TIFF 2019 - Day 4-6

Coming Home Again is a Korean drama about Yale graduate Chang-rae Lee who quits his good-paying job in New York and returns home to San Francisco to care for his mother who is dying from stomach cancer. Switching between present day and flashback memories, we see how the pair bonded over food and cooking. There were many close-up, hunger-inducing scenes of classic Korean dishes being lovingly prepared by the son, as he was taught to do in flashback scenes with the mother. The offering of food was seen as an expression of love. It is interesting that the movie is told from the perspective of the caregiver as opposed to the patient and I was surprised at the level of medical home care that he provided, including refilling his mother's IV bag. Because of the Women in Films documentary that I watched the previous day, I noticed filming techniques used in this movie including staging, lighting, depicting memories and what is left out. Many scenes of the family interacting with the bed-ridden mother are shot from the adjoining room, looking through a window. This includes a critical scene between the mother and Chang-rae’s sister, where you cannot hear what is said, but the meaning is unmistakable. In another climatic scene set at the dining table, an argument erupts around the mother but the camera stays focused on her expressive face. The performances by the two leads are excellent and heartbreaking.

Greed is a biting political satire filmed in part like a mockumentary that ends up being a scathing Indictment against the fashion trade, which profits from the exploitation of poor female workers in third world countries. Steve Coogan plays the wealthy, unscrupulous discount fashion retailer tycoon Richard “Greedy” McCreadie, who ironically coined this nickname for himself as an ambitious young man who would do anything to reach the top. For the occasion of his 60th birthday, McCreadie has organized an obscenely lavish birthday party on the Greek island of Mykonos, where Syrian refugees have “inconveniently camped on HIS beach”. The toga party themed bash, complete with a replica being built of the Colosseum, a gladiator, and a trained lion, is to be documented by McCreadie's biographer Nick as well as being filmed as a TV reality show. Scenes jump between the preparations for and attendance at the party, and flashbacks of McCreadie’s youth, rise from rags to riches, and a business ethics board that grills him about his unsavoury practices. What starts off as a hilariously ridiculous farce ends up with a serious message that is delivered with a sledgehammer.  I don't usually find Steve Coogan's comedies to be funny, but I really liked him in this one.  I just wish they had been a bit more subtle with the message being conveyed and the end.

Although marketed as musical comedy, I found Lina From Lima to be a slow and depressing drama that occasionally and inexplicably breaks into song and dance, without the musical interludes actually advancing or enhancing the plot. Hailing from Peru, Lina works as a migrant worker in Chile for a wealthy couple, taking care of their daughter Clara as well as overseeing the construction of a swimming pool in their new home. Lina struggles to maintain a long distance relationship with her teen-aged son Junior who she left behind with her ex-husband. On the other hand, Clara has bonded with Lina but craves a closer relationship with her absent father. Lina tries to fill the void in her lonely life with Tinder hookups with different men. Her planned trip home for Christmas is derailed when her negligence causes a mishap to the pool and she needs to find a solution to fix it. Again, cultural differences may have prevented me from finding anything funny in her situation and the injection of random songs did not help.  I find it difficult to relate to musicals sung in foreign languages because the effort to translate the lyrics detaches the words from the music and detracts from the impact of the songs.

We walked into Jojo Rabbit with a bit of trepidation, not knowing what to expect based on the film’s strange premise. Jojo is a precocious but socially awkward German youth with blue eyes, blond hair and a cherubic face, who is fanatically obsessed with Adolph Hitler. With his father away “at war”, Jojo conjures up an imaginary version of the Fuhrer who acts as his friend, confidante, and conduit for interpreting all the anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda that he has been taught. The movie starts out as hilarious satire as Jojo attends his Nazi youth training camp, although it takes a few minutes of unease at the sight of all the swastikas before you feel like its OK to laugh. Eventually the film becomes poignant and heartfelt once Jojo discovers the secret that his free-spirited mother has been keeping, which in turn causes him to reevaluate his beliefs and party indoctrination. I have watched many excellent movies at TIFF this year, but most of them followed standard, accepted formulas. From the standpoint of originality, entertainment value and sheer audaciousness, this movie could well turn out to be my favourite of the festival.

I usually don’t like Adam Sandler movies so I wasn’t sure about his crime movie Uncut Gems, about a gambling jeweler trying to get out of debt by auctioning off a stone containing precious gems.  Basketball star Kevin Garnett and pop singer The Weeknd play versions of themselves in roles that advance the plot. It did not help to read a write-up that described the film as loud and frenetic. The review was “bang on”, pun intended.  Even worse, I felt total antipathy and disdain for Adam Sandler’s character and all the yelling and swearing gave me a headache.  So I cut my losses after 75 minutes of the 135 minute film and walked out with enough time to queue up for the another movie.  I guess I still don’t like most Adam Sandler movies.

Red Penguin is an interesting documentary about a consortium of investors including the owners of the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey team who decided in invest in 50% of the Russian Red Army hockey team in the early 1990s.  This was shortly after the breakup of the Soviet Union when many of the Russian hockey superstars left to join the more lucrative National Hockey League, leaving the talent and interest in Russian hockey in tatters.  Diminutive sales and promotion dynamo Steve Warshaw was sent to Moscow to turn things around for the team which was rebranded as the  “Red Penguins” complete with a new logo and merchandising.  Steve brought showmanship to the games to drive up attendance, offering promotions including free beer, strippers at half time, trained bears, a Boris Yeltsin look-alike contest and more.  Unfortunately this was also a time of corruption and rise of the Russian mafia so things started to turn dangerous as the team’s success grew.

Last Porno Show is a quirky Canadian drama about aspiring method-actor Wayne who tries to work through his unresolved feelings about his deceased estranged father Al, after inheriting Al’s beloved but seedy, run-down porno theatre. The film does not shy away from explicit porno images or full-frontal nudity for both the male and female characters.  It flips between scenes in the present of Wayne trying to embrace the porn film culture to get into character for a salacious role and his memories of being a boy growing up in the environment of the porn theatre. These memories show how Wayne was often traumatized by the situations that Al left him in but also reveal glimpses of how much his father loved him. A central theme to the movie, which was surprisingly poignant given its subject matter, is whether you “want to be a person who is happy or one who makes others happy”. By the end of the movie, Wayne comes to realize which one his father was. Although mostly a sombre film, there was a funny scene involving a TV set, and I loved the credits at the end with one role described as “cinema masturbator”.  How would you like that on your resume?