Thursday, 14 September 2000

12:50 a.m. Toronto Savings Time. I just got back from the early part of the Sexy Beast party. A movie I haven't seen. It's a Fox Searchlight picture that will hit American screens next year, but which just premiered here. But the party capped off an All-Fox evening, with back-to-back screenings of Men of Honor and Tigerland. But let's start with happier stories.

The second film I saw today was a thrilling surprise. It was a documentary called Fighter and it was easily the best documentary I've seen this year. All year. The film is the work of three American students who went to the Prague Film Academy, director Amir Bar-Lev and his producers Jonathan Crosby and Alex Mamet. The movie is the story of two men, Europe, World War II and a long friendship made in America based on the shared-apart experiences of their youths.

Jan Weiner is 77 and fought his way through the entire era, never bending from his principles for a moment, escaping the communists as readily as he escaped the Nazis. Arnost Lustig is 72 and he survived the war by his wits, but then joined the communist movement in Czechoslovakia when he considered it a philosophy that the best people connected with. The two men head back to Europe to trace the life history of Weiner and prod, push and piss one another off throughout the entire trip.

The film reminded me of an Errol Morris documentary, with the kind of intimacy that eludes so many docs. Morris makes this magic with all kinds of wondrous tricks. All Bar-Lev needed, short of a lot of hard work, was this dynamic duo. The pair is remarkably well matched. They respect one another, yet feel no need to pull punches. They bring out the best and the worst in one another. So, with each of them doing the prodding, you get a remarkably truthful portrait of both.

I don't mean to diminish Bar-Lev's work here. This documentary crosses all the visual "T"s and dots all the questioning "I"s. He and his crew do a really nice job of getting all on film and maintaining a clear narrative. You can't tell what a director's second film might be like based on a first film. Especially here, where the subjects are so powerful. But I hope that we are seeing the beginning of a great documentary career here.

When I call it the best documentary of the year, I have to make special mention of Ken Burns' Jazz. Burns' film is a whole different animal. First, it was made with TV in mind, as so many festival docs now are. But more importantly, it is almost 19 hours long, telling an expansive story in glorious detail, even though some say that Burns could have added another 20 hours and still come up short of the full story of Jazz. So be it. I love Jazz, the movie and the art musical form. But as a stand-alone, Fighter is the one. Given the Academy's propensity for Holocaust-related docs, this one seems a sure bet for a nomination and a real possibility to win Best Documentary next March.

Another small film that really hit my buttons was a recommendation from RAI Programmer Elan Mastai called Thomas in Love. The film is, it seems to me, the first true cyberfilm. Which is not to say that it's a film you should watch on the Internet. Quite the opposite. It is a movie that speaks to the cyber-culture without tackling the issue head on, but from a human perspective.

Thomas in Love is the story of Thomas, an agoraphobic who has become so afraid of leaving his home that the idea of physical human contact of any kind is beyond thought. In Thomas' time, everyone has videophones, so that's how he connects with the world. Including in his sex life. The movie opens with a tour de force piece of production in which Thomas has sex with a "Sextoon." He can accomplish this with his videophone, an on-line account and a cybersex suit, which will come into play (so to speak) later in the film as well.

Thomas' therapist wants his patient to expand his range of romantic exploits, so he enters Thomas into a dating club, in the film's world, the primary way that people meet people. And so, Thomas starts getting videophone calls from a variety of women…including his regular phone calls from mom. I won't get into any of the details of the relationships. See the movie. But Thomas' isolation and connection is something anyone who spends too much time on the 'net (if you are reading this, you probably qualify) can understand and project into a future that should probably be avoided. But as I said, Thomas in Love isn't there to preach. It is a terrific entertainment.

One of the reasons it works so well is that director Pierre-Paul Renders creates Thomas' world with a real richness of thought. There aren't little bits here and there that don't ring true. Every moment feels real. And Renders makes the truly unique choice of never showing us Thomas, our hero. The people he talks to can see him, though the phone. But we never do. In great part, I suspect, because he is simply an extreme stand-in for us.

I really hope that Thomas in Love has a home somewhere on American movie screens. There is something slightly mundane about the story. It doesn't scream "important." But really, I think it is kind of important. In its way, it is a surprising and thrilling a ride as Run Lola Run. Well, not as thrilling. But it adds to the medium of film in a fascinating way and it speaks gloriously to the issue of staying inside and getting out. Both on the Web and off.

I saw Vulgar today, from Kevin Smith disciple Bryan Johnson. The easiest thing to do is to write the film off completely, as the 30 percent or so of the audience who walked out within 30 minutes did. But the film, which is probably the first poverty-striken-clown-turned-gay-gang-raped-clown-who-ends-up-being-blackmailed-TV-clown movie ever. And it's plenty vulgar, including in its production values. But as the film progresses, it gets steadily better. As it gets away from its urge to be vulgar. Had the film decided what it was earlier in the screenplay, it probably wouldn't have lost more than a person or two and might have actually had the makings of an arthouse hit. Because what you have is a man who has nothing, but a dream of success as a clown. And when he hits bottom, after being gang raped by three men, he is inspired to an act of heroism that ends up being his meal ticket. Now, with something to lose for the first time in his life, he has to deal with his rapist blackmailing him, effectively raping him in a new way. A way that wasn't possible before. Interesting stuff, if you ask me. But there is a lot of crap to swim through before you get to what could have been the really good stuff. And I should add that I missed the last 15 minutes of the film, running to another film, so it may have gotten even better. But as I wrote, it was too busy trying to shock us to really achieve that goal. (P.S. I never noticed that Kevin Smith, who produced the film and cameos, has calves the size of a small Shetland Sheep Dog. I felt like I was watching an Incredible Hulk episode with David Banner's calves caught mid-change.)

"Men of Honor and Tigerland"