The best film of Toronto 2006? Jia Zhangke’s STILL LIFE, winner earlier in the week of the Venice Festival’s Golden Lion, snuck into Toronto one late night for its North American premiere. Like all of Jia’s features (Platform, The World, etc.), this is the story of the non-VIP little people who are pushed around and cast away in evolving/devolving post-Communist China. Here, a monosyllabic coal miner goes searching for his runaway wife and child in a crumbling city. It’s being torn down, before our eyes, to make way for the Three Gorges Dam. (In real life, a million Chinese have been uprooted by the flooding of the Yangtze River.)
SLEEPING DOGS LIE: But should Melinda Page Hamilton say with whom? |
The best American feature at Toronto? Studio pictures came and went, but the film that stayed with me was SLEEPING DOGS LIE, the scandalous and also unexpectedly sweet American indie written and directed by ex-Boston comedian Bobcat Goldthwait. The premise of the film is unbelievably ballsy, and who will get past it to see the movie? A kindly, pretty, intelligent, all-American girl, Amy, is engaged to an all-US guy. Before their marriage, she has to decide whether to bare her darkest secret: in college, one bored night, she went down on her dog! Yes, a blow job!Amy is played by the wonderful newcomer Melinda Page Hamilton, who’s as fresh as early Renée Zellweger; she popped up last season on Desperate Housewives as a naughty nun. I asked her how she promotes the film to acquaintances.
“I only tell them it’s about a little sexual episode in my past. To find out what, they have to see the movie.” Her mom, whom she did inform of the kinky plot, was less than elated. “My mother e-mailed me, ‘If you ever want a political career, you should consider your involvement.’ ”
There goes my presidency!
Goldthwait also made that mongrel hit Shakes the Clown (1992), which will be known forever for a wish-I’d-said-that line in Betsy Sherman’s Boston Globe review: “This is the Citizen Kane of alcoholic-clown movies.”
Well, I’ve got to go one better. Publicists, run with this one: “Sleeping Dogs Lie is the Magnificent Ambersons of canine-cocksucking movies.” — Gerald Peary, Boston Phoenix.
Other worthy movies at Toronto:
THE ISLAND. My nobody-saw-it “discovery,” a diabolic black comedy about a World War II coward who in penance becomes a groveling monk whose daffy advice to the poor is on the cusp of saintliness or insanity. The filmmaker is Pavel Lounguine, who with Taxi Blues (1990) was Russia’s hottest post-glasnost filmmaker. This will be a major comeback if anyone notices.
DAY ON FIRE. Ex-Bostonian Jay Anania’s moody experimental-narrative think piece on post-9/11 living in New York features the filmmaker’s signature Euro-melting of cryptic dialogue, breathtaking images, sharp editing, and the loveliest of young ladies.
MONKEY WARFARE. The fest’s most successful low-low-budget film is about two lost, cynical ex-radicals residing underground in Toronto whose lives are changed with the entry of a vibrant, very attractive, and politically active young woman. Don McKellar and Tracy Wright expertly play the disenchanted couple. Wright’s weary-but-wary performance was my favorite actress turn at Toronto 2006.
