HOT DOCS 2012 (Toronto) – Big Easy Express Review (Kirk Haviland)

HOT DOCS 2012

Big Easy Express

Starring Mumford and Sons, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, and Old Crow Medicine Show.

Directed by Emmett Malloy

Big Easy Express is the story of the country/folk music tour by London’s Mumford and Sons with LA band Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros and Nashville’s Old Crow Medicine Show in 2011. The bands and entourages climb aboard a train in Oakland and ride the rails to New Orleans, stopping to perform along the way.

Big Easy express opens with a credit sequence that is a very cool long shot following Edward Sharpe member Jade. She takes us through the length of the train and walks into ongoing performances by each of the three bands along the way. We are given the setup of the tour through band interviews and find out that the real story happens on board the train. The bands’ booze filled nights go well past sunrise as they jam into the night, any excuse to play is followed. Occasionally playing for random people as they roll along the track as well. This tour is a throwback to the style and sensibilities of the old folk get together like Woodstock and the performances caught on tape are enveloping. One of the bright spots is a visit to a local school band practice by the Mumfords where they perform for the students and invite them out to perform with them late that night. The Mumfords also go on record here stating Edward Share and the Magnetic Zeros may be their new favorite live act to watch perform and based on what we see in the film this is quite understandable.

A interesting document of the tour, Big Easy’s performance footage is great. Most of the interview aspect is dropped in favor of a “fly on the wall” approach during the constant jams and wild nights aboard the train. Mumford and Sons are of course huge stars, but the other two bands are given equal if not more coverage and emerge as talented, hard working individuals with lots of talent. As someone who knows very little about these bands, the one aspect I found lacking in this film was the lack of onscreen titles announcing who was who and which band they were from. This may turn off some people who know nothing of these bands entirely, though I’m sure the people who follow these bands religiously barely noticed. I found the music carried me through to the point where it no longer mattered who said what or even what they said.

In my schedule, Big Easy was a last minute replacement for another film and I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Certainly not groundbreaking, but a fun film with great music aplenty, Big Easy Express works best in those intimate nooks of the train where music exudes at a boozy 4 am.

Til Next Time

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HOT DOCS 2012 (Toronto) – Scarlet Road Review (Paolo Kagaoan)

HOT DOCS 2012 (Toronto)

Scarlet Road

Directed by Catherine Scott

Tickets still available for May 4, 6:30pm and May 6, 9:00pm: CLICK HERE

Catherine Scott’s Scarlet Road is the second feature-length doc I’ve seen this festival that showcases differently-abled people. It’s an umbrella term which makes it inadvertently confusing, so to clarify, the subjects of Frog Princes mostly have developmental differences like autism or Down’s Syndrome. There is also a minor subject in this movie with Down’s Syndrome, like the young adult male in England who needs a sex worker so that he can lose his virginity. But males with developmental differences aren’t the only group that fits within the niche of the clients of this movie’s major subject, Sydney-based sex worker Rachel Wotton, who also caters to people with cerebral palsy or MS. She and her clients are perfect fits in many ways but mostly because they’re both discriminated against in Australian society.

As well as being about Rachel’s story and struggle, this movie is a good lesson about different versions – mostly Australia’s – of multiculturalism. For example, while Rachel and the British man look up possible sex workers for him, they find a website that lists anal sex as “Greek sex”, because apparently some societies are perpetually still in high school – he asks what “Egypt sex” is, which he’ll invent one day (the movie has its share people talking graphically about sex, which might make it uncomfortable for some viewers). Another instance has Rachel visiting friends and other sex workers overseas so  she can bring her ethos of tolerance to other countries. Finally, while Rachel is strolling around a European city with a fellow sex worker, Pye, they walk by a Herzegovinian restaurant, which I’ll visit one day.

Anyway, to more serious stuff, it’s also a lesson on policy (I won’t be comparing other countries’ sex laws with Canadian ones) and how she and like minded sex workers deal with it. I haven’t checked on Australian politics but this movie shows that states control sex laws, so her relative freedom to practice her work in New South Wales won’t yet happen in Queensland. Her boyfriend Matt lives in Brisbane, Queensland and they consider moving her to Queensland but she won’t be able to work there. The legalized status of “whores” in NSW make it also possible for her to give workshop classes for other workers of different ages and genders, teaching them how to handle differently-abled clients. Pye also talks about how her home country and base, Sweden, criminalizes both her clients and herself. Unlike the image of sex workers as uneducated victims, Rachel and Pye talk to the camera soberly, becoming the new breed who know what they’re talking about. It’s their proletarian instinct to know how they want their rights to be.

I’m making it seem that Scarlet Road is info-heavy and stuffier than it really is. Yes, Rachel frustratingly says that she just wants ‘to be a whore’ instead of being a speaker for sex worker rights. And there’s also a scene where she’s on the brink of tears. But otherwise the doc’s tone is sunny thanks to Rachel. We see her with her blond hair, walking around with her scarlet umbrella, suggesting the tolerably quirkiness that she,  Pye and other like-minded workers do. Also, unlike the docs I’ve seen during this festival that have violent shifts in tone and POV, this doc is beautifully seamless and almost chapter-less. It corresponds with Rachel’s energy and her open personality, like she’s introducing the audience to her friends who all belong together.

The movie also has two foreplay scenes, which are lit and shot sensually, but when there are close-ups of Rachel we see her smiling instead of giving a forced ‘sex face’, making these encounters less titillating and more sincere. This doc is being shopped for TV distribution and I hope to see it on more screens, large or small, so more people can be aware of her perspective on how sex and tolerance should be.

I suppose it’s reductive to assume that one person, even as nice as Rachel Wotton, is a representative of all sex workers. But Scarlet Road isn’t about the idealization of sex workers and their industry but its humanization. And this documentary is loyal to her world view and struggle, becoming one of the most tonally consistent and great docs I’ve recently seen.

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HOT DOCS 2012 (Toronto) – The Mechanical Bride Review (Kirk Haviland)

HOT DOCS 2012 (Toronto)

The Mechanical Bride

Directed by Allison de Fren

Tickets are still available for May 6, 9:00pm: CLICK HERE

Update, Paolo’s take (Kirk’s review below):

The Mechanical Bride features the most real voiceover in this year’s crop of documentaries. It’s real in the sense that it’s the kind of voiceover work we the audience would imagine in the docs that we’re used to. This voice belongs to Julie Newmar, the movie showing archive video of her looking like what would happen if Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo had a baby. In the footage she plays a robot with flesh to be a man’s companion, perfect not just because of her classical beauty but because she can be commanded and owned. The words she’s saying, as her older self, narrates the nature of the contemporary industry of life-size female dolls, often used for sexual purposes.

This movie is like a few thesis statements rolled into one, comprehensive enough for its audience. For example, there are the blurred lines between the dolls and their human counterparts, of appearance and reality. Dolls and man’s fascination with them, their definition of play differing from the females who have their own versions of dolls. As symbols of the male desire to obtain property to use and destroy. Their relationships with different cultures and arts (large portions of the film are dedicated to the Japanese and German concepts of those dolls). Concepts of age and beauty. On how the dolls change family dynamics in what’s becoming a more independent, fragmented society. It shows also men, who either work within the industry or owners of the dolls, talk unabashedly about their ‘instincts’ towards female ownership despite giving caveats that they don’t agree with this kind of thinking. These kinds of conversations fit into this well-thought, if not too methodical, perspective of the feminine body politic crossing the uncanny valley.

Hello All,

Mechanical Bride is an expose on the thriving world of mechanical companions and the men who are devoted to their artificial “brides”. The film goes through the history of the world surrounding these men, from the early beginnings to what is hailed as the “Rolls Royce” of the industry, the Real Doll. From the creation, purchase, and use of the dolls, Director de Fren exploration takes us into this world and the characters involved.

The first of the people we meet is Davecat and his girlfriend/lovedoll Shiori. According to Davecat, Shiori is a half-Japanese, half-English Goth who grew up in the UK. Davecat takes Shiori with him almost everywhere. We see him out for a picnic in a cemetery and going out to dinner at a Japanese restaurant with another one of his friends. Elena Dorfmann is a photographer who has become fascinated with photographing men and their dolls. She explains that she became intrigued with the subject when she realized these men had developed real relationships with these dolls. We meet the numerous men and women who are behind the making of these dolls and the way they are manufactured. The film explores the phenomenon globally where we find the doll market is huge in places like Germany (going back to WW2 and Hitler himself, one of the most intriguing part of the doc) and Japan. The star of this documentary is Slade, the love doll “Doctor”. The man people send their dolls to for repairs. Slade is truly hilarious, but has a dark past to him and his story turns out to be truly fascinating. Our Narrator is the incomparable Julie Newmar, who once starred in a television series in the mid sixties called My Living Doll, which was about a female android. The film also briefly delves into the internet group know as the ASFR, devout followers and believers in the love of robots and androids, known as a radical group in most circles.

Mechanical Bride runs as a conventional interview-only based documentary that unfortunately scratches a lot of surfaces but does not delve too deeply into any one of them. Subjects like Davecat and especially Slade could have had much more time devoted to their stories. Slade could probably fill an entire film out himself. Unfortunately because we don’t delve too deeply the film feels inconsequential as well. A watchable film that could have been much more.

Til Next Time

Movie Junkie TO

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HOT DOCS 2012 (Toronto) – Radioman Review (Paolo Kagaoan)

HOT DOCS 2012 (Toronto)

Radioman

Directed by Mary Kerr

Tickets are still available for May 5, 4:15pm: CLICK HERE

Have you ever wanted a movie with Tom Hanks, Kate Winslet, Meryl Streep, George Clooney, Robert de Niro, Tilda Swinton, Bruce Willis and many more actors together? This doc is the closest we’ll probably get to Movie: The Movie ever being made. Those actors never appear together in scenes but individually they do share a screen with the titular Radioman, born Craig Castaldo. Radioman is a legendary figure who’s almost the best kept secret of both New York and cinema since, as Robin Williams estimates, the former probably has a longer CV than the latter (his iMDb profile doesn’t do his extensive work justice, and it’s my fake life ambition now to be a Radioman completist and watch all of his movies).

The movie showcases Radioman’s frankness. Williams also tells director Mary Kerr about Radioman calling stars ‘movie whores’, while the latter at one point hilariously questions Robert Pattinson’s Beatles-like fame and yells when Sean Penn wins his second leading actor Oscar. But he mostly does all of these in a way of good natured ribbing. Radioman assumes a rapport with these celebrities, the latter either genuinely nice to him and his company or are just forced to be nice because most celebrities don’t want to be seen as the snobby stereotype assigned against them.

Radioman is aware of his image and tells the camera how other New Yorkers don’t know him and assume he’s homeless. He’s not, he’s a stage-three hoarder who probably makes decent money as an extra. But he sees his image as a brand and that, for example, if he doesn’t have his trademark boom box necklace or bike, his actor friends would ask him why he doesn’t have those things on certain days. He believes, and it’s probably true, that he would be a nobody if he didn’t have these things as well as keeping up the dirty homeless man appearance.

The movie’s plot line is skewed, showing him as an overinflated, deluded extra to his humiliation in the Oscar season where he travels and is ignored in LA. The former happens between creation to 2011, when movies like The Dictator are being shot and are set in NYC. The latter takes place in 2009. We can interpret this trajectory in many ways. We can see this as a showing differences between two cities; that actors working in New York are more open while the LA scene is full of starlets shuttling themselves away from him and verbally abusive paparazzi. It also shows a culture more predatory than that in the east coast, where autograph hunters take advantage of celebrities and treat them as disposable goods as opposed to him who sees them as friends.

Nonetheless, they could still have chosen the more naturalistic time line, escaping the shitty LA scene and finding himself back with his ‘friends’ in NYC.  It’s as if the movie, culminating into his Oscar party snub, aims to show him how insignificant he is. I don’t necessarily mean that that’s not untrue but it still feels mean to see this anyway. I’ve been critical about this year’s trend in documentaries where directors don’t judge their subjects no matter how harsh they could potentially be. I take my words back, adding that I never want to see a movie this harsh against their subjects.

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The Innkeepers Blu-Ray Review

http://www.eonefilms.com

The Innkeepers Blu-Ray (2012)

Starring Sara Paxton, Pat Healy & Kelly McGillis

Written & Directed by Ti West

Yours truly, Dave Voigt here, also known as The Pop Culture Poet, has finally been acknowledged as an Entertainment Maven. I just want to quickly thank  Matt and his team for bringing me on board and am looking forward to what should be a fun ride!

After a successful run at on the festival circuit, including a stop at our very own Toronto After Dark festival last year, it’s time to dive into a fantastic ghost story out this week on DVD & Blu-Ray from our friends at eOne Films.  Let’s take a look at The Innkeepers.

http://www.eonefilms.com

The Innkeepers centers on the final days of operation of the Yankee Pedlar Inn, a quiet New England hotel with a history of paranormal activity which has seen better days.  On the hotel’s final weekend of operation, its final two employees, Luke and Claire (Healy and Paxton), are determined to find proof that ghosts are haunting the halls of this old hotel. Throw in the hotel’s final customer Leanne, a former actress turned spiritualist, and you’ve got a weekend that none of them will ever forget.

The expression of ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ really comes to mind when watching The Innkeepers as it really is a masterful cinematic stroke of old school scares in assembling the classic ghost story.  Through a near perfect slow burn as the narrative built, writer/director Ti West hardly ever left the actual setting of the hotel, making the story more about what the audience thought was there than what we actually saw.  West didn’t rely on any lazy ‘shock & awe’ moments throughout the film to get the audience interested, but instead used a solid, logical narrative and fantastic character development to have the audience slowly creeping towards the edge of their seats as the tension built to a fevered pitch.  Rather than have it be overly convoluted and complex, he kept it simple and proved that quite often ‘less can be more’ when done right.

As an ensemble cast, everyone involved in this film worked quite well together.  Paxton and Healy had a great dynamic together and we as an audience are immediately invested in their relationship.  As they explore the dark bowels of the Yankee Pedlar Inn, we care about these two and it made the legitimately scary moments all that more effective.  Kelly McGillis as the former actress now new spiritualist dove into the role and actually embraced the self-deprecating humor that the part brought and it was a lot of fun to watch.

http://www.eonefilms.com

The sound and picture quality on the Blu-Ray were top notch, if you are sitting in a dark room you could easily scare yourself just watching it and the special features include a brief behind the scenes look at the film as well as two feature length commentary tracks; one with director Ti West and various members of the production team, as well as a second commentary track with Ti West and stars Sara Paxton and Pat Healy as well as the theatrical trailer.

Ultimately The Innkeepers takes us back to a time that relied on storytelling and stylish filmmaking to elicit a scare or two out of its audience, rather than the more torture porn stylings of today.

4 out of 5 stars

The Innkeepers is widely available at retailers, and to rent at video stores across Toronto if you want to check it out.

Don’t forget to keep it locked right here at Entertainment Maven (like us on Facebook).