Wilnervision!

I have a cold.

I am whiny and sore and things are coming out of my head that really don’t look right.

And I have to see the unscreened Hayden Christensen anaesthetic-awareness thriller “Awake”, like, momentarily.

Fortunately, I have access to excellent baked goods and hearty soups, and the rest of the day is fairly low-impact. And if you’re in the Toronto area, there are new movies to see — specifically:

“I’m Not There“: Todd Haynes’ multifaceted Bob Dylan movie doesn’t exactly, like, satisfy, but it has flashes of brilliance — particularly Marcus Carl Franklin and Cate Blanchett’s sequences — and will almost certainly be thirty times more enjoyable if you’re a rabid follower of Dylan’s music, rather than a casual admirer like certain people I could name.

“The Life of Reilly“: A filmed record of the late Charles Nelson Reilly’s one-man show, “Save It For the Stage”. Actually, about half the show was cut for time, which may be why it seems so rushed and lurching. But Reilly is terrific, and if you’re at all interested in his story, you should drop by the Bloor and experience this with a crowd.

And now, to hit the drugstore and load up on goofballs before the movie …

Further to the whole “Mist” thing …

Since the blog was down last weekend, I never got the chance to steer you to my related Sympatico/MSN movie column, in which I dig out the ten moments in Stephen King movies that best capture the author’s prose.

Lists are fun!

First, Frank Darabont made a reasonably good movie out of Stephen King’s excellent, then- uncharacteristic novella “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” — even if he couldn’t resist wrapping up the author’s ambiguous, hopeful ending with a grace note of its convict pals meeting on that faraway beach.

Then he kinda botched “The Green Mile” by playing every one of its nutbar notions — like Sam Rockwell’s rootin-tootin psychopath and Michael Clarke Duncan’s simpering Magic Negro — straight. Also, it was three hours long.

And then he made “The Majestic”, which revealed that his tendency towards gauzy golden uplift wasn’t just limited to the world of Stephen King: Frank Darabont wanted to be Frank Capra.

(more…)

Technical difficulties resolved, and not a moment too soon — you wouldn’t want to miss my latest Sympatico/MSN DVD column, would you?

After all, this week I stare into the gaping abyss of horrible that is Lindsay Lohan in “I Know Who Killed Me”, and if you read the column, then I won’t have spent 106 minutes suffering for nothing.

Oh, yeah. It’s 106 minutes long.

It hurts.

Our main page seems to be broken, but don’t worry — everything’s still here, searchable through the links at the bottom right. And while we wait for the web-hosting guys to come up with a fix, let’s think about nice things, like puppies and ice cream and penguins and such.

Assuming you can even see this post, of course.

Frickin’ MYSQL.

American Thanksgiving brings a strange calm to the Canadian movie release calendar; my next screening isn’t until Wednesday morning, and that’s for a film that won’t open until January.

I’m using the break to rest up before the year-end crush that starts up in the first week of December; don’t worry, though, there’s still plenty to talk about. Like, say, today’s new releases.

“Margot at the Wedding“: Noah Baumbach follows “The Squid and the Whale” with another horribly funny movie about dysfunctional families; as the title character, Nicole Kidman makes Jeff Daniels’ “Squid” dad look like a paragon of compassion and self-control. But I could not look away.

“The Mist“: The first two hours of Frank Darabont’s latest Stephen King adaptation are gut-twisting and brilliantly orchestrated — probably the best translation of King’s material to the screen that I’ve ever seen. And then Darabont goes and wrecks it with an ending that essentially rapes the soul of the story. I’ll have more to say about this over the weekend. I guarantee it.

“This Christmas“: Look at any cinematic trend, go back two or three years, and you’ll find the movie that started it. This one is on Tyler Perry. I am afraid of what will happen if it’s a hit; Preston A. Whitmore II is the last director I want to see indulged.

And if you’re in Vancouver, check out Jia Zhang-Ke’s “Still Life”. Metro didn’t post my review online — they don’t seem to bother with stuff that doesn’t make the Toronto edition — but it’s in the paper. Bottom line? It’s quite strange and wonderful in that way that only Jia’s movies are.

Catch you later …

As Jim Emerson mentions on his marvelous Scanners blog — from which I have nabbed the image at right — Roger Ebert has written a letter to Werner Herzog, thanking the director for having dedicated his new film, “Encounters at the End of the World”, to him. It’s quite lovely and heartfelt, and you should read it.

Ebert mentions seeing the film at a Toronto film festival press screening. I was there, too, a few seats away. And since the story of that screening is one of the best moments of my career, I figured I’d tell it.

You see, no one knew about the dedication, but everyone knew Roger was in attendance.

(Yeah, I call him Roger. We’ve met a couple of times, and had a few e-mail exchanges over the years. So there.)

Anyway, Roger was hard to miss this year. Having endured a series of surgical procedures designed to correct the post-operative complications that nearly killed him last summer, he looked kind of terrible: His jaw was fixed in place thanks to a complex, obtrusive apparatus that resembled the chin-holder thing you use during an eye test, and he’d had a tracheotomy, so he couldn’t speak or move his head all that much.

But his eyes were bright and alive, and he smiled (or tried to) whenever someone came over to say hello, though most of us sort of shuffled around him so as to crowd, or possibly we just felt uncomfortable or ghoulish going over to the guy when he was so clearly not in the best of shape.

And then the lights went down, and the movie started, and we were all immersed in Herzog’s latest collection of charmingly off-kilter observations. The “demented penguin” sequence — which Roger references in his letter with precisely the right tone, by the way — had the whole room heaving with melancholy hysteria, if such a thing is understandable.

Finally, the movie ended, fading to black. And then, the dedication. You could hear at least half the room draw a sharp breath — the half that had seen Roger there. He’d arrived early, while the lights were up, so there’d been plenty of time to register his presence.

And then, the room just exploded in a crashing wave of applause — applause for the movie, applause for Roger, applause for the grace note of Herzog’s dedication, call it what you want to. But it was a joyous thing, a release for everyone in the room. I can’t quite explain it; I wonder whether anyone who was there could. It just happened. And it was beautiful.

Stuff like that makes spending a quarter of one’s life in the dark seem like a good idea.

… well, okay, not really. This year sees only a handful of wannabe Thanksgiving blockbusters opening over the American long weekend, thanks to the careful positioning of such obvious challengers as “Fred Claus” and “Beowulf” earlier in the month.

Chris took the review of “August Rush” — you can read that here — so I’ve got the other two big openers of the day.

“Enchanted“: A candy-colored Disney fantasia, yes, but a smart and thoroughly captivating one. Amy Adams and James Marsden should only play cartoons from this point on, really.

“Hitman“: Another conceptually simple videogame becomes another crappy action movie. How bad is this? It actually makes “Doom” look engaging and thoughtful.

And I apologize to my American readers, but since “The Mist” isn’t opening here until Friday, I won’t be discussing it here until then. If you were thinking about going, well, um … uh … that’s nice.

Sorry to leave you hanging over the weekend — stuff happened, you know? And stuff is still happening, so this is going to be a short post. But here’s what you need to know:

Today’s Sympatico/MSN DVD column is up, celebrating the long-overdue DVD release of “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse”. If you’ve seen the movie, you know why this rocks. If you haven’t, well, it’s on DVD now! Buy it!

Also, if you’re interested, here’s the Holiday Movie Preview I wrote for Sympatico/MSN last Friday. If you’re one of those people who needs to schedule his or her viewing for the next six weeks, you will find this invaluable. (Hint: Leave some time this weekend to catch “Margot at the Wedding”.)

Also also, that Give One Get One laptop deal I mentioned earlier this fall is up and running this week. For $399, you can act charitably, get a cool toy for a child in your life, and a year’s access to T-Mobile Wi-Fi hotspots across America as a thank-you. If you live in the States, that’s a hell of a deal.

Just think about it, would you?

See you tomorrow …

Some movies opened today. You can find my reviews at Metro’s movies page, but I’d rather talk about something — someone — that matters.

Angie Baldassarre, a central player in the Toronto critical establishment and a very good friend, passed away yesterday after a long battle with cancer. She was … well, she’d smack me if I was vulgar enough to mention her age, but she was far too young to go.

We hear stories about people who fight valiantly against terminal illness, and god knows we see a lot of movies about them; melodramas, mostly, told by people who surely have the best intentions.

The stories and movies get plenty of stuff right — the endless combinations of pills, the lulls and swells of fatigue and sickness, the inexorable progression of that filthy fucking disease — but fiction by its nature expands some realities and compresses others. And it’s all over in a couple of hours, or a few hundred pages.

Angie was sick for most of the 21st century. She rebounded from the first bout, and believe me, that was one for the books — and in one of those horrible ironies you wouldn’t believe in fiction, she found out the illness was back just a few months after being ready to believe she was cancer-free.

Two years ago, she told me the cancer had returned; from then to the end of this summer, she fought all over again. She never stopped working; she never stopped being involved in the world. She was constantly around, constantly present — in the business of the Toronto Film Critics Association, where she served as vice-president since the organization’s inception; in the lives of her husband and daughter, who were just as unbending in their support of her during her illness; in the lives of everyone she knew.

And then I looked up, and she wasn’t around. I’d been distracted with the film festival and the Vancouver trip and the London trips and all the other stuff that piles up in the course of an ordinary life, and when it became obvious she was badly off, I waited for some sign that things were turning around again. She’d had bad spells before. She’d always come out of them.

Not this time.

The funeral mass will be held Monday morning. At the family’s request, in lieu of flowers donations may be made to The Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation. Their donations page is kind of buggy, so I’m just doing it the old-fashioned way, by calling 416-946-6560.