THE LAST EXORCISM - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Effective mock-doc with devil worship.

In anticipation of the upcoming 2015 Toronto Hot Docs International Festival of Documentary Cinema, herewith is a review of one of my favourite horror mock-docs.

The Last Exorcism (2010)
dir. Daniel Stamm
Starring: Patrick Fabian, Ashley Bell, Iris Bahr, Louis Herthum, Caleb Landry Jones and Tony Bentley

Review By Greg Klymkiw

I suppose we have to thank The Blair Witch Project for all the mock-doc shaky-cam thrillers of the past 15 years. I don't even like it much. The movie had a vague visceral effectiveness upon a first viewing, but the real test for all these pictures is how they hold up on repeated viewings. Blair Witch doesn't hold up to that kind of scrutiny at all.

Much like other one-trick-pony efforts such as Christopher "One Idea" Nolan's Memento or the reprehensible pile of filth Man Bites Dog, the aforementioned titles live and then die a miserable death because so much of them rest on the shoulders of their gimmick. In fact, a much better film in this genre, might well be the patriarch of them all, Jim McBride's utterly haunting and creepy David Holzman's Diary which, after over forty years still has the power to blow an audience away as it has way more going for it than its conceit (though its central figure is indeed the walking, talking embodiment of conceit).

My personal favourites of the recent forays into this form of telling creepy stories are Bobcat Goldthwait's magnificent Bigfoot chiller Willow Creek and Oren Peli's stunning Paranormal Activity. Both pictures are rooted in humanity against extraordinary backdrops and bear up under repeated scrutiny.

And now we have, from producer Eli (The Bear Jew) Roth, a very effective horror picture directed by Daniel Stamm which, presents its nerve jangling tale of demonic possession with a reasonable degree of intelligence and style. It's also held up nicely to repeated viewings.

The Last Exorcism is an apparent documentary about preacher Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian), famous and popular man o' God who began his career (much like the real-life Marjoe Gortner) as a child evangelist and worked his way up to being a lower drawer Jimmy Swaggart. Cotton supplements his earnings as an exorcist, which is where he's really made his mark, but recent events have tested his faith and he invites documentary filmmaker Iris Reisen (Iris Bahr) to enter his life - warts and all.

Cotton receives numerous requests to perform exorcisms, but his belief in their effectiveness has more to do with the healing powers he wields through his performance. He goes so far as to rig the exorcisms with simple, but really compelling special effects. He randomly picks an exorcism request off a pile of letters on his desk and off the crew goes to watch him do his stuff. His hope is to expose himself, to expose all exorcists, to expose his own lack of faith. He doesn't believe in the devil and he doesn't believe the exorcism has any special Heavenly significance. He believes in his skill to heal, but due to some recent tragedies where other holy men have committed exorcisms that have traumatized the "possessed" - so much so that they have actually died - he hopes to expose the absurdity and inherent danger in such practices, especially by those not as skilled as he.

He soon enters the world of the Louisiana backwoods Sweetzer family who have been plagued with livestock mutilations and very odd behaviour from 16-year-old Nell (Ashley Bell). Cotton is convinced the problem is psychological and he exorcises, with the help of his bag of tricks, the demon from the girl's soul.

Sooner than you can say "The power of Christ compels thee!" it becomes obvious that there's more to the girl than meets the eye. She's obviously suffered a severe trauma - possibly sexual abuse or... she really is possessed by a demon.

Horror ensues. And a lot of the horror in the picture is extremely effective - lots of creepy crawly stuff and numerous all-out shit-your-pants pyrotechnics. Most impressively, these are bereft of CGI and delivered by the actors.

Ashley Bell is especially astounding in a performance that is highly physical. The gymnastics of self mutilation are rendered by Ms. Bell and Ms. Bell alone. She's not only brilliant physically, but she plumbs the depths of an incredibly tortured young woman with the sort of skill that signals a great talent to keep an eye on.

Equally impressive in the acting sweepstakes is Patrick Fabian as Cotton. Bringing the right balance of showmanship, charm and sleaziness to the table and as the film progresses, a very strong sense in the character's rekindling of faith, Fabian makes us believe as readily as he makes his "patients" believe. It's to the film's credit that faith still plays an important role in the story. While critical of organized religion, it follows the intricacies of Cotton's own spiritual struggles and ultimately, places stock in this, or if you will, his belief in God.

One of the more astounding elements is that the picture not only features lots of magnificent exorcism, but in what must be a first, we also get some mega-devil-worship dolloped lovingly into the mix. Maybe I'm wrong about this, but I don't recall seeing anything (or at least anything good) where we are plunged into a movie about exorcism that then pulls the delicious, tantalizing card of devil worship.

I love devil worship.

And let me guarantee you, The Last Exorcism features devil worship so profoundly disturbing that it rivals some of my favourite devil worship sequences in such classics of the genre as Hammer's The Devil Rides Out, The Satanic Rites of Dracula, and Race With The Devil.

This is one of those movies where horror aficionados can do the math on all the expertly handled moments of major-league delivery and determine the picture's ultimate worth - especiallywhen the picture is good even beyond the math.

So here's the tally: Mutilation (of animals and humans), provocative sexual overtones, lots of "in-the-name-of-Jesus" prayers and Latin incantation. One can never get enough of that. And last, but not least, one of the most harrowing devil worship sequences replete with a bloody, goo dripping deformed demon baby with blood gushing geyser-like from the nether regions of the woman trussed to the unholy altar of Satan.

Seriously. What's not to like?

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***½ 3-and-a-half Stars

The Last Exorcism is available on DVD and BluRay via E-One.

LAW ABIDING CITIZEN - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Lame Vigilante Hijinx pale in comparison to the best

Law Abiding Citizen (2009) *1/2
dir. F. Gary Gray
Starring: Gerard Butler,
Jamie Foxx, Colm Meaney

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Great vigilante movies are driven by a hero or anti-hero that we connect with on a personal level and where ultimately, there are few, if no shades of grey in the quest for retribution. They are also driven by a directorial style that is not only efficient, but endowed with a clear obsessive voice.

Michael Winner’s classic 1974 thriller Death Wish is the first mainstream picture in a decidedly urban setting to make vigilantism entertaining and acceptable as an alternative to supposed law and order. Charles Bronson starred as Paul Kersey, a Manhattan architect whose perfect life is shattered when a pack of thugs home invade his wife and daughter, rape and beat them to a pulp, send the wife to her grave and the daughter to a catatonic state. Frustrated by the seeming indifference of the police and the general lack of law and order, Kersey embarks on a one-man vendetta against crime – roaming the mean streets at night and inviting random acts of violence against him to provide ample opportunities to turn the tables and blow the filth away. The chief investigator of these vigilante slayings is a detective played by the sympathetic, jowly and always-engaging Vincent Gardenia. Between bouts of exquisite vigilante violence and an entertaining cat-and-mouse game between Bronson and Gardenia, Death Wish had “hit” written all over it, playing as it did to packed houses of cheering blood-lusting action enthusiasts in addition to crossing over and appealing to movie-goers of all stripes..

Winner himself seemed to hit his stride as a director with Death Wish – displaying virtuosity and a penchant for nastiness that was seldom matched either by his own work or others (save for Don Siegel and Sam Peckinpah who decidedly went further and with even more style in their own ground-breaking pictures). That said, Winner was no slouch in the style department. With Death Wish, his style was dark, clinical and even now, it’s a film that packs a considerable wallop. Aided by Wendell (Anatomy of a Murder) Mayes’s terrific single-minded screenplay, the picture wisely dispensed with the shades of grey in the original source material of Brian Garfield’s novel. The thematic retribution staple of so many westerns and historical pieces was now placed in a contemporary context and was, for quite some time, accepted by audiences with very open arms.

With a great tradition of vigilante pictures since the ground breaking Death Wish (including the delightful surprise hit Taken), Law Abiding Citizen had a lot of potential to join this delicious coterie of moral reprehensibility as mass entertainment. Kurt Wimmer’s ambitious screenplay sets the wheels in motion for vigilantism directed at ALL the perpetrators of crime – the criminals, the lawyers AND the entire justice system. Seeing the filth get their come-uppance is always pleasurable, but to have the vigilante act upon the system itself, not unlike a home-grown terrorist, could have taken the genre into a whole new realm.

The buff macho hero at the centre of Law Abiding Citizen is seeming everyman Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) who is home-invaded, forced to watch as his wife and child are raped and murdered, then left for dead – bound, gagged and bleeding on his living room floor. As if this wasn’t indignity enough, Clyde watches helplessly as the ambitious Philadelphia prosecutor Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) negotiates a plea-bargain and sends the accomplice to a death sentence while the foul perpetrator of the violence is handed a slap on the wrists. Needless to say, revenge is extracted on both the accomplice and the true person behind the heinous crime in a manner that puts most torture porn to shame. That’s just an appetizer, though. Where the real fun begins is when our hero plays cat and mouse with the system that let him down and he begins murdering lawyers, judges and politicians – in the City of Brotherly Love, no less.

Sadly, the picture is a letdown on two prime counts. Firstly, and most notably, the direction provided by F. Gary Gray is so utterly lacklustre that this potentially stirring narrative plods forward – not with an obsessive quality, but with the dull, single-mindedness of a bull elephant rampaging about a fine china shop. Gray is a director who at his best is barely competent (The Italian Job remake) and at his worst, completely bereft of talent (Be Cool, the miserable sequel to Get Shorty). Secondly, Kurt Wimmer’s potentially solid screenplay veers into confused, schizophrenic territory where the anti-hero becomes a sort of protagonist to the prosecutor, who is portrayed, not as the antagonist, but as the eventual hero. Unfortunately, the prosecutor is clearly a bonehead. He ignores his duties as a family man for his job, he allows ambition to guide his actions and he becomes obsessed with nailing the vigilante to save his own ass – personally and professionally. In many ways, this is a similar problem that drags down Scorsese’s (at least well crafted) remake of Cape Fear where the simple good versus evil story is marred with the wrongheaded attempt to shade the tale with grey – what made J. Lee Thompson’s original so powerful was the pure adherence to black and white (lawyer – good, psychopath – bad, unlike Scorsese’s: lawyer – morally ambiguous, psychopath – bad, but almost justified in exacting terror upon the lawyer).

One wonders if Wimmer’s Law Abiding Citizen screenplay was unceremoniously and bone-headedly over-tweaked-and-tinkered-with to provide new-fangled moral ambiguity to what should have been a simple, but effective white-hat-black-hat action thriller. Most importantly, one also wonders if it might have been a more successful outing if Wimmer had directed himself. As a director, Wimmer's Milla Jovovich ass-kicker Ultraviolet displayed just the sort of panache and obsessive qualities that could have made “Law Abiding Citizen” a genuinely entertaining and effective vigilante picture. It was, alas, not to be. Instead, we’re saddled with a confused, dull and by-the-numbers action thriller that lacks a necessary nastiness and clear directorial voice. We still get to see lawyers, judges and politicians blown away along with criminal scum and while this is not without considerable entertainment value, it all could have risen above the mere IDEA of such delightful proceedings and instead delivered the real goods.

"Law Abiding Citizen" is available on DVD/Blu-Ray from Alliance/E-One.

9 - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Lovely Animated Science Fiction Feature a great buy on Blu-Ray

9 (2009) ***½
dir. Shane Acker
Starring the voices of: Elijah Wood, Christopher Plummer, John C. Reilly, Martin Landau, Jennifer Connelly, Crispin Glover

Review By Greg Klymkiw

9 is blessed with a simple narrative that, not unlike the little engine that could, drives the picture forward with the force of a powerful springboard – yielding big ideas and exquisitely generating emotional responses as viscerally thrilling as they are profoundly moving. Based on his acclaimed award-winning and Oscar-nominated short, director Shane Acker attracted the likes of such visionaries as Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov to assist with the production of his feature debut. Blending the dark magical qualities of the former and the razzle-dazzle rollercoaster ride action of the latter, Acker goes the distance and then some with this astoundingly gorgeous animated sci-fi adventure. He also brings his own unique visual style to the fore and creates a movie that careens through a futuristic, yet retro look that is altogether unique. On a story-level, Acker builds to a suspenseful climax and a conclusion that is almost as awe-inspiring in its sense of spirituality as the final moments of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

It’s a ride that keeps you glued to the screen and desperately wanting, by the end, to not leave the cinema. He keeps you wanting more and this is a considerable virtue, indeed. However, rather than leaving unanswered narrative questions, you are left with much that is cerebral and, dare I say, philosophical.

Set in a post-apocalyptic world that resembles our own (but early 20th century retro), a strange little rag doll with the number 9 stitched on his back (Elijah Wood), comes to life in a ramshackle room with the long-dead body of an old man, his inventor (Alan Oppenheimer). He eventually discovers others like himself, tucked away in a bombed-out cathedral while huge metal machine monsters roam the lifeless planet seeking to destroy the rag dolls. Led by the patriarchal #1 (Christopher Plummer), the dolls are convinced they must hide to survive, but #9 is convinced that the key to their continued existence is to fight back, and most importantly, try to discover the reason why the monsters are hell-bent on wiping them out. #9 leads the battle charge with the help of #5 (John C. Reilly), a mechanical whiz, #2 (Martin Landau), an old scientist, #6 (Crispin Glover), a feverishly crazed artist, #7 (Jennifer Connelly) a “gorgeous” ninja-styled ass-kicker (a “ninjette”?) and the hulking more-brawn-than-brains #8 (Fred Tatasciore). As it turns out, it’s not just the existence of the rag dolls that’s in peril, but the potential to bring real life back to the planet.

One of the extraordinary aspects of 9 is Acker’s use of the all-star cast of voices. This is not the usual assembly of names to inject boxoffice appeal into an animated film. Each and every actor used (save for one sore thumb) is endowed with the sort of voice one needs to give life to animated characters. Christopher Plummer is not surprisingly, in excellent form as the authoritarian figure that demands adherence to his belief that survival can only mean keeping the lowest profile possible. This said, however, would paint a portrait of a character far too one-dimensional for an actor as great as Plummer to be wasted on and there is another aspect of #1 that we get subtle glimpses of so that his eventual transformation comes as one of those surprises we should have seen coming right from the very beginning. All the other actors acquit themselves superbly, but the one low-point is Jennifer Connelly’s weak voice work that borders on cliché. But no matter, Wood is a great, finely textured hero, Reilly a warm and fun presence and Glover, especially and predictably brilliant as a tortured artist.

Acker has a real gift for blending images that are stunning in their detail – in fact, almost awe-inspiring – and yet, that are as dark and bleak as all get out. The shattered ruins of a civilization that once was – lying dead under greenish clouds of some vaguely nuclear haze are powerful indeed. Similar to the strange feelings evoked by John Boorman in Hope and Glory, his live-action autobiographical portrait of England during World War II where, to a child, there was something oddly fun about the Blitz in a boys’ adventure manner – Acker manages to make this dead world a kind of cool playground. To the dolls, it’s as dangerous as it is fascinating. And this is exactly one of the things that stays with you after you see 9. Acker allows you to fill the shoes of his title character and much of what you experience is from his perspective. Even George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead had this going for it – especially in the main setting within the mall where the survivors create their own Heaven on an Earth that has become a living Hell. For the dolls in 9, it’s especially evocative since they’ve never really known anything else and certainly for the title character, he is very much a child born into a world that is dizzyingly intoxicating.

The depiction of life before the apocalypse is seen mostly in strange flashbacks or film footage and yellowed newspaper clippings where Acker creates a Hitler-like global dictator referred to only as The Chancellor (Tom Kane), a foul despot who uses the scientist/inventor (whose corpse we see at the beginning of the film) to create a world of deadly machines that have a life and mind of their own. The scientist, duped into thinking his life’s work will be used for the good of mankind, suffers the slings and arrows of his own genius as he sees the machines used to destroy The Chancellor’s enemies and eventually, mankind itself.

This, of course, is where Acker parcels out the spiritual element of the picture. Though the cathedral is initially seen as a place of sanctuary, it soon becomes, like all symbols of organized religion, a place that represents authoritarian rule and not unlike the totalitarian evil that has destroyed the world. But what’s very interesting and extremely moving is how Acker depicts the notion of how many scientists – especially astrophysicists – have embraced the notion of a higher power. This is not God as some patriarchal old dude with a furry white beard, but something far more mind-boggling. It is the notion that science IS spiritual – that the very idea and essence of soul is so fully rooted in Creation itself. This is what eventually carries the picture to a conclusion that is tremendously moving.

9 has a perfect running time. At 78 minutes it moves in mysterious ways. Though short in length, it’s a picture that has as many moments of breathing room as it does moments of utterly breathtaking, break-neck action. Contemporary audiences are so out of step with just how short many features were during the Golden Age of Cinema that it’s conceivable that some people might be taken aback by just how short it is. This, I feel, is their loss – getting one’s money’s worth at the movies has less to do with how much running time can be applied to a picture, but just how satisfying the ride actually is.

And make no mistake, 9 is a ride that is very much worth taking.

Like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Acker infuses his film with a Judeo-Christian ethic and finally, it is a sacrifice – the ultimate sacrifice, in fact – which opens the doors to a sense of rebirth. And in a world as dead and bleak as the one Acker fashions, mankind’s redemption is only attainable through rebirth.

For much of the film’s running time, Acker presents us with a perfect example of what’s often referred to as “A Terrible Beauty”, but ultimately, what he delivers is pure, unadulterated beauty. It’s not something we get enough of in movies today. Most importantly, it’s not something we get enough of in life. 9 admirably fills a void on both counts.

"9" looks absolutely gorgeous on Blu-Ray and it's well worth owning. It's available in a number of terrific bargain-priced editions via Alliance/E-One.

CAPITALISM: A LOVE STORY - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Michael Moore Entertainingly Defends Common Man

Capitalism: A Love Story (2009) ****
dir. Michael Moore

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Michael Moore is a showman – an entertainer of the highest order. He’s also one of the few filmmakers who seems willing (and indeed able) to tackle the insanity that is the United States of America with such a perfect blend of in-your-face chutzpah, humour (of both the dry and broad variety), hard-hitting straight-up journalism, muck-raking reportage of the most obvious kind and a feel for the common man that is as genuine as it is profoundly and resolutely moving.

In the 20 years Moore has been making movies – both the world AND cinema, have been a much better place because of his work. He’s scrappier than a wiry street mutt and as steel-jawed as a mastiff.

Moore’s ramshackle, yet remarkable debut feature Roger and Me examined how General Motors Corporation heartlessly destroyed profitable factories in Flint, Michigan (Moore’s home town) in order to increase profits by simply laying off thousands of workers. With Capitalism: A Love Story, Moore continues to stand his ground as the mouthpiece of the working stiff and the worst nightmare of corporate and political sleazebags.

Using himself as a “character” in his documentaries, Moore has made one deliciously entertaining picture after another. Dealing with such diverse subjects as gun control (or lack thereof), the American health system (or lack thereof) and the inner-workings of the mind of President George W. Bush (or – you guessed it! – lack thereof), Moore is an activist extraordinaire who exposes hard truth with laughs, tears and a whole lot of the old razzle-dazzle.

And Capitalism: A Love Story is nothing if not dazzling. Like all good love stories we get a delightful bit of the old meet-cute (via 50s educational films on capitalism and the American way), the instant attraction (the rise of fake post-war American prosperity), the pursuit (the American dream), the jeopardy (the corporate takeover of America), the loss (how capitalism failed us) and, in a strange way – boy does indeed get girl back again, but in that bittersweet way where he kind of gets something he didn’t bargain for, but still has fresh hope for the future (Obama).

Still, within the picture, there appears little hope for the family who has their home stolen from them by the bank, but is offered $1000.00 to clean the house and dispose of a lifetime of memories. How much hope could their be for another family that refuses to leave their home – waiting for the Sheriff and his men to “illegally” break down the doors and remove them by force? Such images and sad stories are the backdrop for the corporate crime of the mortgage scandal and the even bigger crime of the very non-capitalist government bailout of the banks wherein high placed executives cut themselves huge bonus cheques while continuing to steal homes from honest, hard-working people. Even more scandalous is that these same banks don’t necessarily even hold the mortgages since the debt has been pieced off, bought, sold and traded. This almost unbelievable corporate gangster-ism is countered when Moore gets Ohio Democrat politician Marcy Kaptur on-camera admitting to the fact that she tells all her constituents not to move and to demand, as is their right, a copy of the mortgage itself which she further reveals is probably no longer with the bank anyway.

Another extraordinary and, I daresay groundbreaking moment in Moore’s picture is when – for the very first time in history (!!!!!) – actual film footage of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is shown wherein he declares that all Americans have the basic right to jobs, healthcare, homes and education – a right that must, according to Roosevelt, be inscribed in stone and adhered to if America is to ever become the great country its founders envisioned. Roosevelt steadfastly declares that there must be a new Bill of Rights, a second Bill of Rights that guarantees the basics of a good life (as opposed, one supposes to the right to bear arms). Alas, Roosevelt was too sick to deliver his statements in public. The footage was commissioned by him and filmed privately in the White House. He died some months later. The footage was never shown – not then, not ever and only NOW in Moore’s film. How this astonishing filmed historic record was suppressed is, on one hand, beyond me, but on the other, it makes perfect sense – especially within the picture Moore paints – of a country, if not an entire planet that is ruled, not by government, not by the people, but by corporate entities and a veritable handful of individuals who hold the vast majority of the world’s wealth.

One of the most grotesque insights into the corruption and moral bankruptcy of capitalism is the use of “dead peasant” insurance where major companies (including, naturally, Wal-Mart) take out life insurance policies on their employees and when these employees die, the beneficiary is not the families of the deceased, but the corporation they work for. That this is even legal is bile inducing. To see the shattered families who find out that their departed loved ones have been exploited in this fashion is heartbreaking. To think that companies look upon their departed employees as “dead peasants” is beyond moral reprehensibility. This enters the realm of pure evil. Hitler’s a pussycat compared to these scumbags.

In addition to all the hard-hitting stuff in the movie, we also get healthy doses of Moore up to his (borderline cliché by this point) amusing antics of shit disturbing – tussling with security guards, trying to make citizens’ arrests of corporate bigwigs, wrapping crime scene tape around banks and insurance companies, etc. Thankfully, these moments of levity hammer the point home further, but like the best filmmaking (which frankly is ALL propaganda to my way of thinking), it’s supremely entertaining.

Where the film somewhat betrays Moore’s and, in fact, most of the world’s naïve belief is the bittersweet final moments of the film where Moore questions the notions of all “isms” to be the real answer to solving the world’s woes. Moore feels the real victor is Democracy. Sorry, Mike. Democracy is bought and paid for. Obama winning means nothing. He’s either going to sell out in a more gentle manner than his Republican colleagues or he will be set-up to screw up and be taken down, or if and when he tries to do something genuinely good that’s not a compromise or a half-measure, he’ll be murdered.

For me, Moore does such a good job of exposing the truth behind what and who really rules our souls that I don’t believe in much of anything anymore – other than great entertainment, which this picture most certainly is.

"Capitalism: A Love Story" is available on Blu-Ray and DVD via Alliance/E-One.

A HARD DAY'S NIGHT - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Wherein Ringo Starr Searches For His Very Soul

The Beatles' classic musical comedy as fresh today as if made just yesterday instead of 50 years ago!

A Hard Day’s Night (1964) ****
Dir. Richard Lester
Starring: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Wilfrid Brambell, Victor Spinetti

Review By Greg Klymkiw

This is one astounding picture. I first saw A Hard Day's Night at the age of five. It is now almost half a century later and I have seen it innumerable times and in several formats – more times on a big screen in 35mm than I can remember, on 16mm with my own Bell and Howell Auto-load projector, Beta, VHS, laser disc, DVD and now Blu-Ray. It is a movie that never gets stale. Each time I see it, it seems like I’m seeing it for the first time and in this sense, it is truly timeless on a personal level. On every other level, it's just plain timeless. As a movie and in the larger scheme of things, it’s a gleefully entertaining movie - a mad, freewheeling portrait of the greatest rock and roll band of all time and surely one of the most influential motion pictures during the latter half of cinema’s relatively short history.

As well, it is one of the truly important works to come out of a period often referred to as the British New Wave where the silver screens lit-up with a new way of telling stories on both a stylistic and content level. A series of comedies and dramas from a combination of foreign expat directors living in the United Kingdom as well as indigenous talent were the order of the day. These pictures delivered cutting edge satire, anarchic laughs, kitchen sink realism, grim and/or humorous looks at working and middle class society and more often than not, focusing upon the hopes and dreams (both dashed and realized) of young adults.

There were, for example, the "angry young man" pictures featuring the likes of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay - grimy little affairs that were depressingly cool. And then, there were the comedies - the best of which came from a director who contributed a great deal to changing the face of how movies could be made.

Richard Lester, the gifted American-born expatriate in London, was this very director and A Hard Day’s Night is unquestionably his masterpiece. Conceived just before the “Beatlemania” craze really exploded on an international level, Lester was probably the best man for the job of creating the sort of work that would have the greatest impact. Having directed and produced several British TV comedy programs featuring the iconoclastic Goons (including the likes of Peter Sellers, Kevin Connor and Spike Milligan) and with an Oscar nominated short film and a hit feature The Mouse on the Moon under his belt, Lester not only wore the shoes of director ever-so-comfortably on The Beatles' big-screen debut, he dove into the job with the mad passion of a Welles or an Eisenstein. This was not going to be just any rock and roll musical – it was going to be THE rock and roll musical – and as such, it informed filmmaking technique and style in ways we still experience in cinema even now.

Lester’s approach was to capture the slender tale in a documentary style with black and white photography; handheld cameras galore with freewheeling movement, but always gorgeously composed, all stunningly shot by the great Gilbert Taylor of Dr. Strangelove and Repulsion fame. Even more insanely, all sequences aboard moving trains were shot on, uh, moving trains! The approach to editing via John – Frenzy, Zulu, A Fish Called Wanda – Jympson's exquisite shearing would have made Sergei Eisenstein both dizzy and sick with envy.

The usual approach to rock movies at this time was to assemble a gaggle of performers and have them deliver a series of tunes in the dullest, most conservative fashion or worse yet, to plunk the likes of Elvis into (mostly) silly vehicles that were far below the dignity levels such performers demanded. Lester, on the other hand, wanted to propel us with lots of humour (sheer silliness mixed with sharply tuned wit), a dizzying camera and cool cuts that drew attention to their sheer virtuosity as well as performing the task of always moving us forward.

What this approach needed was a script like no other. Securing the services of the Welsh-born and Liverpool-raised actor, comedian, playwright and screenwriter Alun Owen. He proved to be a godsend to both Lester and the Beatles by crafting a simple narrative involving a day and a half in the life of the mop-topped Liverpudlians wherein they repeatedly shirk their responsibilities as rock stars and just have tons of fun – much to the consternation of their road manager (Norman Rossington), the bemusement of his assistant (John Junkin), the exasperation of a harried live TV director (Victor Spinetti) and to the delight of Paul McCartney’s (fictional) Grandfather (Wilfrid Brambell) who exploits his proximity to the rock stars to show himself a grand old time.

Amidst all this frivolity, Owen concocts several brilliant character-elements and plot-plots that tie both absurdly and realistically into the personae of the Beatles themselves. The one that infuses the movie with considerable conflict, but also knee-slapping laughs is when Ringo goes missing on a soul search.

Ringo on a soul search?

Ladies and gentlemen, I reiterate and give you - ONE GREAT SCRIPT!

Eventually, all are reunited for a totally kick-ass show in front of thousands of screaming, swooning kids and WOW! Can it get more simple and pure than this? Thankfully no! It’s just what the doctor ordered for this picture. Even more impressive is Owen’s brilliant dialogue and the endless opportunities to have the boys duck in and out of cabs, run from screaming teenyboppers and find as many different means of escape from both their fans and responsibilities – crashing through service doors, cascading down fire escapes and partying up a storm against the backdrop of the swinging-est London imaginable.

Not surprisingly, given the auteurist tendency to downplay the importance of screenwriters that aren’t the auteurs themselves, Richard Lester has uncharitably stated that much of Owen’s script was jettisoned in favour of letting the Beatles ad-lib. Enough statements from many others refute this assertion to support what really seems to be the truth of the matter – Owen spent a considerable amount of time with The Beatles on their journeys before setting narrative and dialogue to paper and went out of his way to create words perfectly suited to John, Paul, George and Ringo so that they’d be comfortable playing them and, on rare occasions have a solid springboard to ad-lib (which according to most reports is no more than 10 to 15% anyway).

And then there is the music! The title track “A Hard Day’s Night” (taken from one of Ringo’s delightful malapropisms), “Can’t Buy Me Love”, “Tell Me Why”, “She Loves You (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah)”, “I Should Have Known Better” and then some are featured in stunning concert footage and/or within the narrative body of the film, and most notably are not unlike music videos before the notion of music videos even existed. This latter point is especially important to add some illumination. Lester, always the consummate filmmaker didn’t throw images and cuts at us willy-nilly, but actually adhered to the conventions of filmmaking (establishing shots, mediums, reverses, close-ups, etc.) by making it seem like he did anything but.

It’s brilliantly, beautifully orchestrated cinematic anarchy in all the purity and simplicity that great pictures are ultimately endowed with, allowing, of course for differing levels and perspectives to grow and to flow naturally and organically out of the mise-en-scene. Most extraordinarily, even though it's a movie set in a different time and shot 50 years ago, it feels as free and original and fresh as if it had been shot, as that great Beatles tune reminds us: Yesterday!

“A Hard Day’s Night” is available on a Collector’s Edition Blu-Ray via Alliance Films (Universal Home Entertainment, Canada). The new Blu-Ray release will disappoint some home videophiles since the source material seems no different that what appeared on the previous DVD and laserdisc releases. That said, Blu-Ray still makes anything and everything look better and “A Hard Day’s Night” is no exception. This recent Blu-Ray release also contains a decent clutch of extra materials, which are surprisingly worth watching (since most of them on most releases, I find, are not). Until a complete re-mastering (or better one) comes along, this will most certainly do.

THE UNKNOWN KNOWN - Review By Greg Klymkiw - #TIFF 2013- Moe Does Donald Good - Does Him REEL Good

The Unknown Known (2013) ****
Dir. Errol Morris
Starring: Donald Rumsfeld

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Ace master documentary filmmaker Errol Morris is back in familiar territory with this one-on-one exploration of the life and times of George W. Bush's Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the clearly gifted master of political doubletalk, misinformation, disinformation and perhaps one of the most dangerous, despicable and evil Americans of the past decade. Much like The Fog of War, Morris' exploration of Robert McNamara, Defense Secretary during the Vietnam War, Morris hits his new subject with tough questions. Blending archival footage, graphs, charts and an assortment of Rumsfeld's memos (numbering over 20,000 he issued during a six-year period) the veteran documentarian attempts to paint as honest a portrait as possible of a political mastermind of legal mass murder, or, if you will, the war against terror. (The only thing missing is a Philip Glass score - inexplicably replaced with a so-so Danny Elfman score.) McNamara was a different beast, though. He at least seemed to be telling the truth. None of that - truth, that is - appears to be on display here.

With a malevolent grin, Rumsfeld makes you think he's letting the cat in the bag slip out, but in the same breath, he's letting you know the cat's still in the bag and that his final word on the matter will always ensure that the bag's indeed, in the river. In fact, we never get a clear picture of anything from Rumsfeld. It always seems clear, but never feels truthful. In several contexts, Rumsfeld is caught completely contradicting himself and hilariously ignoring and/or talking his way out of his obvious falsehoods and/or contradictions

The film delivers a good deal of personal and historical detail on Rumsfeld, the most fascinating of which is his keen interest in and study of history - especially, not surprisingly, in terms of war. When he discusses America's past, one gets a clear sense of how his own decisions are colored by his analysis of past American failures and triumphs. For example, he refers to America's unpreparedness for the attack on Pearl Harbor as "a failure of the imagination". Of course, he prides himself on his own imagination and how it leads to a constant state of "worry" - one which he maintains is the ultimate state of preparedness. He goes so far as to suggest that great nations must never accept the notion that peace can ever be achieved.

"If you wish for peace," Rumsfeld maintains you must immediately begin to "prepare for war."

Morris usually keeps his cool as the off-screen interviewer, but on occasion, his utter incredulity with respect to Rumsfeld's delectable twisting of the truth is genuinely entertaining. We're witness to one magnificent turn of phrase after another. The man is a master spin doctor and even more astoundingly, he might actually be the best generator of juicy sound bites in the world - ever. Here's a tiny, but choice grocery list of a few of them:

"All generalizations are false, including this one," he proclaims.

"The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," he opines on weapons of mass destruction or lack thereof in Iraq.

Of course, Rumsfeld treats us to one of his astounding humdingers (which Morris uses for the film's title): "There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we don't know we don't know. The unknown known, however, is a thing that we know, but are unaware of knowing."

And there are even some sound bites that feel genuine, almost moving, such as his response to 9/11 and an explanation for his subsequent actions: "Something terrible happened on my watch."

If Rumsfeld seems less up-front in this film than McNamara was in The Fog of War, it doesn't make him any less fascinating and Morris expertly presents us with a movie that might have even more obvious entertainment value. The almost-easy-to-swallow nature of The Unknown Known in terms of how engaging it is as a movie, also doesn't make it any less an important record of contemporary American history - and by extension, world history.

The whole movie, in fact, is a hoot from beginning to end, but what we're ultimately presented and left with is 96 minutes of lies - or, at the very least, what Rumsfeld wants us to hear, even if we don't believe a word.

The man has no shame. None. He could have been a President.

"The Unknown Known" is part of the TIFF Docs series at the Toronto International Film Festival 2013. Visit the TIFF website HERE. The film is being distributed via E-One.

THE WORLD'S END - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Alcoholism is seldom a laughing matter, nor is this movie.

The World's End (2013) *
Dir. Edgar Wright
Starring: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Rosamund Pike, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman, Eddie Marsan

Review By Greg Klymkiw

I don't believe in Sacred Cows. For me - everything - and I do mean everything can be funny. Context and form are, however, important factors in the notion of finding humour in all things and I must admit to a considerable degree of intolerance when it comes to plumbing the depths of alcohol abuse for fun.

W.C. Fields was always able to get away with it because his very being was a self awareness in his own alcoholism - we responded to the sad sack misanthrope who sought solace in booze to keep himself sane in a less than sane world and the bitterly funny irony of a bona fide disease being both the cause and cure of his almost hate-filled view of a world rife with hypocrisy and repression. Fields always rode the line separating heartache from hilarity, but with his toe dipped in the latter.

The World's End, a new film from the Shaun of the Dead team, is probably a work that its creators had hoped would rise above surface ambitions to generate laughs from an all night pub crawl, but the content is seriously amiss and the form ill-equipped to handle the full ramifications of its subtextual goals. This is a movie that wants to have it too many which-ways and ends up serving none of them on a satisfactory level.

Co-writer and star Simon Pegg plays Gary, a forty-something ne'er–do–well who manages to convince his old chums to follow him back to the stomping grounds of their youth in order to recreate and actually finish a booze-up odyssey they failed to completely fulfill some twenty years earlier. His friends all have jobs, families and/or responsibiities, while Gary has eschewed all semblance of normalcy for a life of adolescent hedonism long after the point that such activities tend to feel pathetically juvenile.

Once assembled in the hamlet of their younger days, the goal is to hit every pub in one night and make it to the Holy Grail of pubs, The World's End. Along the way, old resentments and rivalries begin to rear their ugly heads and the men are forced to confront demons they long ago forced into the closet. What makes this entire indulgence somewhat disparate from other tales of pathetic middle aged men trying to recreate their youth is the slow realization that all is not right in the place they left behind two decades earlier.

Ye Olde Towne has, you see, been insidiously taken over by a New World Order that's not of this Earth, so in addition to the aforementioned emotional gymnastics threatening the sacred bonds of male camaraderie, the boys find themselves up against a cross between the pod-people of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the hideous underbelly masked by human flesh in They Live.

The entire movie is wrapped in a thematic ribbon which suggests how we can never truly turn back the clock of time and go home again to long-ago halcyon days of yore, but if we do, it's important to save the world from alien invasion.

On paper, this sounds a whole lot better than it actually is. The biggest problem is the movie's fey lightheartedness with respect to its central character Gary (and by extension, the proceedings of the whole film). We're supposed to love this pathetic adolescent in a man's body and admire his "freedom" which, the filmmakers juxtapose sharply with the staid, mainstream lives of his chums. Why this doesn't work is that Gary is pretty much a loser in his own way, as are his friends in their own fashion. Granted, the screenplay by Pegg and director Wright allows for some requisite skin-deep tut-tutting towards Gary's life choices, but ultimately, the filmmakers want us to be on Gary's side 100% as he rallies his chums to finish a 20-year-old pub crawl.

The movie is uncomfortably perched upon a fence post and as such, The World's End is never as funny as the filmmakers want it to be (I personally didn't crack a single smile, never mind a chuckle, laugh or guffaw). As well, the dramatic elements are impossible to swallow in any legitimate fashion and the science-fiction thriller side of things never takes flight the way in which the horror elements did so effectively in Shaun of the Dead. Most of all, the aesthetic pole-sitting reveals a huge missed opportunity that might have moved the film into the kind of satirical social observation it so desperately required to work beyond the trifle that it is.

The whole backdrop of British pub culture is an interesting one as it historically has provided one of the richest breeding grounds for the disease of alcoholism - one that not only flourished within the island borders of the United Kingdom, but extended well beyond into the colonial empire whereupon it tainted huge swaths of indigenous peoples. One might argue the social virtues of the pub culture, but the reality is that it sadly provided (and indeed, continues to provide) the habit-forming stimulus that leads to a horrible, debilitating disease.

One senses Pegg and Wright are trying to reach further, but one suspects they're either lacking the sophistication and craft of better filmmakers or they succumbed to a myriad of creative fingers in their pie. It's not impossible to achieve a higher purpose, but it requires a firm commitment on the part of its creative team to take no prisoners - a stance successfully maintained by others over a wide variety of successful works, though clearly not employed by Pegg and Wright.

The excess of American reliance upon all manner of stimuli to the emotional bandages provided by booze and drugs were indelibly captured by Terry Gilliam in his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas nightmare and even Britain, during its cinematic New Wave during the early-to-mid-60s was able to successfully delve into the effects of socially accepted forms of inebriation amongst all the "Angry Young Man" pictures generated by the likes of Karel Reizs, Tony Richardson, Richard Lester and Lindsay Anderson. Alas, Pegg and Wright, sadly, seem to be lost as to what kind of movie it is they want to make. Like any of the aforementioned filmmakers, they needed to have the courage and commitment to take a stand.

Gary's character, for example, is clearly an alcoholic and the pub-crawling activities are but one symptom of this ultimately debilitating disease, but instead of taking us onto the far more challenging paths into hearts of darkness, Pegg and Wright are content to pay lip-service to the humanity of the world they've created and most annoyingly, place far too much emphasis upon overwrought laugh-wrenching from the booze-swilling fake camaraderie engendered by the activity of pub crawling.

The whole affair is, however, far too inconsequential to inspire anything - especially that which might best be expressed as violently vehement moral outrage over the cavalier treatment of a debilitating disease and the pathetically empty lives of all the film's characters (not just Gary, frankly). Instead, we sit in the cinema, mouths agape at all the squandered opportunities for a film that could and should have been several steps forward for a clearly talented pair of collaborators.

"The World's End" is currently in theatrical release via E1 Films.

YOU'RE NEXT! - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Some effective jolts, within its been-there-done-that script.

You're Next! (2011) **1/2
dir. Adam Wingard
Starring: Sharni Vinson, AJ Bowen, Joe Swanberg, Margaret Laney, Barbara Crampton, Nicholas Tucci, Wendy Glenn, Amy Seimetz, Ti West and Larry Fessenden

Review By Greg Klymkiw

This energetic, crisply directed home invasion horror thriller delivers up the scares and gore with some panache. I especially loved the delightfully grotesque and ultra-creepy animal masks like those really cute lifelike ones you can buy for your kids at Zoo gift shops. In fact, the deadly home-invading carnage-purveyors might only have been creepier if they all wore matching Larry Harmon Bozo the Clown masks. (Or even creepier than that, if they WERE actually ALL Larry Harmon - but that, I'm afraid is another movie.)

In addition to the aforementioned, the picture is chock-full of babes. When genre thrillers - especially those set in one primary location are sans babes, it's the kiss of death. Always.

Here, though, we not only get babes, we get a mega-kick-ass Aussie chick played spiritedly by Sharni Vinson. Her character, it is revealed, was raised in a survivalist compound Down Under.

I kid you not!

An Aussie Survivalist Babe!!!

What's not to like?

Well, not that I expect much in the way of originality from this sort of movie, especially if the killings are conceived and dispatched with both humour and aplomb - as they most certainly are in the picture, but it's almost all for nought since early on we are assailed with clues which suggest the movie is going to have a twist that falls into the category of: " Oh fuck, I can see an obvious 'twist' coming from miles away and I hope to Christ it's just a red herring and the filmmakers surprise me with something as sick and twisted as what's already on display in terms of the genuine jolts and gore."

But no!

There it is in all its dullsville glory - the dreaded twist I won't reveal for the great unwashed who don't see it coming! (Anyone who doesn't see "it" coming needs a thorough brain wash.)

Come on, guys! Give me a break. Frankly, I'd have been happier if there was NO reason given for the killings save for a whack of psychos just doing what psychos do best. That really would have been better than the, uh... twist.

It's kind of too bad, because the first half of the movie proceeds like a delightful bat out of hell.

An affluent couple (the female half played by the still-delectable Re-Animator babe Barbara Crampton) are celebrating their 35th wedding anniversary in their ultra-chic country mansion and have invited all their kids and assorted significant others to join them. The characters sharing bloodlines are straight out of some lower-drawer Albee or O'Neill play and the conversation round the dinner table plays out with plenty of funny, nasty sniping

Great stuff!

Then the killing starts!

Even Greater!

And then, the aforementioned plot twist!

Uh, not great! Not good! Not even passable.



Thankfully, the carnage continues, but for this genre geek, the movie never quite recovers from a twist that was probably meant to be clever or something. I hate that! This is exactly the sort of thing that can drag potentially great genre pictures right down the crapper. It's too bad, really, because I really think screenwriter Simon Barrett has a lot more going for him than resorting to crap like that. He delivers a decent backdrop, first-rate sniping and a passel of great killings.

And, of course, let's not forget the babe raised on a survival compound in Australia.

Now that is truly inspired!!!

You're Next was unveiled during Midnight Madness at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF 2011) and is now playing theatrically via E-One.

FRUITVALE STATION - Review By Greg Klymkiw - A Day in the Life of a Human Being: The strength, the beauty, the power, the goodness and yes, the sorrow of a dream cut short by one act of senseless violence.

Fruitvale Station (2013) *****
Dir. Ryan Coogler
Starring: Michael B. Jordan, Melonie Diaz, Ariana Neal, Octavia Spencer, Kevin Durand, Chad Michael Murray, Ahna O'Reilly

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Fruitvale Station proved to me that I'm not crazy about trying to see movies without knowing about them (to the extent it's even possible in our hype-saturated world). Even as I write this after being alternately battered and caressed by one of the most moving and devastating contemporary films currently on screen, I still have not read any interviews, puff pieces or reviews nor seen any of the trailers. I know I'd have still loved this movie, but going in with no prior information yielded an extremely pure and raw movie-going experience.

The movie is infused with considerable gravity and hammers home the fact that we all live in a Police State within our supposedly democratic North American existence. There can be no denying or escaping this fact. Witness the appalling verdict in the recent trial involving the gated-community-dwelling vigilante or, if you must, a "concerned citizen" infused, no-doubt, with redneck values who, whilst carrying a loaded, ready-to-fire gun, fatally shot the innocent Trayvon Martin. Witness peaceful demonstrations against corporate greed that are either ignored by the bought-and-paid-for mainstream media and/or met with the violence of police thugs. Even upon the supposedly complacent Canadian landscape we all witnessed a prominent politician going scotfree after running down a cyclist and we recently shuddered while watching the cel phone footage of a trigger-happy Toronto cop emptying his revolver into a clearly disturbed young man who stood ALONE in an EMPTY streetcar, armed with only a 3-inch boxcutter - a young man crying for help, not bullets.

The movie humanizes the disenfranchised in ways that allow us to see pieces of ourselves in those less blessed and acknowledges how we're all equal in the eyes of the Universe. Sadly, it also firmly establishes just how alive and well racism is in North America - especially in the seemingly endless and repeated statistics proving that cops continue to commit racially motivated (and/or class-related) murder - no matter how slanted and/or fudged the stats are to protect the guilty (our protectors, lawmakers, lawgivers, corporate rulers and politicians).

Finally, Fruitvale Station proves just how sacred an artistic medium cinema is and how it can provide a lot of entertainment value AND social commentary - without robots and Godzilla-like monsters pulverizing each other or mindless superhero antics for no other reason than to profit from both propaganda and violence.

Thankfully that horrendous title card "based on a true story" does not open Fruitvale Station, but instead we get a shaky, murky cel phone video wherein a group of young men are rousted by the police on a subway platform. The film then jumps to a point that's clearly from the past and we begin a powerful and moving - almost Neo-realist tale - of a young man who's made more than his fair share of mistakes during the first 22 years of his life, but then experiences an epiphanous moment in the early morning in which he knows what path he wants and needs to take.

The simplicity of the tale is what yields such remarkable emotional and thematic layers. Following this young man (Michael B. Jordan) as he begins to fulfill his potential as a life partner to the woman he loves (Melonie Diaz), a father to his sprightly daughter (Ariana Neal) and a son worthy of the love bestowed upon him by his Mother (Octavia Spencer) is, at least in recent memory, quite unparalleled. What we see is a turning point in his life amidst all the things that society throws in the way to thwart this gigantic change in his life.

Fruitvale Station is tremendously moving and inspiring as it depicts one day in his life. Set on New Year's Eve and also the night of his Mom's birthday we see him prepare for the party but also face the conflicts and hardships of poverty. As the film inches ever closer to the New Year celebrations, we sense both joy and portent.

By the picture's end, I indeed realized I knew about the actual "true story" - the senseless murder of Oscar Grant, the 22-year-old African-American who, on New Year's Day 2009 was beaten, handcuffed, then shot by racist cops (Kevin Durand, Chad Michael Murray).

Director Ryan Coogler doesn't pull any punches and there isn't a second of this movie that feels false, forced or contrived. If, by picture's end, you aren't quaking in your seat - wracked with shock and sobs - I feel sorry for you.

Most of all, I feel sorry for humanity. Fruitvale Station is proof positive of life's infinite mystery, wonder, joy and sorrow. We are all better for the fact that this picture exists, but mostly, that it sheds light on how one man's existence (and indeed all humanity's) touched and continues to touch the lives of all others.

"Fruitvale Station" is in theatrical release via E-One.

THE LESSER BLESSED - Review By Greg Klymkiw - COUNTDOWN TO CANADA DAY 2013 - Anita Doron's portrait of life in extreme isolation captures the pulse of a Canada that is as foreign to most of us as it is familiar.

The Lesser Blessed (2012) ***
Dir. Anita Doron
Starring: Joel Nathan Evans, Benjamin Bratt, Tamara Podemski, Chloe Rose, Kiowa Gordon, Adam Butcher

Review By Greg Klymkiw

A knee-jerk response might be to say we've seen all this before.

Witness:

An Aboriginal teenage boy (Joel Nathan Evans) of the Dogrib (Tlicho) Nation lives with his widowed Mom (Tamara Podemski) in a tiny village in the Northwest Territories. His late Dad was a violent, abusive monster and the boy carries the physical disfigurement of an especially harrowing event from the relatively recent past, as well as the emotional scars, the latter of which he shares with his withdrawn Mom. Her boyfriend (Benjamin Bratt) is a handsome, brooding, but kindly man who bears his own wounds of the past and often escapes conflict by disappearing deep into the bush.

High school for our young hero is fraught with a combination of loneliness and bullying whilst harbouring a deep crush on a beautiful, vivacious, popular and seemingly unattainable teenage girl (Chloe Rose). The bullying, mostly from a young thug (Adam Butcher) who shares an equally abusive past, becomes less frequent when the protagonist is befriended by a new kid in town, a hunky, dreamy tough guy (Kiowa Gordon).

It's a mixed blessing for our main character. Though he has a new friend, the gal of his dreams naturally falls for the magnificent specimen of manhood who takes him under his wing. And, of course, there is the crushing weight of the past - truths must be confronted if freedom - real freedom - is to be attained.

So yes, on the surface one might assume this is a glorified after-school special or worse, an Aboriginal John Hughes movie.

"One", however, would assume wrongly.

Narrative is an odd duck because, in a sense, there are no real new stories - what makes things fresh is that magical property one discovers in both the telling and the details. This is what The Lesser Blessed has in spades. Director Anita Doron succeeds magnificently in capturing a unique world that is at once indigenous to Canada's northernmost regions and yet, in its exploration of isolation yields a tale with universal qualities.

Anyone who has experienced life in Canada's most barren regions will be startled by the sense of place in this movie. There isn't a single image - interior or exterior - that isn't infused with the strange, remote and terrible beauty of life in this part of the world. A combination of Doron's eye, superb cinematography and truly exquisite production design all lend themselves to the creation of this dichotomous environment. As well, the natural rhythms of life in the north - in the unfolding of time and events, the cadence of the verbal delivery amongst the populace and even down to the very manner in which people physically move and carry themselves is so spot-on that the movie managed to transport me to every great memory and feeling of living and/or having lived in similar isolation.

A good part of this is inherent in the great range of performances. Joel Nathan Evans in the lead does not seem at all like a natural actor, but it's precisely this quality that allows us IN to this character - especially since he's surrounded by a variety of flamboyant performances from Rose, Gordon and Butcher - he's like the straight man. He let's us see the world and those around him the way he sees it - not necessarily, or at least not always via his point of view, but because there is such a raw, natural quality to his work.

There is one role in the film that could have been delivered with by-the-numbers histrionics, but Tamara Podemski as our hero's Mom is brilliantly understated to the point of heartbreak - this wonderful actress's smallest gestures or in many cases, "non"-gestures, are as riveting as they are deeply and profoundly moving. This is the kind of finely wrought performance that some might overlook because it is so great.

The revelation, at least for me, is Benjamin Bratt in the role of the Mom's boyfriend and our hero's eventual surrogate Dad. As I've watched almost no television since 1982, it seems like I've missed much of this veteran actor's most prolific (and possibly best) work, but I found myself so drawn to his commanding presence in the film that all I kept wondering is why isn't this guy a movie star on the same level as some of the great ruggedly handsome actors from 70s movies? His line deliveries were surprisingly "Canadian" (yes, there is a distinctly Canadian "accent") and frankly, the first time I saw the film I'll admit to having heard of Benjamin Bratt, but I didn't associate him with the role he was playing. All I thought at the time was: "WHO IS THIS GUY? HE'S FUCKING AMAZING!" Once I Googled him and realized what I was dealing with, I still kind of felt the same way. I immediately began imagining him in a variety of imaginary 70s-style movies and wondered when the fuck Quentin Tarantino was going to put this guy in a great role in one of his movies.

Well, QT - you lose. Anita Doron beat you to the punch. In any event, though I have no intention of ever watching Miss Congeniality again, I can hardly wait to dive into a few of his feature film appearances to refresh my appreciation of his clear talent, but he's also appeared in some indie pictures I've yet to see.

The Lesser Blessed is ultimately a film heavy on mood and tone and I'm happy to say that it works beautifully on this front since these elements go a long way in capturing the thematic underpinnings of the tale. There are a few items that don't work for me, though.

I'd have preferred the film to have no narration at all. What little there is of it - and it is mercifully sparse - occurs at the beginning and end, but it felt like it was going out of its way to tell me things I already knew or sensed in a kind of on-point way.

I also wasn't sure about the structural use of the main character's past tragic events as this slow build-up to a big reveal - I think that knowing early on what the precise details of the tragedy were would have instead shifted the flashback stuff into a kind of repeated visual and emotional punctuation of what haunted him. (And I've not read the book, nor did I read any reviews prior to seeing the movie, but I pretty much knew what had happened to him really early in the game and was occasionally frustrated with this storytelling trope that to me, always seems a bit lazy and overused.)

My final nitpick is the score. At times, it felt spare in the way many scores in low budget films feel, while at other times, I found it overbearing. On a second viewing of the film I re-imagined it with only snatches of source music and no formal score whatsoever (and in its place, more of a soundscape reflecting the natural environment and inner life of the main character). Given that many scenes are shot in a gorgeous "floaty-cam" styled handheld and that many of the film's details in terms of locale and setting seemed so real, I'm pretty convinced this would have worked quite beautifully.

All that said, none of these elements detracted from my overall enjoyment of the film, but because so much of the picture is so good, I was occasionally going a bit nutty when elements were often falling short of a kind of greatness that seemed entirely attainable. This, ultimately, is what distinguishes The Lesser Blessed, though. Far too many films are satisfied with filling ephemeral voids and/or needs of audiences (as usually perceived by the boneheaded middlemen green-lighting pictures the world over), but Doron's film is always striving for greatness - true, real and pure greatness.

That's what separates genuine filmmakers from the hacks and poseurs. The Lesser Blessed is definitely worth seeing, but as she acquits herself solidly with this movie, I'm especially looking forward to more pictures from Doron (and, uh, of course... Mr. Bratt!).

"The Lesser Blessed" is available on a variety of home entertainment formats from Monterey Media, the very cool and visionary company south of the 49th. You can order your copy from Monterey right now. YOU CAN EVEN BUY THIS VERSION FROM AMAZON.CA AS AN IMPORT FOR AN EXCELLENT PRICE!!! In Canada, E-One distributes, but it doesn't appear to be available until September as per the following screen capture as of today, July 1, 2013.

MY BLOODY VALENTINE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - COUNTDOWN TO CANADA DAY 2013 - What could possibly be more Canadian than an East Coast miner with a pickaxe hell-bent on vengeance?

My Bloody Valentine (1981) ***
dir. George Mihalka
Starring: Paul Kelman, Lori Hallier, Neil Affleck, Cynthia Dale and Don Francks

Review By Greg Klymkiw

My Bloody Valentine is one of the best slasher movies ever made, and one of the primary reasons it’s so good is that it’s Canadian. Both of these assertions (proclamations, if you will) might be viewed with a mixture of skepticism and gales of derisive laughter. Well, doubt away and yuck-it-up to your heart’s content, I stand by this controversial claim – especially in light of all the remakes of 70s horror fouling our screens, and most notably the dull My Bloody Valentine 3-D.

Of all the slasher pictures from this period, this delectable Canuck blood spurter splashed onto the silver screen with an indigenous sense of time and place that contributed very significantly to the overall creepiness of the picture. Unlike the demonic, unstoppable, supernatural forces of Jason, Michael and Freddie, the central killer in My Bloody Valentine is a disgruntled miner who, due to the carelessness of some colleagues and mine officials, is trapped in a deadly mine explosion wherein he is eventually forced to devour the flesh of his deceased co-workers in order to survive.

As the accident happened on the night of a Valentine’s Day Dance at the Union Hall in town, our reluctant cannibal miner begins a reign of terror that forces the mining town of Valentine Bluffs to stop presenting a Valentine dance for 20 years. After two decades, however, the citizenry feel that it’s time to resurrect the annual love-fest, especially since the killer has been safely incarcerated in a loony bin.

Bad move. No sooner than you can spit-out a Valentine salutation or create a saliva rope whilst kissing your best gal (or guy), the mysterious miner – replete with super-scary helmet, goggle eyes, Darth-Vader-like breathing mask, adorned in blacks duds from head to toe and utilizing a variety of fine items like pick axes, nail guns, rope and other mining accoutrements, begins to dispatch a whole passel of townsfolk in some of the most grotesque, stomach-turning killings ever committed to film.

The killings are even more delightful now that they’ve been restored to their unrated, uncensored glory on the special edition DVD from Lionsgate. My favourites include death by tumble dryer, face-in-a-pot-of-boiling-hot-wiener-water (one of the greatest pot p.o.v. shots ever) and an impaling from the neck and out through the mouth on a gushing water pipe.

While some might argue that the abovementioned proceedings may seem stock, if not downright derivative of the earlier work of the likes of Mario (Twitch of the Death Nerve, Blood and Black Lace) Bava, Bob (Black Christmas) Clark and John (Halloween) Carpenter, the fact remains that there is absolutely no attempt to hide the fact that this is set IN Canada, IN a real mining town, IN Nova Scotia, IN a real mine and featuring an all-Canadian cast replete with unmistakably Canadian accents (including some obviously “local” extras).

This goes a long way to creating an experience that makes the genre’s situations and requirements richer and, dare I say it, more realistic. Not that the film is replete with the typically “quirky” Canadian casting – most of the young leads are suitably hunky and/or babe-o-licious (especially leading lady Lori Hallier), but they look especially appealing in their Canadian-hoser plaid, faded jeans, dirty caps and small town and decidedly (un)chic Woolco/K-Mart duds. (Though one young lady appears to be adorned in an angora sweater – Hubba! Hubba!)

That said, there are a number of supporting players who feel a bit more “quirky” including a John Candy look-alike fat guy who ends up being pretty tough and courageous – that’s definitely “Canadian”. And cool, too. (The only obvious non-Canadian thing is that Don Francks plays a sheriff – something Canucks do not really have presiding over the law and order of small towns.)



The way in which director George Mihalka uses his excellent locations is especially welcome. The small-town union hall, the Laundromat, the numerous signs proudly proclaiming the availability of Moosehead Beer and that dank, dark, creepy and VERY REAL mine all contribute to presenting a tale of terror with a real local flavour.

In scene after scene, Mihalka makes practical and imaginative use of everything real that’s available to him – certainly something every good filmmaker should do, but especially when directing a thriller. Hitchcock’s rule of thumb in terms of utilizing EVERYTHING that is naturally around you to generate thrills is exploited beautifully in this picture by both the script and Mihalka’s direction.

In addition to the great locations, both the art direction and costume design go a long way to creating a work that lives beyond the stock situations. As well, the cinematography is first-rate. Above ground, there’s a terrific, slightly over lit quality that captures every decrepit detail of the town and in the mine, the use of light, shadow and black is expertly rendered and adds considerably to the terror below.

At the end of the day (or night, if you will) it’s great that Lionsgate secured the rights to the original My Bloody Valentine from Paramount and expertly restored it to the glory originally envisioned by its makers. The especially cool thing is that these enhancements are JUST THAT – enhancements. My Bloody Valentine always felt like an original and stayed in one’s mind for over two decades. Now, it is in a much better form where it can shock, thrill and delight future generations of horror fans.

The original 1981 “My Bloody Valentine” is available on DVD and Blu-ray from Lionsgate Home Entertainment (Alliance/E-One).