It’s a bit of a grab bag edition this week as TIFF ramps up for some major summer programming in the coming weeks.
The first ever retrospective of Chinese-Canadian filmmaker and York University grad Luo Li started yesterday at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. Luo is obviously has good taste as he chose Robert Bresson’s incredible prison film A Man Escaped to introduce in the midst of this weekend’s retrospective.
Luo's two early shorts and his first feature I Went to the Zoo the Other Day, shot here at the the Toronto Zoo, were screened last night but the one to wait for is his latest work, Li Wen at East Lake, which screens Sunday June 14 at 6:15 p.m. It got good notices at Rotterdam’s international film festival early this year and is the most exciting mix of Luo’s mellow pace, rich with stillness and quiet, and his formal inventiveness.
The film explores the rapid development around East Lake — apparently China’s largest urban lake — in Luo’s hometown of Wuhan. It flips a switch going from documentary to fictional narrative in a way that doesn’t feel like a cheap gimmick, likely because of his restrained and unobtrusive style.
There are two other films this weekend to fill-out the director’s whole body of work. 2012’s Emperor Visits the Hell (featuring the actor Li Wen from the previous title) is a bit of a misfire in my books, though it was a winner at the Vancouver International Film Festival in 2012, but starts from an interesting premise of taking an episode from the 16th century Chinese novel Journey to the West and transports it to today and ends with a character's memorable, drunken anti-capitalist rant.
Rivers and My Father screens June 12 at 6:30 p.m. and is a better piece. It’s all about perspective and memory as Luo describes finding his father’s memoirs and deciding to make a film out of them. Luo goes back to Wuhan to dramatize some of the incidents in his father’s life as a child and later wrestles with his own memory as he displays instances closer to the present. The ending features a narration of corrections and changes his father would make to the film to bring it in line with his version of the events. It’s not perfect but it is an intriguing film.
Around the Horn
The aforementioned Li Luo retrospective will appeal to a niche, so we’ll mix it up and hit on broad appeal. Kurt Russell is a beloved screen presence and his filmography will be popping up at the TIFF Bell Lightbox all summer as part of RussellMania. That’s perfect because he and John Carpenter made some of the best “summer” movies of all time together in the 1980s.
The best of them is the marvellous remake of The Thing from 1982 which you can catch June 13 at 9 p.m. Nothing says summer like an isolated, alien-infested arctic outpost right?
Docs in Revue (at the Revue Cinema) is screening a recent Canadian doc called Milk with director Noemi Weis in attendance at all three screenings (June 15, 17, 20). The film purports to use visuals to explore the realities and controversies to do with “infant feeding” all across the earth. It sounds novel at the very least.
And finally, as part of the Annex Family Festival this weekend, kids under 16 get in to see two films at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema. You get to watch the original 1979 The Muppet Movie, which remains awesome, and the 2014 Hot Docs selection I Am Big Bird, a documentary that, as you might guess, looks at Caroll Spinney, the man who has “animated” some of Sesame Street’s most popular characters for decades. Details here.
Toronto Screengrab of the Week
@DannyOnions nabbed last week’s screengrab as from The Fly. That’s it for Cronenberg but we’ll continue the theme of couples walking down Toronto streets as part-time Toronto resident Rachel McAdams strolls along with the guy pictured in the High Park neighbourhood.
