuinely sweet lady cuddle this mewling thing, cooing to it and stroking its (fake) fur. It makes me cry, even now, just to think back on those sequences… It’s not that I think the good feelings it engendered in Mrs. Körner were a bad thing. Quite the contrary! But the thought that this is what we’ve come to makes me feel very sad for all of us.

I think Ambo’s film is quite wonderful in that it could provoke such a strong emotional reaction from me. It is a fascinating subject told well–with humour and with empathy–and easily one of my favourites of Hot Docs ‘08. See it if you get a chance.

Starting with Sundance, back in ‘06, I have made a habit of trying to sit on the aisle, in a row near the back of the theatre, whenever I go to film festivals. Sometimes you need to get out quickly to get to another screening and other times you discover that you’ve chosen unwisely and just wanna slink out without causing other audience members to be taken out of the film by your rustling and excuse-mes as you squeeze past them out the row.

Well, wouldn’t you just know it, but the only time I ended up having to sit down at the front of the theatre at this year’s Hot Docs was for the one film I absolutely hated and wanted to get the hell outta before it was finished. There was nothing I could do but just gut it out.

The write-up on this thing described it as being about Carlos Castaneda’s five “wives”, who mysteriously disappeared right after his death—never to be seen again. Sounds like it might be interesting, right? Yeah, that’s what I thought too. But when the director introduced her film by saying that she doesn’t normally make her films for an audience—she makes them for herself—and then added, ‘I hope that if you don’t find what you are looking for in this film, you find something else’, well… As it turns out, I didn’t find what I was looking for and all I found in its absence was frustration and boredom.

Minou Norouzi’s Anatomy of Failure reminds me of something that was made by a self-absorbed teenager who doesn’t know 1. how to construct a story, 3. how to capture something interesting within the frame, 3. how to draw a comprehensible story from the people she sets before her lens, or 4. how to focus her fucking camera!

I sat and seethed through this self-indulgent thing. What on earth the programmers saw in this, I dunno. I saw some blurry navel-gazing shit on a beach and then a bunch of interviews with flaky nouveau-hippies.

At least the opening film was interesting. It was called The Apology Line and was a rather poetic little film about an anonymous phone line in Britain that you call when you need to apologize for something and you don’t feel you can make your apology to the person who deserves it. Some of the apologies are funny while others are wrenching. Directed by James Lees, it won the Best Short Documentary award at the festival.

Minou, the number is 0800 970 93 94.

I was looking forward to the group-directed Jesus Loves You–a film about a bunch of fundamentalist Christian missionaries from around the world who converged on Germany to minister to the millions who were there to attend the 2006 World Cup–but it left me with little taste in my mouth, good or bad.

It was shot by four crews–meaning four directors: Lilian Franck, Matthias Luthard, Michaela Kirst, and Robert Cibis–so that each could focus on one particular missionary… Tillman is a charismatic German who started a group called Youth With A Mission. Scott is a young pastor who preaches at the 411 Church in NYC in a bad hairdo. Gershom is a friendly, outgoing Zambian who, despite his young age, is a veteran missionary. Cody, in contrast, is a complete noob at this–freshly baptised in Scott’s church and decidedly awkward when it comes to approaching the strangers to whom he is meant to appeal.

There is a lot of buildup to the missionaries’ arrival in Germany but once they are there, it seems like there is little interaction shown between them and the soccer fans, and the film seems to lose its direction and peter out. The few soccer fans we meet don’t seem to know quite what to make of these earnest folks appealing to them to accept Christ as their saviour. The ending felt abrupt, without resolution. Not sure what the point of it all was, y’know?

The English Surgeon (dir. Geoffrey Smith, U.K.) has won the Best International Feature award at this year’s festival. While I would’ve cast my vote in the direction of Man On Wire instead (because it is interesting not only in content but in form–whereas The English Surgeon’s content is compelling but it is not doing anything interesting formally), I must say that I really enjoyed it.

It tells the story of British brain surgeon Henry Marsh, who has been helping out an impoverished Ukrainian clinic for the past 15 years, and his colleague in Kiev, Dr. Igor Kurilets, who admits he looks up to Marsh as an older brother. The film focuses on one operation that Marsh is to perform on a poor Ukranian farmer, Marian, who suffers from a brain tumour. What might be a simple operation in London is complicated by an ill-equipped clinic and inexperienced staff. We see Marsh and Kurilets shopping for a cordless drill at a hardware store in the local market. You can imagine what a brain surgeon might need a drill for. Just not the kind a handyman might buy. The operation, itself, is featured in the film and it’s definitely not for the squeamish. I had to avert my eyes a couple times and the guy beside me sat there with his hands over his ears when the drilling started.

Marsh is a droll delight, and this serves to leaven what could’ve been shameles melodrama. Yet we see how a failed attempt to help a child in his past has left a permanent mark on his soul and how it informs all his doctor-patient relations.

While it might not have gotten my vote for the award, I still feel that it is a beautiful, facinating film about a lovely man.