TIFF: Norwegians and "Goons."

Paolo here. I've never made a secret that ever since watching that Lars von Trier film, it's been my goal to see TIFF movies that are pretty gross (I say last year's was Aronofsky's Black Swan but most would say Bruce LaBruce's LA Zombie). If the three films I saw today were combined, there would be more abject and nudity to rival all else. Oh, and these movies have some bad parenting too.

Apparently John 'Johnny Rotten' Lydon is making cameos now, appearing in and producing a movie called Sons of Norway. His younger self has a big presence and influence in the evolving characters, as young Nikolai watches the legendary rocker on television, the latter pretending to know about what 'punk' or what anything means. Nikolai is surrounded by people who have their own definitions of the musical movement, like his Communist/Dadist inspired father or a leather jacketed young man who fancies himself as a band's singer, recruiting Nikolai on lead guitars.

What I do like about it is how Nikolai's exposure to punk weaves in and out of a tragedy that befalls his mystically gifted mother instead of the latter causing the former. Most movies portray youths participating in antisocial behaviour as either a product of a bad generation or a family, and he is both. His mother couldn't have stopped him from listening to this kind of music and supports him, actually. His father also can't be bothered to be a good parent after being distraught, letting his son tend to the house. The movie is jus as easily about their father-son relationship, the former occasionally speechatizing his way to defend his son.

Why is this movie 'gross?' The answer... plus two more films after the jump.

One of the film's first scenes include Nikolai, with a safety pin piercing his left cheek, throwing a beer bottle at a school principal, causing a big cartoonish bump on the latter's head. There's a lot of, well, punk ethos in the film. Zoom in close-ups, broken noses, obvious musical cues, a parent taking his child to a nudist colony, most of it making me feel too old for this noise.

The Canadian hockey film Goon is the new comedic offering from Michael Dowse, director of the FUBARs, which some of you might know about, and the Topher Grace vehicle Take Me Home Tonight - Roger Ebert's review of it might be the best film review I'll ever read this year and is much more enjoyable than the movie might be. Dowse also doesn't seem to be taking good risk with Goon's disastrously crass  trailer and by appointing Seann William Scott as his star. Scott's character, amateur hockey player Doug 'the Thug' Glatt, is the centre of Jay Baruchel's flawed script. The mostly male characters have co-dependent relationships instead of teaching themselves and each other how to stand up for themselves. The only major female character and Doug's love interest, Eva (Alison Pill), is also the kind of seemingly loose woman who likes the gruffness and violence of hockey players because apparently pretty girls like that. And there are certain scenes where Doug looks too old for Eva.

If the film might not work as a whole, its separate scenes are marvelously hilarious. Scott nails Doug's social awkwardness and surprising meekness, devoid of the signature bravado in his decade-long repertoire. He also encapsulates Doug's morose side, his eyes often on the brink of tears although he sneaks a chuckle or two when characters like his best friend (Baruchel) get wacky. It's also probably the sentimental Canadian in me that makes it more poignant in my eyes, the film coming out after the handful of suicides of hockey players. Jocks get sad too, depressed even. Some of these players, fit and seemingly invincible on the outside like Doug, don't know they're potential because they're the receiving end of verbal abuse and condescension by their families or by the people they see every day.

And since this follows on the footsteps of Slap Shot, Baruchel punctuates the script with bloody fights. Fighting also happens to be Doug's specialty and is why his coaches allow him, an inept hockey player, on the rink. The film does what it can to work on the merging layers of the sadism and empathy within the audience's violent spectatorship.

i am a good person/i am a bad person apparently sounds like a pretentious college student film, and it kind of is. Ingrid Veninger the writer/producer/director of the refreshing young love tale Modra, is back with this newer, meta-narrative film, where she plays a director named Ruby White. The film was off to a good start, as Ruby does things like perform sexual acts or go to the bathroom, guaranteed to show mothers in a different light. She then takes her eighteen year old daughter Sara to an itinerary of film festivals in Europe, the first one being in Bedford, England. It then lets us assume that the next hundred minutes will depict the tests in their relationship. The test aspect mostly comes from Ruby, the reckless mother calling her daughter a 'drag.'

Unable to handle her mother's lack of professionalism, Sara calls it quits and goes to Paris on her own leisure time, leaving Ruby in the Berlinale. There's some admirable writing while portraying their two separate story lines. Ruby makes a spectacle out of herself while trying to promote the film in U-Bahn stations and public squares, sporting a bandaged head. She's also wondering whether she's still desirable to men by going out to night clubs. Meanwhile,  Sara discovers that she's pregnant, keeping in mind that her mother was also pregnant with her, following and retracing her mother's footsteps. The film also features not one but two whopping Skype conversations. And, you know, most of the bit actors around Ruby and Sara were picked on the street but they weren't that bad.

After the two women separate, we're watching an hour where these bourgeois women walk around cities that your regular person can't afford to visit. There's also Veninger's trademark of pontificating sound bytes from strangers accompanied by unrelated visuals of crowds. Events unfold and anecdotes in the film produce uncomfortable laughs. But it still seems as if Veninger was hunting for a story and that kind of method mostly produces the most limp of emotional arcs.

I hope Toronto steps its game up tomorrow. I have faith.

Comments

[James]

I was at the premiere as well. I assume Paolo is the guy who asked the two stupid questions at the end of the Q&A. For those not in attendance, someone asked if this was the director's attempt to move into mainstream moviemaking, and also asked about the large age difference between William Scott and Pill (which is a startling 9 years according to Wiki - for shame! call the police!) The crowd had the same look on their faces as the crew on stage - a sort of WTF??!?. The crew gave a deservedly flip answer to the stupid questions and we all laughed at the guy. The crowd really seemed to enjoy the film and I would suggest that Paolo find another vocation. Maybe he should get a job guessing ages at an amusement park since that seems to be his obsession...

[Paolo]

Thank you for the kind words. Also, I actually liked Goon, despite everything.

[Paolo]

By the way, 26 and 35 are different stages in people's lives, although anyone can get a half hour's conversation with me about my ambivalence about that. I will concede that I should have asked a question about hockey violence because that fascinated me.

I also encourage you to add a URL on your profile here because I would like to believe that anything you'll say about this movie, or any movie is better than my words.

[James T]

Just want to say that I have a friend who is 26 and she's dating a guy who is 32. The age difference is a problem some times.