CIFF: Day Nine - Winding Down

Writer-director-star-composer-pianist Anthony Hopkins' Slipstream premieres tonight at the Music Box Theatre. He's scheduled to be there. If you don't have tickets, don't expect to get them; if you do have tickets, good luck.

The movie is Hopkins channeling David Lynch via Oliver Stone but without Lynch's hypnotic imagery or Stone's ability to command hyperkinetic editing. It's a blatant satire of Hollywood that finds Hopkins as a screenwriter whose characters keep coming into his life (or he goes into theirs). The point, sadly, is obvious from the get-go, and after the initial shock of the movie's style wears off, it just becomes tedious.

Also Screened:

Jerry LaMothe wants us to learn a lesson from Blackout, inspired by the Northeast Blackout of 2003, and he goes as far as having a crazy homeless guy yell it from the street and having one of the characters sadly look into the camera at the very end. It's nothing more than a series of soap opera vignettes (cheating boyfriend, troubled relationship, gang tension that goes nowhere), loosely tethered with a ham-handed social message and shot in ugly digital.

Blackout is not scheduled for further screenings.

Chicago filmmaker Darryl Roberts, on the other hand, doesn't find any easy answers in America the Beautiful, an effective documentary on America's obsession with body image and physical perfection. Roberts takes the Michael Moore approach to documentary filmmaking, asking a question and throwing as much information as possible about the topic on screen while commenting on the process the whole way through. Some of it doesn't work, but most of it does.

America the Beautiful screens again today, Oct. 14 at Landmark's Century Centre Cinema @ 2:15 p.m.

Australian television director Matthew Saville makes his feature film debut as the writer-director of Noise. One of the better films I've seen at the festival, Noise starts with a young girl named Lavinia (after one of Shakespeare's most famous victims) who is the only witness to the killer of seven people on a commuter train. Meanwhile, a state police officer deals with tinnitus (a constant ringing in the ears), the possibility of a brain tumor and having to work in a trailer talking with concerned members of the public. The film is about two people trapped in fear and escalates as a claustrophobic slow burn. It ends with a shoot-out, but the film deserves it after the attention to character and atmosphere.

Noise is not scheduled for further screenings.

--Mark Dujsik