Cake

For years, I’ve been unable to shake the suspicion that Hollywood operates as a sophisticated money-laundering scheme. Each year, hundreds of movies are produced – so that capital can be circulated throughout the intricate circuitry of the film industry. In the end, it really doesn’t matter what the actual productions look like – it’s simply a matter of maintaining that sacred flow of money. How else could anyone explain the existence of Look Who’s Talking Now? Or, The Pacifier??

No – seriously.

At the same time, I’ve also been certain that we run things differently up here, in the home of virtue: Canada (insert red-branded logo). We might still hold to the same economic priorities, but at least we make an effort to maintain the façade of culture. Our filmmakers, for the most part, aspire to meaningful creation (at least as far as their talents permit).

This grand old illusion, however, is fading; fading precisely because institutions like Telefilm – which are supposed to ensure the autonomy and vitality of Canadian culture – are producing crap like Cake.

A dramedy about an almost-30 proto-feminist (played by, um, Heather Graham) who spiritedly forsakes the cheap pleasures of institutional relationships – only to “hilariously” end-up editing a wedding magazine for her insensitive, yet enfeebled, father: the only thing comedic about this film is its exclusive trade in clichés. It’s as

if every plot twist, every montage, every possible quirk of behaviour, is presented in a pre-packaged form. As such, the audience is asked merely to perform (on well-rehearsed cue) the function of a living, breathing laugh track.

By investing in films like these (it’s downright scary how many government seals appear at the end of Cake), our cultural institutions display a growing affinity for the Hollywood system. Subject to the uniform principle of laundering, our films are turning into nothing but empty calories.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

If you plan on taking in the fourth installment of the Harry Potter series, may we suggest a late show on a week night; this way you’ll avoid being inundated with the smell of diapers, child’s piss, and the wailing of terrified tots whose parents brought them to see a movie that features an implied murder in the first few minutes of the flick, and later an emotional death.

One can only imagine the sheer horror little kids must be experiencing before this intriguing and developing human drama, replete with computer animated effects that are pure eye candy, once the evil wizard Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) rises from the grave.

The central characters – Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and his mates Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson) – have hit puberty. Thus sexual innuendo has become apart of the package. And Harry himself is looking more man than boy these days. It’s a short question of time before trying to portray Radcliffe as a cute little boy simply won’t pass anymore.

This film essentially focuses on a rare and dangerous Triwizard Tournament, a tourney that Harry is mysteriously entered into despite being too young and inexperienced. Students from two other wizard schools are also involved in the competition. Meanwhile, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry has a new Defense Against the Dark Arts professor: the wacky and seemingly always drunk amputee Alastor Moody (played brilliantly by Brendan Gleeson). More affectionately known as “Mad Eye” for his one bulging, all-seeing eye, he’s asked by Professor Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) to keep an eye trained on Harry as he goes through the competition.

A twisting tale of mystery, black magic, young love, and betrayal unfolds, as Harry is obliged to compete in the tournament’s three death-defying tasks. Of course, he survives.

Fans of the J.K. Rowling books and the previous films won’t be disappointed with Goblet of Fire. It is quite simply, the finest of the four films from the opening nightmarish scene to the last day of Harry's fourth and final year of study at Hogwarts.Though magic and action packed, the movie ends on a slightly flat note after Harry once again prevails in the face of being obliterated. Perhaps it’s director Mike Newell’s flare for bringing a more powerful sense of emotion to the film’s characters, and it’s nicely set up for a fifth film, but it lacks that firecracker bang of an ending that the former chapters offer.

Get Rich or Die Tryin’

Get Rich or Die Tryin’ is a semi-autobiographical drama of Curtis Jackson, a.k.a 50 Cent’s thug life prior to his fame as a rapper.

Jackson plays Marcus, a fatherless boy we watch grow into a man. As a boy, Marcus knows his mother deals drugs but as long the money keeps him in high priced athletic shoes, he doesn’t question it. When his mother is murdered, Marcus goes to live with his grandparents who have a full house and many mouths to feed. Unable to adjust to hand-me-downs, he follows in his mother’s footsteps dealing drugs. Over the next few years he rises in the ranks and becomes a top dealer in his crew. While at the top of his drug game Marcus reconnects and falls in love with his childhood sweetheart Charlene, played by Joy Bryant.

After being set up by one of his crew, Marcus does time in prison. When he gets out he has a baby on the way and decides to walk away from dealing drugs and pursue a rap career in the music industry. He soon finds out walking away is easier said then done with life threatening consequences.

Jackson puts in a good performance in his first starring role and is surrounded by a solid cast. Veteran actor Bill Duke plays Levar a sort of mafia Godfather type who is head of the drug organization. Terrence Howard from Hustle & Flow is a standout as Bama, a prison mate of Marcus’s who later becomes his manager.

The movie is sentimental at times, contains nudity and a lot of gang violence. Don’t expect to see 50 Cent in concert. Surprisingly the movie is not about rap music. It’s more of an urban gangster movie about the war over drug turf, revenge and street cred.

Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ drags a little in places but overall is well done and entertaining.

Cracked, Not Broken

The Drake Hotel featured a screening of the movie Cracked, Not Broken, a 45-minute documentary that follows the life of Lisa, a woman addicted to crack cocaine.

Lisa, who once lived a typical, normal life being an account manager and a mother to her daughter, is haunted by her addiction and chooses to leave her family and live on the streets of Toronto. Filmmaker Paul Perrier documents minute by minute how a charismatic, beautiful 37-year-old woman gets lost in the dangerous lifestyle of drugs and turns to prostitution.

The most intense part of the film is when Lisa prepares the needle and cocaine to get high. As the needle pierces Lisa’s skin, a bruise starts to develop because she hasn’t hit the right nerve to get the ‘high’ she’s aspiring for. When Lisa finally gets the hit, she becomes carefree and blank.

Perrier uses an editing technique, which makes everything in the film being black and white, dull and lifeless, until Lisa gets her fix and then suddenly the images become vibrant. Lisa says while poking her body making her skin bleed, “You shoot it in your legs, but taste it in your mouth.”

Cracked, Not Broken at first makes the audience believe there is no hope for Lisa, but as time goes on, Lisa begins contemplating whether or not she still wants to play the “game” of cocaine and selling her body for it. The film is a raw look at the reality of addictions and leaves the audience with an unsettling, but real feeling.

Mouth to Mouth

Ellen Page gives an awesome performance as Sherry, a teenage runaway trying to find herself and her place in the world. She is intrigued and seduced by SPARK – Street People Armed with Radical Knowledge and joins them as they travel through Europe in their dilapidated campers, recruiting members. The voyage is injected with sex, drugs and tragedy.

The music helps set the mood of this thought provoking and at times, moving film. We watch the subtle elimination of the individuality of Sherry and the other recruits and the ultimate strength of the seemingly weak. The charismatic and controlling leader of SPARK offers his recruits, who are mostly street urchins and druggies, an alternative – a better way, a paradise. Or does he?

Sherry’s teenage angst is real and her journey to self-discovery is riveting. This movie gives a great insight into how cults and cult leaders are able to enchant and manipulate the young and the not so young.

In Mouth to Mouth, Ellen Page clearly demonstrates she is a talent to watch out for and her performance leaves no question as to why this movie was voted Best of the Fest at the Brooklyn International Film Festival. Catch it if you can during its short run at Camera Bar (1028 Queen St. W.), November 11 – 28, 7 pm & 9 pm nightly. It’s a film worth seeing.

Capote

Cliché: The writing process is inherently uncinematic – the visual territory of film ill-suited to the representation of interiority so central to The Author’s calling. However, when the author being represented is Truman Capote, the cliché becomes just that. Chock full of idiosyncrasies and social panache, the real life Capote was himself something of a mythical character.

Accordingly, a filmic adaptation of Capote’s life – centred on his six-year odyssey of completing his masterpiece In Cold Blood – presented an alluring opportunity to capture that elusive writerly quality, through something of an end around. By juxtaposing Capote’s active public persona with his moments of psychic torment, the interiority of the writer’s activity emerges in a play of presence-absence. As director Bennett suggests: “What Truman was not saying became as interesting as what he was.”

In this case, the catalyst for Capote’s torment involves his unique relationship with his subject matter. Attempting to be the first fiction writer to present a story “ripped from the headlines,” Capote decides to investigate a brutal multiple homicide in a small Kansas town. However, in eventually forming an ambivalent relationship with the murderers on death row, Capote is left in a terrible bind: his book cannot be completed until the executions are performed. Thus, casting himself as a character in his own story, Capote becomes trapped in some kind of purgatory – suspended between fiction and reality.However, while this moral dilemma is itself a source of fascination – and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance certainly up to task – the film nonetheless suffers from this singularity of purpose. Despite the presence of an accomplished secondary cast (Keener, Cooper, and Greenwood), the narrative sorely lacks the distraction of an intriguing subplot – thus managing to fall into yet another writerly cliché: that of self-indulgence.