JEFF - Review By Greg Klymkiw - HOT DOCS 2012 - Must-See #3

Jeff (2012) dir. Chris James Thompson
Starring: Andrew Swant, Pat Kennedy, Pamela Bass, Jeffrey Jentzen

***

By Greg Klymkiw

If a kind, sensitive, soft-spoken, friendly and intelligent next door neighbour paid frequent visits in which he always brought delicious sandwiches lovingly made by his own hand and you eventually learned that he was not only a serial killer but a cannibal, chances are pretty good that you indeed had been munching happily on his victims. Mais non?

This, of course, is just one of many appalling thoughts haunting Pamela Bass and will, no doubt, continue to haunt her until the very last gasp.

Pamela's kindly neighbour, you see, was none other than Jeffrey Dahmer, the sociopathic nutcase who tortured. murdered, performed necrophiliac sex acts, dismembered and ate 17 young men in his Milwaukee apartment during his leisure time whilst working in a chocolate factory.

Upon his arrest, Dahmer was interviewed by detective Pat Kennedy who had to "befriend" the killer to pry a confession as well as get an accurate number of victims in order to identify them. Police work - GOOD police work - often requires more than just a strong stomach, but the talent to render Oscar-winning performances to get to the truth. Identifying the remains in a pre-DNA world was not an easy task and Kennedy needed to convince Dahmer that he was sincere, benevolent and just a good pal who wanted to help.

All that remained of most of the victims was a head in the fridge, skull trophies, preserved genitals, "meat" in the freezer and a huge, putrid vat full of body parts floating amidst copious globs of viscera and acid.

Chief Medical Examiner Jeffrey Jantzen was assigned the gruesome task of studying the remains of the victims to determine both their identities and causes of death. In one case, he made the shocking discovery that Dahmer had drilled into the head of a young man and performed a living lobotomy upon him.

Detective Kennedy would get these delicious nuggets from Jantzen and in his winning manner, suited more to a kaffeeklatsch than an interrogation room, he'd get Dahmer to calmly retch up the details. In the case of the lobotomy victim, Dahmer nonchalantly revealed that his goal was to create a zombie and furthermore, that he performed this surgery without any manner of mind-altering anesthetic.

Bass, Kennedy and Jantzen are the primary interview subjects of director Chris James Thompson's Jeff. He trains his steady camera on them and lets it roll. Their talking heads are more than enough to cinematically render a grotesque portrait of a serial killer in that point just before, during and just after his capture.

The subjects are simply, but nicely shot with crisp sound to allow for Thompson's clearly penetrating and well researched line of questioning and in turn, revealing three very diverse personalities who all deliver exactly what we need to get a sense of Dahmer's crimes and, most importantly, insight into the man himself.

The one key element in the film that, for me, keeps the picture from achieving a greatness is how Thompson stitches the interviews together with competently rendered dramatic recreations - so competent that they feel, at times, like bargain basement Errol Morris (though definitely a few cuts above the usual nonsense one sees in cheesy A&E-styled "documentaries"). While these scenes are delivered in a low-key format (with a genuinely superb performance from Andrew Swant as Dahmer) they unfortunately stick out like a whole vat full of sore thumbs.

Low key was the right way to approach the dramatic recreations, but it feels like Thompson would have been better off to trust his subjects and his own interview skills. He lets the movie luxuriate itself upon and within the three subjects - enough so, that I strongly feel he should have stuck to the simplicity of the talking heads with dollops of the archival material and other interviews he uses.

It's a testament to Thompson's clear ability to work with these three people and get the phenomenal footage he wrenches out of them that finally, Jeff is the most powerful rendering of the atrociously horrific crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer yet committed to film.

Sadly, it just misses the boat on greatness.

"Jeff" is playing Sat, Apr 28 11:30 PM at Bloor Hot Docs Cinema and Sun, Apr 29 10:00 PM at TIFF Bell Lightbox 1 and Fri, May 4 9:45 PM at TIFF Bell Lightbox 2 during the 2012 edition of Toronto's Hot Docs Film Festival. For tickets, visit the Hot Docs website HERE.

Download and view the Electronic Press Kit of "Jeff" at the film's website HERE.

DETROPIA - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Toronto Hot Docs 2012 Must-See #2

Detropia (2012) dir. Rachel Grady, Heidi Ewing

***1/2

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Having been conceived in Detroit, but at the last minute, born in Winnipeg due to Mom's sentimental desire to have me expunged in Canada, I always felt like Motor City should rightfully have been my city.

I've got to say that Detropia, a harrowing feature-length documentary exploration of this great town's decline is ultra-depressing, but surprisingly, it hasn't changed my mind about wanting to have been born there anyway. In fact, after seeing this movie, I wish I had been born there even more.

From Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, those wily, probing and provocative Oscar-nominated helmers of Jesus Camp and 12th & Delaware, this picture is not only a fascinating portrait of urban blight, but amidst the crime, poverty and decay, there's still a pulse and heartbeat of something very cool. One of the film's subjects, a young artist who enters long-abandoned, crumbling buildings in the core of the city to experience and photograph her adventures, manages to capture, at least for me, what's still residing amidst the crumbling ruins of what was once great.

Ghosts.

It's a city full of ectoplasmic activity of days gone by and I feel an odd connection to this sentiment - not only because it's the place of my conception, but that in its own way Detroit reminds me - at least on a cosmetic level of what happened to my eventual place of birth. When I first visited Detroit in the early 90s, it already looked like a blasted-out war zone. This is not unlike what happened in Winnipeg around the same time. A combination of corrupt city officials tied to owners of heritage buildings who wanted to tear them down to build parking lots and an overwhelming "White-Flight" (less-than-charitable Winnipeggers began referring to the core as an urban Indian Reservation), my magical winter city became a ghost town of abandoned, boarded-up buildings.

Detropia takes us on a fascinating tour. We meet a union organizer for an auto parts plant who desperately tries to negotiate a deal that will stop the factory from moving its base of operations to Mexico. Unemployment and the resulting poverty is touched upon unflinchingly. City council meetings with the beleaguered Mayor trying to find ways of revitalizing the city, maintaining services and yet staving off bankruptcy - as well as a disorganized, emotional and packed-to-the-rafters Town Hall Meeting are all the stuff of compelling drama.

Even more harrowing is the detail surrounding government bailouts of big business and how none of those dollars are passed on to the workers - many of whom are faced with massive pay-cuts and threats of business relocation and/or out and out closure. One woman, making minimum wage and refusing to accept handouts describes how the axing of bus routes leaves her with no way to get to her job. People working two or three jobs just to stay afloat are the norm.

While this might be the story of Detroit, it's also the story of a great nation descending to levels of a Third World Country and a New World Order intent upon keeping it that way - to widen the gap between rich and poor even further in order to maintain power and wealth.

One of the few bright spots is the story of an artist who is, for the first time in his life able to own his own home. I have to admit that this is a tad inspiring - the idea of creative people owning property and being surrounded by plenty of inspiration amidst the urban blight seems to be a tiny repast of retribution for those who are the first to be looked down upon by virtually everyone on both sides of the fence.

And then, there is the Detroit Opera House - still alive, still making beautiful music - surrounded by a wasteland of poverty, seemingly filled to capacity, and yet displaying the grotesque irony that the only patrons are those who can afford to be there. We watch, agog, as hundreds of the elite sit there adorned in finery that could probably feed all the city's homeless, their pig-snouted heads of privilege nodding solemnly in agreement when they're delivered solemn speeches from some clown in tails who whines about the financial crises facing the opera.

And finally, much as I extol the ghostly virtues of this blight, I'm ultimately sickened by what this terrific picture presents. One sequence involves an auto show filled to overflowing with American autos, but standing amidst the toils of the red, white and blue is a Chinese car - offering everything the American autos do and then some.

The American dealers can't adequately explain why the Chinese car costs so much less, but it's not lost on us as we watch the movie and everything surrounding this sequence - China's exploitative sickle and hammer capitalism is a choice many of these American auto dealers welcome. They'd be happiest if Americans succumbed to the savagery facing China's working men and women on American soil, but if not, they're happy to exploit the poor in other countries to stay rich and powerful.

When a city like Detroit goes down, America is not far behind.

And the rest of the world will feel the shattering effects of a nation ruled by oligarchies - gangster thugs dolled up beneath the veneer of respectability.

"Detropia" is playing at the Hot Docs 2012 Film Festival on Sat, May 5 5:45 PM at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. Visit the Hot Docs website to get tickets HERE.

HERMAN'S HOUSE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Hot Docs 2012 Must See #1

Herman's House (2012) dir. Angad Bhalla
Starring: Jackie Sumell, Herman Wallace

****

By Greg Klymkiw

Herman Wallace - African-American. Black Panther activist. Commits armed bank robbery. Sentenced to 25 years in Louisiana's Angola Prison (a former slave breeding plantation). 1972: Wrongfully convicted of murdering a prison guard. The evidence is clearly trumped up. Even the wife of the murdered guard believes a miscarriage of justice might have occurred and wants the truth. Appeal after appeal. Nothing. Herman Wallace was placed in solitary confinement. In 1972. 23 Hours a day. Every single day. A cell measuring six feet by nine feet. It is now 2012.

Solitary confinement is torture. Herman Wallace has been tortured for 40 years. Repeat. 40 years. Ladies and gentlemen, Welcome to America.

Herman's House is an extraordinary film about extraordinary people in a country that has sadly learned nothing since 1776 but the right of might, the power of the dollar and the exploitation of the poor - a country that purports to be the most powerful democracy in the world, but is little more than a backwards Totalitarian State - run by a greedy, mean-spirited, prejudiced Old Boys Club. Or, call them what you will - an oligarchy, gangsters, the New World Order - or Hell, why not all three? Bush I, Bush II, Clinton, Obama, all those before and all those who will come after - they're just puppets anyway. To paraphrase Michael Corleone in Godfather II: They're all a part of the same hypocrisy.

The people, the Real People, are the victims. Surprisingly they persevere. They shed their victimhood by fighting back - not with fists, but with the weaponry of activism, the fighting spirit of the soul.

This is a movie that will anger, frustrate and yet finally, move you to tears as it explores real compassion and understanding amongst those with the only power they have - their hearts, their minds and most of all, imagination. At times, the storytelling in this miraculous work is so artfully wrought, one occasionally forgets it's a documentary and you find yourself thinking, "Jesus, if this really happened, things are more fucked in America than I ever imagined." Then comes the proverbial pinch. You're not dreaming. You're not watching a neo-realist drama. These are real people, this really happened and is, in fact, really happening.

In America.

When the New York artist Jackie Sumell heard about the plight of Herman Wallace, she began to correspond with him. In time they forged a deep friendship on opposite ends of the country - one free, the other in prison. And not just prison - solitary confinement.

For a crime he did not commit. (And even if he did, which he clearly did not, but just saying - even if he did, you do not torture someone for 40 years. Unless, of course, you are a Totalitarian State - which, though some try to deny it - America most certainly is.)

Jackie began to use her power as an artist to imagine and create the world in which Herman lived. Soon, she began to plumb his imagination and try to discover what a man in solitary might concoct if he could have his very own dream home. Working strictly from Herman's specifications, Jackie created an art piece that represented Herman's design. Not only did Jackie create a work of art (that has toured to five countries), she was able to provide a vehicle for Herman to plumb the depths of his dreams.

Director Angad Bhalla spent five years following this story. We meet with Herman's family, friends and former cell mates and are privy to telephone conversations between Jackie and Herman. On subject matter alone, this would have been a fine film, but it goes well beyond having great material. This is a real movie made by a real filmmaker, surrounded by a first-rate team of collaborators - all of whom have rendered a picture of finely wrought drama and cinematic artistry of a very high order.

Ricardo Acosta's editing skillfully juggles several years worth of material and delivers a compelling forward thrust. The top-drawer cinematography by Bhalla and Iris Ng is full of superlative compositions and a magnificent, deft use of light. Punctuating much of the film are a series of stunning animated sequences by Nicolas Brault that blend perfectly with the overall mise-en-scene.

The sound mixing by the legendary Daniel Pellerin is especially brilliant - capturing the delicate blend of superb location sound, voice-over, Ken Myhr's highly evocative musical score and most astoundingly, the recordings of Herman on the phone (eerily and occasionally punctuated with a computer generated voice that reminds us that the State Correctional Institute is monitoring the conversation).

Welcome to 1984 in 2012.

Welcome, once again, to America!!!

What I love about this film is that it's infused with an independent spirit. The production value and artistry are of a high order, but there's nothing slick about it. Nothing feels machine-tooled in the way so many contemporary documentaries are fashioned. It's grass-roots storytelling - replete with passion, vigour and a deep emotional core.

And, Goddamn!

It's one hell of a great story!

"Herman's House" is playing in Toronto at the Hot Docs 2012 Film Festival on Fri, Apr 27 9:00 PM - TIFF Bell Lightbox 1, Wed, May 2 9:15 PM - The ROM Theatre and Sun, May 6 9:30 PM - TIFF Bell Lightbox 2. For tickets, visit the Hot Docs website HERE. If you miss it at Hot Docs, I can't imagine the film not being picked up and handled properly by a great theatrical distributor. This movie needs to be seen far and wide. The official Herman's House website is HERE.

HAPPY PEOPLE: A YEAR IN THE TAIGA - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Werner Herzog's re-edit of Dmitry Vasyukov's four-hour exploration of life in the extreme north of Russia is a fascinating meditation on ages-old livelihoods that still exist in this modern age.

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga
(2010) dir. Dmitry Vasyukov, Werner Herzog
Starring: Werner Herzog (as narrator)

***

By Greg Klymkiw

Freedom in the northern Boreal forests of Siberia is in abundant supply. So is peace, quiet and the power of the natural world. There is a price to pay, however. Bitter cold (dipping to 50 degrees below zero), back-breaking toil and virtually no time to spend with family and friends.

Such is the life of Gennady, a trapper who spends months in the deep bush of the Taiga, trudging through 1000 square miles of territory to secure furs to earn a living. Using ages-old methods and hand-crafted implements, the only modern accoutrements are a snowmobile and a chainsaw. His only company and often, a necessary lifeline, is his dog.

With Happy People: A Year in the Taiga, Werner Herzog has taken a four-hour-long documentary by Dmitry Vasyukov and re-edited the piece into a lean 90 minutes - complete with Herzog's distinctively dramatic narration. In addition to spending time with Gennady, we see the lives of other northern dwellers - a vaguely red-necked trapper who is related to the late, great filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky and a family of aboriginal people who are afflicted with alcoholism to such a degree that their traditional culture is rapidly dwindling.

Even at 90 minutes, the pace might well prove challenging for most viewers, but for me, it allowed an opportunity to get a sense of what life must be like in this glorious, though harsh land. The film also provides a unique window into the soul of Gennady - a deeply intelligent and philosophical man. His ruminations on both life and his toil are utterly fascinating and there are plenty moments of solitude to take in the stunningly photographed landscapes while also thinking deeply about Gennady's perspectives on nature and to form your own.

While Herzog's narration, as always, is a Germanically-tinged delight, he makes the odd choice to have American actors in voice-over replace the Russian language. I suspect this was either to make the film more palatable for English language audiences and to also force us to keep our eyes riveted to the images. Or perhaps both. Alas, the actors' voice work is very distracting and I'd have preferred to hear the original Russian - unfettered by flawed vocal renderings of the film's subjects.

The movie also made me long to see Vasyukov's four-hour version. Siberia is cool - in more ways than one - and it's a world that looks like it would indeed be a great place to spend more time from the comfort of one's seat in the theatre or at home.

These are minor quibbles and one does get used to the actor voice-overs. Try, however, to see the film on a big screen.

Big is where this tale belongs.

"Happy People: A Year in the Taiga" is currently in theatrical release via Mongrel Media. In Toronto, it is currently playing at the Hot Docs Bloor Cinema - a perfect venue to enjoy the film in all its visual splendour.

GIRL MODEL - Review By Greg Klymkiw - The exploitation of Russian girls as young as age 13 in Japan is examined in a chilling portrait of shattered hopes and dreams within a modelling industry that values youth, beauty and the sexualization of pre-pubescence.

Girl Model (2011)
dir. David Redmon, Ashley Sabin

***1/2

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Much has been documented about the appalling sexual exploitation of women in Eastern Europe - the out and out chicanery that amounts to kidnapping women of all ages and forcing them into sexual slavery the world over. What has not been adequately detailed is the "legal" entrapment of similar young women - desperate to end the crushing poverty they and their families experience in the relatively new "capitalism" of former Soviet countries. Girl Model is just such a film. This extremely harrowing depiction of a perverse business connection that links Siberia to Japan exposes a brutal reality that sadly still exists.

Japan, it seems, always needs meat - fresh, tender, young meat. In the Land of Nippon, the vast publishing industry can never get enough young models to feed the bottomless pit of periodicals that place emphasis upon extolling the virtues of creamy, white, wide-eyed, innocent and highly sexualized female flesh. And as this chilling documentary points out - the younger the better.

In fact, a look of pre-pubescence is what's very often admired. There's certainly nothing ethnocentric or racist in pointing this out. Much of Japan's manga and anime constantly sexualizes innocence of young women - quite openly and with nary a shred of objection. Lord knows I've seen my fair share of it - everything from simple tales of love amongst burgeoning sexuality to wide-eyed animated little girls in school uniforms being pursued and often raped by demons bearing huge snake-like penises.

The film follows two subjects.

The first is Nadya, an innocent 13-year-old girl from Siberia who participates in a modelling cattle-call. She is eventually flown to Japan and endures endless, gruelling "casting" sessions, hoping she'll strike it rich as a model.

The second is Ashley, a beautiful though world-weary former child model from America who ten years earlier worked in Japan and now makes a very good living as a talent scout - plucking these stunningly gorgeous kids from their squalid villages and plunging them before the expert Japanese oglers looking to place these children on and within the pages of the cornucopia of fashion magazines filling shelf space in every conceivable retail outlet.

Nadya's parents naively sign an insane contract in languages (English and Japanese) they do not even understand which includes legalese designed to favour the exploitation of their child. When Nadya arrives in Japan, nobody is there to meet her at the airport and there isn't anyone who can speak Russian. How or where she might have ended up is anyone's guess. It's clear the presence of the filmmakers is what gets her where she needs to be.

Nadya is flung from one casting session to another and there's every indication that some of the photos ARE being bought and sold, but that she's not getting a penny. She's broke, in debt to the agency, achingly lonely and desperately homesick to the point where she breaks down in tears more than once.

Ashley speaks about the freedom her current work as a scout brings her, but within her eyes we see the pain she endured during her own childhood indenture in Japan. She shares her video diaries from that period where she is clearly going through a similar experience that Nadya is now in.

She even questions why she is drawn to luring these children into what she herself suffered. At one point she talks about how these young women need to be on top of the game to make a living from modelling and even admits that those less savvy will use their bodies as strippers or prostitutes.

Interviewed in her American home, what we see is even more horrendous. Ashley's house is clearly modern and upscale, but its interior is utterly bereft of anything representing a personality - those little touches that give either a sense of warmth or character.

The only personal touches are two grotesque looking unclothed baby dolls that she dotes over (she admits there used to be a third that she destroyed limb from plastic limb) and we then follow Ashley into a medical procedure wherein cantelope-sized tumours are removed from her belly - resembling deformed progeny that almost symbolize her desire to have a baby growing in her stomach instead.

One of the most reprehensible figures in the movie is an agency middleman, the Russian-speaking Tigran who, with the straight-faced intonations of a zealot trying to hide the truth from himself and others, claims that he is devoted to saving these young girls from their lot in post-Soviet-Russian life.

If he wasn't adorned in the garb viewed by most North Americans of Eastern European heritage as strictly chic by Old-Country-boys-at-heart standards and if it wasn't for the thin, almost indistinguishable layer of metaphorical slime coating his body, we might actually believe him when he claims that his work is akin to being a "religious matter" - that he is a saviour instead of the glorified pimp really is.

I almost expected Tigran to morph into Marlon Brando's Terry Malloy in the back of the cab with Rod Steiger's Charley in On the Waterfront - paraphrasing the famous Budd Schulberg-scribed speech as something like, "I could'a bin' a saviour, 'stead of a pimp, which is what I yam!"

I watched Girl Model with my 11-year-old daughter. She was riveted throughout, though occasionally gasping open-mouthed and both commenting and questioning how little girls not much older than her were being paraded about as sexual objects. "Are you sure this is real, Dad?" she asked at one point. I nodded. "How can they do this to kids? This is so sick," she responded.

She's right. These are kids. Children. And they are being exploited in a fashion as reprehensible as if they were being immediately tossed into the streets to turn tricks.

Though the film brilliantly doesn't go out of its way to slant the material, it goes a step further in capturing the proceedings with an objective eye - proving, once again, that objectivity can be the harshest point of view of all.

This is a movie that demands to be seen by as wide an audience as possible. It especially demands to be seen by those who only want the best for women in a world which is not changing as rapidly for them as some might believe it is.

See Girl Model.

See it with your daughters.

For your daughters.

"Girl Model" is currently in theatrical release from Kinosmith. In Toronto it can be seen at the Hot Docs Bloor Cinema.

THE CABIN IN THE WOODS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Creepy Genre-Geek Wet-Dream

ONE CREEPY CABIN!

The Cabin in the Woods (2012)
dir. Drew Goddard
Starring: Kristen Connolly, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison, Fran Kranz, Jesse Williams, Richard Jenkins, Bradley Whitford, Amy Acker, Tim De Zarn, Sigourney Weaver

***

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Set a spell. Take a load off. Leave your brain home. You won't need any grey matter for The Cabin in the Woods anyway. As moronic, derivative and plot-hole-ridden as the picture is, there are enough genuine surprises and a couple of truly breathtakingly inventive horror set pieces, that by the end, you'll be giddily satisfied.

It's a familiar-enough tale. Five college kids - two hunks, two babes and one doper dweeb (think Scooby Doo's "Shaggy" with a perpetually smouldering doobie twixt his lips) - hop into an RV and head into back country so isolated they can't even get a GPS signal. Stopping for gas, they encounter a chaw-spitting, unfriendly, hell-and-brimstone-uttering inbred who points them in the direction of an abandoned cabin in the woods - a long-forgotten family treasure of one of the more obnoxious hunks in this party of brain-bereft 20-somethings.

Upon reaching their destination, they engage in the usual shenanigans that Hollywood-types assume young people do and before you can say: "Sam Raimi", a whole mess of slavering, rotting, bloodthirsty undead come crawling out of the soil.

Needless to say, there will be carnage.

However, if you think the movie is a mere retread of The Evil Dead and its many imitators, you've another thing coming. A concurrent tale involving a whole whack of white collar bureaucrats wends its way through the familiar tale and then, even though you think you might have it all figured out, the narrative takes several detours - some stretching credibility even within the context of a genre picture, while others not only making perfect sense (so to speak), but displaying horrific delights of the most insanely,jaw-dropping variety.

Another element the picture has going for it is a sense of humour. Though many of the laughs are of the bargain-basement youth-comedy variety, there are an equal number of knee-slappers that delight and surprise. Most importantly, the humour is not of the nudge-nudge-wink-wink tongue-in-cheek variety, but is naturally rooted in the characters (such as they are) and narrative (such as it is). Wisely, the filmmakers do not continually remind us that they're more clever than movie (a stretch, I'll admit).

In his directorial debut, Drew Goddard (writer of the terrific Cloverfield and co-writer of this one) has a firm grip on the proceedings. His helmsmanship is very solid and certainly a cut or two above that of a mere TV-hack camera jockey and country miles ahead of the grotesquely overrated and utterly incompetent likes of J.J. Abrams, Christopher Nolan and Gary Ross.

Unlike those three boneheaded stooges of modern cinema, Goddard has good, clear ideas where to place his camera for maximum impact, using a variety of well-composed tableaux and covering the action with a superb sense of space and geography. Every cut, every shot is a dramatic beat - unlike the herky-jerky mish-mashes continually perpetrated by Abrams, Nolan and Ross - who collectively have the worst tin-eyes in Hollywood and no real idea of how to craft suspense and action save for throwing blustery everything-including-the-kitchen-sink shots in our direction with lots of noise and Attention Deficit Disorder editing.

I went into watching this film without having seen the trailer and avoiding all puff pieces. I do this with all films, but it was especially helpful in terms of enjoying The Cabin in the Woods. I normally don't have a problem with "spoilers" as a READER because I NEVER read reviews until AFTER I see a movie. I, however, am an anomaly in this regard. For me, a good review is like a dialogue with the reader and I much prefer getting (and giving) such specifics. Doing so for this film, however, would be most egregious.

That said, I mentioned several plot-holes above and without citing them specifically by rote - allow me to briefly address them in general terms. The holes were of the stretching credulity variety. Even within the context of the fantasy world set-up by the filmmakers, the movie also had several motivational speed bumps. Each time these stumbles occurred I'd briefly be taken out of the forward thrust of the piece either by noting them or briefly questioning them (all in my mind - as it were - not, obviously aloud).

Part of why these plot-holes and speed bumps stick out like sore thumbs has to do with the admirable directorial choice of providing really well composed shots that conveyed a lot of information without resorting to that dreadful rat-at-at-at approach that's become annoyingly fashionable in contemporary genre films. Alas, the script needed one more pass to allow for this. Cumulatively, however, it's not a major problem, but certainly worth noting since the mise-en-scene is generally so first rate.

I'm not sure how Goddard's style will develop beyond this first film - unlike, for example Brad Peyton (Journey 2 The Mysterious Island) who, with his first two features, delivered craft, humour AND a clearly distinctive genre filmmaking voice. That said, Goddard is this film's real star and I have high hopes for his career as a director.

Without spoiling a single thing for you, two of the more favourable aspects of The Cabin in the Woods are:

(a) Every character you detest (including some of the purported "good guys") get everything they deserve and then some and;

(b) The film has an extremely satisfying conclusion that completely betrays most contemporary movies of this ilk and delightfully harkens back to the sci-fi and horror of 70s cinema AND E.C. horror comics of the 50s.

The Cabin in the Woods is a genre-geek's wet-dream that will also appeal to those of more "normal" mainstream tastes.

It's not perfect, but it's a winner nevertheless.

"The Cabin in the Woods" is in wide theatrical release via Alliance Films"

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THE DEEP BLUE SEA - Review by Greg Klymkiw - Terence Davies: The poet as filmmaker.

The Deep Blue Sea (2011) dir. Terence Davies
Starring: Rachel Weizs, Simon Russell, Tom Hiddlestone

****

By Greg Klymkiw

I used to think Terence Davies might well have been one of the most important living British filmmakers. I was wrong. He is, without question, Britain's most important living filmmaker. From his trilogy of mesmerizing shorts to his latest work, The Deep Blue Sea, Davies is easily as important to the framework of Great Britain's cinema heritage as Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger or any of the greats of the 1960s British New Wave.

Working in a classical style with indelible compositions, creating a rhythm through little, no or very slow camera moves and infusing his work with a humanity seldom rivalled, Davies recognizes the importance of cinema as poetry – or rather, using the poetry of cinema to create narrative that is truly experiential. (I doubt any audience member will forget the haunting underground tracking shot during the Blitz in this new picture – as evocative to the eye, ear and mind as anything I’ve seen.)

I’d go so far as saying that Davies might well be the heir apparent to film artists like Alexander Dovzhenko and Sergei Paradjanov – exploiting the poetic properties of cinema in all the best ways.

The Deep Blue Sea is a heartbreaking, sumptuous and tremendously moving adaptation of Terrence Rattigan’s great play of the same name. Rattigan’s theatrical explorations of class and sex have made for rich film adaptations, most notably The Browning Version, Separate Tables, The Winslow Boy and The Prince and the Showgirl. Rattigan, given the discriminatory criminalisation of homosexuality in England (his frequent collaborator, the closeted director Anthony Asquith, was the progeny of the man who signed Oscar Wilde’s arrest warrant) chose to primarily reflect on gay issues and culture by utilizing a critical dramatic look at the often troubled lives of straight couples.

Nowhere is this more powerfully rendered than in The Deep Blue Sea, which Davies has adapted with considerable homage to the play’s tone and themes while using the source as a springboard for his own unique approach to affairs of the heart. (While Davies oddly reduces the role and importance of the play’s one clearly gay character, one suspects he did this to focus more prominently on the trinity of its central characters.)

Here we feel and experience the tragic tale of Hester (Rachel Weisz), who leaves her much older, though loving husband, the respected judge Sir William (Simon Russell) when she meets the handsome, charming Freddie (Tom Hiddlestone), a former RAF pilot who allows her the joys of sex for the first time in her life.

Alas, Freddie’s a bit of a rake and soon tires of domesticity, and Hester is driven to seriously contemplating suicide. Sir William wishes desperately to have her back. The eternal dilemma is that Freddie doesn’t love Hester as much as she’d like, nor does Hester feel as much love for Sir William as he does for her.

This is a beautifully acted piece through and through. Most astonishing is the performance Davies coaxes out of Rachel Weisz - it's as infused with heartbreaking tragedy as the great work he pulled from Gillian Anderson in his perfect film adaptation of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth.

The triangle in The Deep Blue Sea is played out with Davies’s trademark style and a welcome return to pubs thick with smoke and filled with songs sung by its inebriated denizens. Harking back to Distant Voices, Still Lives, the songs here are not so much a counterpoint to the drudgery of the characters’ lives as something indicative of an overwhelming malaise born out of repression and class.

Davies dazzles and moves us with his humanity and artistry.

It doesn’t take much to give over to his stately pace, and when we do, we’re drawn into a world that can only exist on a big screen, while at the same time providing a window on the concerns of days gone by that are more prevalent in our contemporary world than most of us would care to admit.

"The Deep Blue Sea" is currently in theatrical release via Mongrel Media.

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