
Toronto International Film Festival
I’m off to Toronto this weekend to check out a few of the films that are screening as part of the Toronto International Film Festival [TIFF] — a charitable, not-for-profit cultural organization. All up, there will be 335 films from 64 countries screening over ten days, so I’ll be scrambling to fit a few in, but some of the highlights include Mr. Nobody [photo above], ‘which tells the story of Nemo, the world’s oldest man’; Crab Trap, ‘a meditative look at daily life in a remote village on the Pacific coast of Colombia’; and She, A Chinese, ‘a hybrid of documentary, creative writing, visual poetry and cinema’.
Tagged: A Chinese, Crab Trap, Mr. Nobody, She, TIFF, Toronto International Film Festival
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Cracks, the feature length debut of Jordan Scott
Directed by Jordan Scott, the daughter of Ridley Scott, and starring the sensual Eva Green, Cracks is an unsettling, yet tragically beautiful movie set in the lush surrounds of the English countryside and featuring a Lord of the Flies-ish storyline in which a group of English boarding school students turn on a new Spanish-born classmate when they feel threatened by her evident exotic-ness and worldliness. With a dark subtext in which boundaries between teacher and student and the students themselves are increasingly blurred, and beguiling cinematography, this film, which I saw at the recent Toronto International Film Festival, provides plenty of talking points, not the least of being the stunning performance of Green as the teacher whose fantasises about a life that she had never had the opportunity to live ultimately lead to a calamitous outcome. Read more
Turtle: The Incredible Journey
This beautiful documentary charts the journey of a loggerhead turtle from its traumatic hatching on a Floridian beach and its frantic scramble to make it to the sea, to its battles with the currents as it makes its way on its genetically programmed path of discovery through the temperamental oceans. Partly fictionalized to allow for the many years over which the ‘journey’ takes place, the cinematography is stunning and the storyline engrossing, making this one of the standout screenings at the recent Toronto International Film Festival.
Dorian Gray, as directed by Oliver Parker
Whilst in Toronto last weekend for the International Film Festival, I caught a screening of Dorian Gray, the superbly realised adaptation of the Oscar Wilde classic which first appeared nearly 100 years ago in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine and now stars the unheralded Ben Barnes and the meticulously brilliant Colin Firth. Directed by Oliver Parker, the film is a dark, dangerous, yet stunningly shot expose on the trappings of beauty and the inherent temptations that its combination with youth and curiosity can bring. The costume design, in particular, is wonderful, not just for the aspirational seduction of the draping and the romanticisim of the accessories, but for its shaping of an alluring but frightening world where darkness and light go hand in hand and the descent into madness is both sudden and expected. This is a compelling film, though not without its flaws. Mind you, the best of them rarely are.
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Remember those one-piece bobble toys that used to sway back and forth until coming to an upright stop? Ryan Harc has practically implemented the same concept into a toothbrush; no more lying on the germ-infested sink base because it simply won’t.
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Michael Wolf, a German born American photographer, has lived in Hong Kong since 1995. His work explores the ways city-dwellers in China and Hong Kong shape their surroundings in an ‘organic metropolis’. His series — Architecture of Density — has some breathtaking images of Hong Kong’s apartment buildings.
Cloud Control have just unravelled a newly recorded track, Gold Canary, from their forthcoming 2010 album. It’s straight up pastoral Blue Mountains goodness. I actually heard it live earlier this year and it sounded quite rad.
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Scott Sternberg created the great Los Angeles label, Band of Outsiders, and it’s one of the few labels that fit a little guy like me perfectly. I live in BOO shirts. They are my second skin.
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