MDFF Presents : Kaili Blues @ The Royal

Ben Wheatley Book Launch ! (Nov 30 @ The Royal)

This upcoming Wednesday, November 30th come to The Royal for a launch of Adam Nayman's new book Ben Wheatley: Confusion and Carnage (Critical Press) and a double-bill of Down Terrace (7pm) and The Kill List (9:30pm) with a Skype interview with Wheatley himself. It should be a great opportunity to discover or revisit the films of this singular this genre auteur. The book makes for some compelling and fun reading too! Highly recommended.

Body Double @ The Royal (May 7th, 9PM)

Buzzard at the Royal (April 22nd @ 9PM)

Paul Schrader at The Royal (7PM, April 21st)

Paul Schrader will be attendance at The Royal for an exciting screening of the new digital restoration of Taxi Driver and an exclusive clip from his new film The Canyons as part of the The Seventh Art Live Directors Series on Sunday April 21st at 7PM.

TOWER at The Royal (Feb 22 - 28)

(Kazik Radwanski's Tower will have a week-long theatrical run at The Royal from Friday February 22nd to Thursday the 28th. See the Tower page on the Royal's website for the daily listings)

Recommended Reading:

• Kazik Radwanski's short-films and Tower
• Drive: road movie tendencies in Tower and Krivina 
• The MDFF Interview by The Seventh Art 
• The Trailer for Kazik Radwanski's TOWER  
• The Top Films of 2012 According to Some Toronto Cinephiles 
• The Greatest Films of All Time According to Some Toronto Cinephiles
• New York and Toronto DIY Filmmakers
• Simon Ennis' Lunarcy! (+ Toronto DIY Filmmakers) 
• MDFF Reviews (Green Crayons, Woman Waiting) 
• "The Patron Saints" by Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky

Kazik Radwanski's short-films and Tower

In anticipation for the theatrical run of Kazik Radwanski's Tower that begins at The Royal on February 22^nd, there is going to be a MDFF short-film program at The Royal on Wednesday December 13^th at 7pm. The program includes the MDF trilogy Assault (‘07), Princess Margaret Blvd. (‘08) and Out In That Deep Blue Sea (’09) along with the under-seen Green Crayons (’10) and the rare Kenya documentary Nakuru Song (’08).

Here is the program’s description:

“These films portray themes of ordinary insanity, feelings stirred in mundane actions and everyday absurdities in order to communicate an individual set against societal conventions. In Assault a terrified young man is barely able to talk to lawyers; and in Princess Margaret Blvd. an elderly female with Alzheimer’s navigates through her reality, diagnosis and institutionalization; while Out in that Deep Blue Sea depicts a depressed real-estate agent that is overwhelmed by the balance between personal and business relationships; and Green Crayons documents a boy struggling to understand his first nascent stirrings of guilt and responsibility.”

*****

Radwanski’s cinema lies at the intersection between where his actors and their fictional characters meet. Casting is very important as the non-union, ordinary actors perform a variation of themselves in heightened situations to illustrate a defining character trait. What makes this approach balanced is its authenticity to the ordinary and never letting the characters be reduced to a caricature. It is perhaps less in the method acting tradition of a Robert De Niro or an Al Pacino but instead more like the documentary subjects in the films of a Frederick Wiseman or an Allan King.

For example, in Tower so much of the film comes from what Derek Bogart brings to his performance. The 34-year-old Derek is just some guy: average height, medium build, regular wardrobe, balding… In Tower’s great opening sequence on a sunny day Derek is all by himself in his backyard slowly digging a hole with a shovel. He gets bored and in a daze he leans and rests on the shovel’s wooden handle. He circles around it while whispering and singing to himself. Then the music increases and Derek is in a club. Through the poetics of the scene, with Derek at the center of it, what comes across is his warmth, mystery and confusion. 

Derek is at his best when he’s engaging with the people around him. When talking to someone about their cell-phone, “How do you know if you aren’t getting ripped off if you don’t know what you pay? Do you have data on there?” He deliver his lines really well and has a great sense of timing. In one scene instead of studying an animation manual he does a crossword, and he asks the girl sitting beside her, “Do you know a three-letter word that expresses grief?” When she answers him with the word sad, “No. I don’t think it’s sad, but what about sob?”

Derek is an interesting character and it is seems pertinent that the film is called Tower. Like the CN Tower that looms over the city of Toronto there is something about Derek that speaks to a universal awkwardness. To conclude, on the character of Derek, in a great interview Dreams on Pause with Radwanski and Bogart for the Ryerson Folio, its author Tamara Jones quotes,

“He’s a bit of a mystery. I don’t even fully understand him,” Radwanski says of Derek. Bogart added, “He’s almost agnostic. Maybe it’s something that can’t be understood.”

KRIVINA at The Royal (Jan 25 - 31)

(Krivina will have a week-long theatrical run at The Royal from Friday January 25th to Thursday the 31st. See the Krivina page on the Royal's website for the daily listings)

Recommended Reading:

• Drive: road movie tendencies in Tower and Krivina 
• The Tarkovsky Influence on "Krivina" 
• Igor Drljača's Sarajevo Memories 
• The Top Films of 2012 According to Some Toronto Cinephiles  
• New York and Toronto DIY Filmmakers (+ review of THE BLACK BALLOON) 
• First Generation Filmmaker: the Films of Nicolás Pereda 
• Local Listings: Igor Drljača’s short Films, College Street Pictures, Jonas Mekas, Media Mondays, Superimposition

Whit Stillman at The Royal (December 12th to the 13th)

One of the most exciting things in the world of Toronto film-criticism - along with Andrew Parker's extensive reviews of each week's new releases - is the video-magazine, The Seventh Art. When most film criticism keeps using the written format - relying on second-hand descriptions of images - The Seventh Art excels with their video-essays by showing the scenes along with voice-over narration commenting on them.

It is great news to hear that The Seventh Art is branching outward toward film programming as this week as part of a new initiative, the Live Directors Series, invited Whit Stillman to introduce two of his films. So at The Royal on Wednesday, December 12th at 7PM they are screening Metropolitan (1990) and on Thursday, December 13th at 7PM they are screening The Last Day of Disco (1998).

It is worth bringing up something Stillman talks about in the recent interview in Bad Day magazine (N.14),

“I have a theory that people should approach movie experiences like theater experiences. Every showing of a film, no matter what the format, is all performance, it’s about the interaction between the person and the piece. Even though the actor’s performance doesn’t change, it’s vastly different each time someone sees it, how they respond."

It's exciting to have the opportunity to see these films with the director in attendance and with a lively host Christopher Heron to moderate the Q&A.

BESTIAIRE by Denis Côté

"In this apparently documentary mode Côté is at his most Bressonian, collecting sound-image fragments in all their materiality to continually shift expression from one relation of part-object-meaning to another in a series of never totalized, ever-open relations." - Scott Birdwise (Entre Nous: The Cinema of Denis Côté)

(Bestiaire by Denis Côté will be playing at The Royal from December 7th to the 11th)