Did someone say TIFF Day 3? Let’s get this party started!
Anora
Sean Baker is quickly turning into one of our most reliable indie filmmakers. Tangerine was a micro-budget wonder that grabbed my attention and that of a lot of other critics. I still think about various bits from that movie that stick with me, the least of which being one of the great Clu Gulager’s final roles. The Florida Project was even better. And I stand before you as one of the true believers in Red Rocket as well. That roller coaster scene alone! I had to ask one of the producers how they did that because I was so enamored with the process.
Anora, which won the Palme at Cannes, is going to be Baker’s coming out party. Bluntly, it’s his best film date, which says something. Elevating Mikey Madison aka the actress who I mostly know as “girl who gets set on fire in things” (seriously, this happened in back to back movies practically) to an awards darling, she produces one of the best performances of the year as a NYC-based erotic dancer. While working she meets a Russian oligarch’s son (Mark Eidelstein aka Russian Timothee Chalamet) and they spark off a relationship that goes a lot further than his family would like.
This is a tight script, and it carries some of the same combustible nervous energy that you’d see in a Safdie Bros. movie. A lot of manic panic, with people screaming at each other and running across the city trying to reach end goals. And yet, it’s one of the most absorbing narratives we took in the entire festival. The hapless bullshit that Anora falls into with a trio of Russian and Armenian doofuses is rollicking for the entirety of its runtime and hits a growing crescendo of pathos, particularly as its inevitable conclusion comes to a head. Like Red Rocket before, it’s just such a great time. But Anora is an even more complete film, one that finds Baker at height of his storytelling prowess and his ongoing fixation on gutter glam. This could serve as his final statement on that theme.
As an aside, I was delighted to see Baker is a fellow Compartment No. 6 enjoyer.
4.5 stars
Sharp Corner
Every TIFF, you roll the dice on at least a few homegrown Canadian productions, and this time the big one I was angling for was this Ben Foster starring psychological piece that the early buzz had cast as “in the mold of Nightcrawler”.
I don’t know that Jason Buxton’s newest effort is necessarily that, and it’s nowhere near the same level of thrill or high-wattage a central performance, but it’s a clever idea nonetheless. Foster stars as Josh, a married father of one who has just moved into a new home with his wife (Colbie Smulders) and child. All is well until a car accident happens right on their front lawn. From then on, Josh becomes obsessed not only with the now deceased teenaged victim of the accident but also the idea that it will occur again. And it does, thanks to the titular sharp turn in front of their home, which only serves to stoke his fixation further. Soon, he spends his working hours learning First Aid and reading up about subsequent victims to the point where his working days and familial relationships begin to fall apart.
It’s an odd movie tonally, with subject matter that is akin to Take Shelter, but it does indeed embrace elements of comedy found, not in Nightcrawler, but Dan Gilroy’s later film Velvet Buzzsaw. It doesn’t go THAT far, to Sharp Corner’s detriment, but you can see the inspiration as the story takes shape. There’s a limitation to the premise too. Let’s be blunt, if the local news was covering a wreck where someone was literally burned to a crisp, the city/county would without doubt at least put up a speed bump or two. You have to exercise some suspension of disbelief in order to keep the film going.
And from a character perspective, it’s a little unclear as to whether the audience is supposed to sympathize with either Josh or his wife in this situation. For the record, I came away thinking a little bit of empathy for trauma could have gone a long way here, but Buxton only barely touches on it.
Bottomline, it’s just a little thin, if inherently watchable.
3 stars
Ick
Our only Midnight Madness screening of the festival was greeted with an introduction from director Joseph Kahn who stated that he had finished Ick just the day before.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m here to tell you that the film was absolutely not finished and the rush job was very apparent.
Let me get the good out of the way; Kahn’s heart is in the right place. His attempt to recapture the spirit of Amblin sci-fi/horror/adventure pictures is laudable, as we’ve only really seen that replicated well recently with Stranger Things and freaking Transformers spinoff, of all things. The clear influence on Kahn is both Chuck Russell’s excellent remake of The Blob and millennial culture of the late 90’s and early 2000’s.
There are moments in Ick, which has an affable leading man in Brandon Routh, that work. It’s genuinely funny at points – with sharp barbs at online Gen Z discourse that sometimes get a hair too insular but works often – and a set-up that’s pretty clever. You see, the “Ick” is this monstrous growth that’s come up from the ground and has been around for as long as any of the town’s citizens can remember. The kids at the local school where former alumnus football star Hank (Routh) teaches science keep wondering “when is the Ick gonna do something?” That’s a novel, knowing approach that I can get on-board with.
Here’s where things get dicey though. For one, the script never quite takes a moment to breathe. It’s just wall to wall riffing, everybody has something sharp to say, and because of that non-stop comedic approach there’s no weight to anything that’s happening. Even when the kinds of movies that Kahn is reaching toward were at their most parodic (namely the films of Fred Dekker and Shane Black) they still took time for the characters to take a step back and feel some form of fleshed out. By the third act, there are two characters that play an important role that I spent most of the movie wondering why we were following them at all.
There’s a lot of other rough edges too. The action is bewildering at times, some of that due to cgi menace that saps any of the visceral nature of its kills, others can be chalked up to bizarre editing decisions. But the biggest issue, and I really don’t know if it was the venue or the mixing of the film, but about half of the dialogue was muffled and unintelligible. Not great for a movie that relies on that humor I was just talking about.
In all, this premiere of Ick felt like a test screening. There’s promise there, no doubt. And I’d love to return to it when it’s honed a little more and enters its final form.
2 stars