Rock wrote:

All my TIFF viewings for this year:

https://boxd.it/y7SiO/detail

Had a few more planned but got sick and had to skip a a day.

Top 5:
The Substance
Friendship
The Shadow Strays
The End
Triumph

Worst were Linda, The Damned and Hold Your Breath. Everything else I enjoyed at least a bit.

Good news for The Substance, and also for The End after seeing where Vulture gave it a pan.

Rest assured, this movie is awful and not worth anyone's time.

I should explain why I watched it.  First of all, it was free on Youtube, and even the comments were joking about how even the studio wasn't even bothering to take it down.  I'm obviously not much of what you might call a "gamer", but I am a fan of the Borderlands games.  They're fun.  I like the sci-fi sandbox and the cartoonish violence.  Going a little deeper, it's also a pretty sharp post-capitalism parody, showing a ravished colonized landscape scarred by multiple oligarchic corporations, all of which have left behind their garbage, including lots of sunny advertisements which act as ironic contrast to the desolated waste.  This peripheral detritis provides a lot of the game's humor.  In this way, unintentionally as it may be, the game also provides a built-in meta-joke for any mass media corporation who would bother to try to adapt it into a commercial franchise.  And in this way, this film, far beyond any interest in its feeble attempts at entertainment or storytelling, provides a far more fascinating and even cautionary tale.  It is, in fact, a perfect encapsulation of vulture capitalism run amuk, showing an exhausted terrain strewn with overly strip-mined cliches and tropes, the detritis now representing fallow IP, humped to death in a desperate thrust of demographic lust, recycled to the point of homogeneous decay, with any semblence of true entertainment a distant ironic reminder of its absence.

As our entertainment industry morphs into the new engagement industry, this is the kind of contrived and by-committee product that we can expect.  In a perfect world, the failure of this film should be an equivalent of the Heaven's Gate to the current era of IP-dependent franchise-obsessed Hollywood filmmaking template.  It should be an instructive opportunity for improvement.  But, alas, instead its studio Lionsgate has decided to feed all of its catalogue to A.I. software for what it calls "capital-efficient content creation opportunities".  Sounds like one of the bullshit recruiting posters rotting on the walls of the Borderlands game.  These corporations can't co-opt a joke that they aren't capable of understanding.

1/10
 

One of the few films from poco Bunuel, son Juan Luis, this film formally resembles some of his father's late surrealistic work, like Discreet Charm or Obscure Object, which is helped by the addition of Bunuel vets Fernando Rey and Catherine Deneuve.  The story involves Rey, as a wealthy "patron" of the arts who is secretly committed to its destruction (a pretty clear indictment on the interests financing films) who becomes obsessed with a young writer, Deneuve, who seems to have exceptional and possibly metaphysical creative abilities (my take was she has the ability to influence others' perception of reality; other synopsis claim she has the ability to actually alter physical reality), and conspires to embroil her in a scheme to destroy the lives of both her, her artist boyfriend and an otherwise unrelated publisher (who loses his wife and ends up falling for Deneuve) in a series of unfortunate events. 

This is the first film I've seen from Juan Luis Bunuel, but I'd be more interested to check out his other horror films from the time, which have a potential of being more removed from his father's style, because as interesting and sometime humorous as this film is, it still smacks of imitation in his father's shadow.

7/10
 

The cliche has been to say that Ethan Coen was the "writer" half of the Coen Brothers, while Joel was more the "director" half.  This film goes some way to following that cliche, as it encompasses a sharp script which has the screwball energy of the Coens' comedies, but the actual filmmaking is crude and without Joel's panache or polish.  One could argue this gives the film more of an indie, scrappy style that fits the material.  Either way, no one will be mistaking this for Roger Deakins.

The film is still quite fun and witty, even if much of the plot feels like a '90s era sub-Tarantino crime-comedy throwback.  Our title dykes, Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan, have sparky chemistry.  But honestly, most of the problems lie with Qualley, whose southern accent is frankly terrible and frequently iffy enough to be a distraction.

7.5/10




It's a mean feat to be able to transform the story of the bondage-obsessed creator of Wonder Woman and his permissively promiscuous private life into something as utterly boring and pedestrain as this paint-by-numbers and psychologically shallow bioflick which is completely without imagination or eros.

3/10
 

I look forward to redeeming her in my eventual Substance review.

Also I look forward to Qualley as the lead in the next Ethan Coen film, Honey Don't (reportedly the second of his intended "lesbian B-movie trilogy") where she will be a private detective without a southern accent.

Cheers, buddy, 

I'll take the one in the turban.

Hoping to see it tomorrow.

They had the IMAX Experience downtown last week but I missed it.

The prospect of Willem Dafoe playing Vincent van Gogh is simply irresistible, even given the unfortunate fact that Dafoe happens to be a good 25 years older than van Gogh at the time of his death.  Perhaps it's to show his "old soul".  Dafoe still manages a frail and sensitive portrait.  Director/co-writer Julian Schnabel chooses to incorporate some controversial interpretations of events, particularly concerning van Gogh's death, which may be questionable and off-putting, but where Schnabel, as a painter himself, succeeds is in his depiction of van Gogh's more subjective perceptions of nature, keeping faithful to van Gogh's palette and vibrancy during the film's sequences in Arles, France.  In this sense. the film almost makes an incidental argument that van Gogh may have been the true discoverer of the vaunted "magic hour" light.  This film has its virtues, although I'm still inclined to cite Altman's Vincent & Theo as my preferred version of the artist.

7.5/10