knocked up

judd apatow’s (40 year old virgin, freaks and geeks) newest comedy again brings together his favourite actors (seth rogen, paul rudd, jason segel, etc) for knocked up. seth rogen plays the lead, ben, alongside katherine heigl (grey’s anatomy) as alison. the two meet at a bar one night, have a one night stand, and alison ends up pregnant. the word abortion is never quite mentioned in this film and is clearly not considered by alison, even after her mother subtly suggests it. once the film hits this point, it is essentially about struggling to keep an unlikely relationship between ben, a stoner, and alison, a successful woman working in television, together. i think the film is so accessible for so many people because the humour comes from very relatable situations that occur in relationships and during pregnancy. ben knows he must take responsibility but finds it initially difficult to leave behind his immature lifestyle, living with roommates and working on a porn website. the two also deal with more specific issues, like feeling unattractive during sex while alison is pregnant. ben and alison’s relationship is held up against alison’s sister, debbie (leslie mann, apatow’s wife) and her husband, pete’s (paul rudd) marriage. they deal with similar problems with communication and the men and women each confide in each other, all realizing that they are imperfect. i think apatow’s films are successful because he writes realistically; the interactions between friends are so believable, and potentially involve a lot of improvisation amongst real friends. while seth rogen and katherine heigl are charismatic together and well cast in this film, i think the supporting cast is just as crucial in making knocked up one of the funniest films i’ve seen so far this year.

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away from her

away from her is the directorial debut of sarah polley, who has been an actor from a young age, starring in the long-running road to avonlea and more recently in films such as exotica, the sweet hereafter, and my life without me. for her first film as a director, she has adapted a short story by alice munro, called the bear came over the mountain. the story follows fiona (julie christie) as the onset of her alzheimer's necessitates that she leave her husband, grant (gordon pinsent), of forty-some years to live in a nursing home.

in the opening scene between grant and fiona, they are washing dishes after dinner and after drying a pot, fiona puts it in the freezer. i found this to be quite effective at establishing their relationship with the current state of fiona’s alzheimer’s. from grant’s reaction we get the full effect of what their life has become in a simple expression. much of the emotion conveyed in this films is done through the facial expressions of the two stars, which in my opinion makes their casting very important and deliberate on polley’s part. the decision for fiona to enter the nursing home is ultimately her choice; grant in fact tries to convince her not to go when he discovers that he can’t see her for the first thirty days. we learn through discussions between the two that grant cheated on fiona several years before when he was a professor, but fiona says she has forgiven him. however, what becomes clear as fiona enters the nursing home and forgets who grant is, is that she has essentially chosen to leave him at this point in their marriage. she does not see grant for thirty days and begins spending time with another man in the home, aubrey (michael murphy). i think it is viable to interpret this as her punishment to grant for his adultery years ago; he is forced to watch her be in love with another man. this perspective is reinforced through grant’s conversations with one of the workers in the nursing home. the nursing home is shot with over-exposed lighting and soft focus, making it appear very idyllic, but this element of grant’s punishment gives the setting a darker component to consider along with the typical difficulties of an alzheimer’s story.

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year of the dog

year of the dog is the directorial debut of mike white (writer of the good girl, chuck&buck) and stars molly shannon as peggy, a woman whose closest companion, her dog pencil, dies and subsequently, her life as she knew it falls apart. peggy is a secretary whose only friends are her coworker layla (regina king) and her brother and his wife (thomas mccarthy and laura dern) but we see that these relationships are more or less superficial and that peggy truly feels closest to pencil. when peggy adopts a new dog, she meets newt (peter sarsgaard) who feels the same as her about animal rights and she begins to like him and it seems as though they may have a relationship. however, he like peggy, has better relationships with animals than humans and is incapable of being anything more than a friend to her. after this realization, peggy adopts a strictly vegan lifestyle which alienates her from her friends and family. molly shannon effectively portrays the balancing act that peggy attempts to perform between living a normal life and adhering to her beliefs. in the scenes when we see her using her company’s money to support animal rights foundations, and when she takes her brother’s children to a farm and then a slaughterhouse, we know she is attempting to do good things, but they end up backfiring because her gestures are too extreme. shannon conveys this through her performance by shifting between humour and drama, even within particular shots. it is often difficult to know whether we’re supposed to be laughing or feeling deeply sympathetic towards peggy. i think this technique is effective especially when peggy ultimately abandons the traditional life she had been living to support her cause entirely at the end of the film. even after she has been rehabilitated and her boss has welcomed her back, she cannot rejoin the life she lived before. i saw this film soon after zoo (a film dealing with real-life zoophiles) and it got me thinking about the spectrums of animal love. year of the dog seemed to me to be the safe side of the spectrum, portraying a woman with a deep emotional connection to her pet, so intense that when he dies, it upsets her entire world, and zoo being the dangerous territory of beastiality. i do not think the relationship portrayed in year of the dog is meant to suggest that peggy is a zoophile; just to perhaps bring to light the idea that the connections some people feel to animals are often more fulfilling than their human interactions. and that the way the men in zoo had to negotiate their regular lives with their love of animals was similar to the way in which peggy negotiates her animal rights beliefs with her existence in a more traditional setting.

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disturbia

director d.j. caruso’s (taking lives) disturbia begins with a car accident that kills kale (shia labeouf)’s father and causes kale to become reclusive and act out in school. an argument with his spanish teacher ends with kale punching him and receiving a punishment of three months under house arrest. he has an ankle monitor attached that allows kale to reach the boundaries of the yard and if he is to go beyond that, the police are immediately dispatched. initially, kale wastes his days playing video games, watching trash tv and eating junk food. his mother (carrie-anne moss) gets frustrated with this behaviour and cuts off all of his entertainment. out of boredom, kale begins spying on his neighbours, including Ashley, a hot teenage girl who spends most of her time lounging poolside, and mr.turner (david morse), a man he suspects to be a serial killer who is all over the news. kale employs the help of ashley and his best friend, ronnie, to do the investigating that he cannot. the parallels to hitchcock’s rear window are unmistakable with shia labeouf’s house-bound kale mirroring jimmy stewart’s wheelchair-bound l.b. jefferies, both of whom become obsessed with an unsolved murder mystery in their own neighbourhoods. however, disturbia does not extend the mystery of the killer’s identity in the way that rear window does. the clues in disturbia are laid out blankly through the television reports and kale realizes that mr.turner is in fact the killer, almost immediately. beyond this point, the tone of disturbia changes and it becomes a fairly standard teen thriller, albeit a suspenseful one.

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hot docs: girls rock!

the world premiere of arne johnson and shane king’s girls rock! was the best screening i attended at hot docs. the film is about a rock n’ roll camp for girls aged eight to eighteen. while at this week-long camp, the girls must choose an instrument (that they may never have played) and form a band with other campers. at the end of the week, all of the bands perform for a large crowd. the film focuses on several campers and follows their progression through learning to play instruments to resolving conflicts with other band members. along with learning to play music, the girls take lessons in self-defense and discuss body image issues as well as pressures they face at school and home. a lot of emphasis is placed on the idea of girls not being afraid to be loud and to express themselves. we witness many of the girls undergo transformations when they lose their initial inhibitions and allow themselves to play loudly, make mistakes, and get sweaty. one of the camp leaders mentions the ways in which girls are taught to be small and quiet in this culture while boys are allowed to be loud, take up space, and get dirty. part of the focus of the camp is working to undo these behaviours in the girls, by providing a space that they feel comfortable and encouraged in. one of the most profound realizations that some of the campers reach is discovering that they are happy with themselves; a quality lacking from many of them when they begin the week. i felt that this documentary worked really well because the girls they interviewed and followed for the week were all very endearing in their own ways and the film approached the difficult subject of teenage girls’ self-confidence through the guise of a music camp, while still addressing a full spectrum of individuals and struggles.

hot docs: zoo

director robinson devor’s zoo depicts through interviews and re-enactments the story of a seattle man’s death in 2005. the man died of a perforated colon due to engaging in intercourse with a horse at a gathering of zoophiles on a washington farm. devor constructs the story out of order, cutting between establishing the psychology of the zoophiles involved and the lead up to the actual event of the man’s death. it was obvious that devor was extremely careful to not pass judgment on this group of people, and to treat the situation delicately. the film portrays these men as misunderstood and somewhat alienated from healthy human connections. we never see the actual people involved, only re-enactments (for privacy reasons i assume), but we do hear their voices in the voice-over. it is nearly impossible to distinguish the voices from one another, giving the sense that they are all speaking as a unified group. much of the film is dark and sets an eerie mood when the events leading up to the death are recounted for us. conversely, when we are hearing some of these men discuss the emotional connections they have with animals (sexual relations are barely mentioned), the cinematography is quite beautiful; a lot of nighttime outdoor shots with vibrantly coloured flowers, trees, etc. i think devor used this technique of two distinct filming styles to visually reinforce the idea of a spectrum of animal love. because much of what the men discuss is emotional connections, it helps us to move beyond the initial shock of the sex to see that it’s not such a simple distinction between zoophiles and everyone else. i thought devor’s cautious treatment of this subject was effective because i left the theatre not focused on the man’s death, but more on the psyches of zoophiles and where exactly i stand on my beliefs about them.

hot docs: dreamworld / my second life

this was the north american premiere of both dreamworld and my second life. jorien van nes’ dreamworld tells the story of patrick, a 30 year old man living in the netherlands who spends most of his time playing second life, the online virtual world that has been gaining popularity recently. he describes creating an online avatar and the process of creating a second life identity. we meet patrick’s wife, danielle, who also spends a great deal of time in second life. cut between this story, are interviews with two other women living in the u.s. one of these women, christine, is patrick’s online girlfriend and he is planning a trip to meet her in real life. his wife also has an online boyfriend and so allows him to make this trip. once patrick arrives in the u.s., we witness how awkward their interactions are. at the end of the weekend, patrick discusses how the trip was not what he expected, while looking clearly disappointed. the films running time was only 30 minutes and i think had it been longer, van nes could have focused more on the implications second life has on the increasingly indistinguishable boundaries between reality and fantasy. while patrick had clearly functional distinct lives in reality, with his wife danielle, and in fantasy, with christine, when he tried to bring his fantasy life into reality, the two did not easily mesh. i think dreamworld is important because it’s one of our first forays into the effects of our culture entering into more and more virtual and online social networks, and as a result moving away from personal and physical interactions.

douglas gayeton’s my second life is the first documentary to be shot entirely in second life. the premise is that a california man named molotov alva went missing and director, gayeton discovered diaries of this man who chose to leave his real world existence behind and “entirely” live in second life. the documentary within a documentary is told from alva’s perspective in what is a problematic conflating of the real and fantasy worlds. granted these concepts are philosophically very interesting, i found gayeton’s approach to be superficial and pretentious. throughout the film, quotes from philosophers and various intellectuals are used to blatantly further these lofty ideas, while not actually expanding upon them, in what seems an attempt to deceive the audience into thinking gayeton is more insightful than he actually is. afterwards, these suspicions were confirmed at the q&a where gayeton came across as highly arrogant about the “truth” of his documentary.