TIFF 2024 Diary: Entry #1
Canada's favourite business writer moonlighting as a film journalist (that's me) returns to TIFF.
I once again have a press pass the Toronto International Film Festival. While I feel less like a fraud than I did last year because I can now brag about being published in the Toronto Star, the impostor syndrome (yuck, I hate that phrase) still lingers. Let’s work through it together. Here are some thoughts on some early screenings I’ve caught.
Midnight Dankness
TLDR: What will surely be my highlight of the festival wasn’t even a part of the festival.
Midnight Madness programmer (and all-around inspirational figure) Peter Kuplowsky put on his now-annual Midnight Dankness screening at the Royal Cinema — a celebration of films too weird to even screen at Midnight Madness. This year’s edition was one for the ages, a six-hour movie marathon from two of the greatest independent auteurs working today: Matt Farley and Conner O’Malley.
Let’s start with the person you’ve potentially heard of. O’Malley has gained a cult following with his viral videos that piercingly lampoon certain types of guys who live podunk unobserved lives rarely depicted onscreen and his work. Thanks to his presence in the works of other alt-comedian auteurs like Tim Robinson and John Wilson, he is slowly, but surely, bleeding into the mainstream. During his intro, O’Malley shouted out the Convoy truckers, made several references to Justin Trudeau doing brownface, and dedicated the screening to the Seals and the West Edmonton Mall. During the post-movie Q&A he talked about how if McDonald’s and Target disappeared he would go on a killing spree. This is all to say, he was in fine form.
First up was Coreys, a new short film he wrote and stars in that takes a Lynchian look at suburban malaise. Then the feature (a scant 58 minutes, but still a feature), Rap World, which he wrote and starts in with two other luminaries of weird internet humour Jack Bensinger and Eric Rahill. The period piece — set in the far-off world of 2009 — depicts three 30-something burnouts living in the suburban Pennsylvanian community of Tobyhanna and their attempt to record a rap album in one night. The threadbare plot is an excuse for these three very funny people and their other very funny friends to goof around. The results are electric. Simply put, Rap World is the hardest I’ve laughed in a theatre in a very, very long time.
This is a work about the guys who stayed in your hometown. The guys that for a brief moment were really cool because they were the first in school to start smoking weed but quickly became the subject of abject pity. The guys who you come across only in those rare moments when you have to log on to Facebook for some reason. And it’s distillation of what makes O’Malley’s comedy hit so hard. It’s all about precision. As slapdash and improvised as the structure and riffs might seem, there is undeniable rigour than makes it a transportive experience. The characters good around with Wii nunchucks, aGuitar Hero guitar, and those stupid bouncy balls things that everybody’s parents had in the basement for some reason. Watching it made me feel like I was back in 2009 at a sleepover doing hoodrat shit with my friends.
The music direction (which is completely illegal and means that this will never get a proper release, sadly) is equally important. The first of many collective audience guffaws the film delivers simply came from Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” playing on a car radio. Of course these 2009 dudes are listening to “Viva La Vida!” We all were!
As great as Rap World was, the main event for me was Matt Farley. I won’t go in-depth on who he is, his micro media empire — Motern Media, he’s created — or the 25,000+ songs he’s written (you can read about that here) but all I will say is that he has long been a figure of fascination. Midnight Dankness opened with his 2013 masterpiece Local Legends and closed with its long-gap sequel Local Legends: Bloodbath. The former film is a piece of autofiction in which Farley details his life as an artists on the margins and struggle to balance art as a career vs. art as passion. I think it’s one of the great films about being an artist and could rightly, if tritely, be called “inspiring.” It was wonderful seeing it with an audience, many of whom who had never heard of Farley and were their for O’Malley, and hear uproarious laughter.
Bloodbath flips the original on its head — positioning Farley not as a heroic figure whose managed to live an admirable life where he makes movies with his friends, but a raging solipsist profiting off of free labour and more interest in perpetuating his own mythos than maintaining healthy relationships. If that sounds heavy, it undoubtedly is, but its also very goofy in the specific way only a Motern film can be.
Julies Stays Quiet Dir. Leonardo Van Dijl | Belgium | 100 mins.
TLDR: Meticulous craftsmanship and a strong central performance can’t elevate this teen sports drama to new heights.
I begin the fest once again watching a sports-drama about teenaged athlete struggling with their mental health (shout out Backspot).
Julie Stays Quiet is a quintessential festival film. It has a certain, let’s call it Middle-European sensibility that never goes out of style. The story focuses on Julie (newcomer Tessa Van den Broeck) as a teen tennis prodigy whose life becomes unmoored when her coach is suspended for alleged inappropriate after a former pupil commits suicide. What follows are lots of meticulously composed, long (though not too long), mostly static, shots of Julie practicing, studying, and talking in various states of unease. The result is feeling that drifts between dread and boredom — this isn’t a diss, highlighting the excruciatingly quotidian details of student-athlete life is definitely the point. Though, to be honest, this movie is also kinda boring.
The movie is buoyed by Van den Broeck, an actual high-level tennis player, gives a strong internalized performance, capturing the quiet determination and sometimes disarming aloofness that elite athletes often possess. She does a great job of portraying someone who is “not doing great tbh” but trying not to show it. Some could argue that the stoicism of the performance is more on account of her being an amateur actress, but if the emotions are convincingly conveyed I don’t think it matters how she got there.
Director Leonardo Van Dijl, helming his debut feature, has strong command of the camera, but his style does wear as the film goes on. He loves putting Van den Broeck either in the extreme foreground with a blurred background or in the middle distance in between layers of other bodies to highlight her isolation. Another trick is having Julie’s parents in shadows to represent, quite literally, how in the dark they are about the specifics of her mental health struggles. Seeing these shots repeated over the 100-minute runtime does get a little dull. It would have been nice to see a little more kineticism in what is ostensibly a sports movie, but I suppose that’s not the point. Ultimately, what keeps this well-crafted and well-acted picture from ascending the damning praise of “it’s fine” is a lack of propulsion. Scenes don’t build on each other, and by the end its style feels exhausted and bloodless.
Men of War Dir. Bill Corben and Jen Gatien | Canada, USA | 103 mins.
TLDR: Hyper-kinetic doc about a failed Venezuelan coup could become a streaming hit.
This Adam McKay produced documentary tells the story of ex-special forces member Jordan Goudreau and how he ended up the figurehead of a disastrous attempt to overthrow the Nicolás Maduro government in Venezuela in 2020. It’s an interesting logline and Goudreau — who is onscreen for the majority of the movies — makes quite the impression. Weirdly charismatic meathead soldier who renounced his Canadian citizenship after 9/11 to join the U.S. army, is able to quote Macbeth but doesn’t grasp the simple moral lesson of the play, and achieves political enlightenment only after orchestrating a failed coup of Venezuelan, is such a slam dunk documentary subject. So much so that it makes me wish this wasn’t just another straight-to-streaming style doc that stretches out about an hour of good material to 105 minutes. Especially as the hyper-kinetic editing style grates and it feels the documentarians are almost trying to make the story more complicated than it actually is.
The TIFF website description is advertising Men of War as “Rambo meets Fyre Fest,” which is a canny bit of marketing. But it also highlights what is ailing the documentary genre right. When publications start doing lists of the most influential films of the 2010s in the future, the Netflix Fyre Fest documentary will need to be mentioned. With the documentary genre all but dead on the big screen (it’s hard to believe Fahrenheit 9/11 was grossing $220 million 20 years ago) the broadest cultural impact most docs can now aspire to is the meme of the one Fyre Fest guy saying he’d suck dick for water bottles. This is not to undermine the difficult subject matter of PTSD Men of War ends up broaching — not very tactfully, but A for effort — though the film ultimately feels as a means to an end to generate credulity rather than inform.