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Toronto International Film Festival

Film Festival wrap up and movies of note



The 2008 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival has come and gone. For a while there I was beginning to wonder whether I would see any good films, but as the week wore on, I saw some that I am happy to recommend.

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You already know that I liked Passchendaele and Laila's Birthday. I also liked Fifty Dead Men Walking. Shortly after my comments on Fifty Dead Men Walking, I received an email from Martin McGartland, the person whose experiences form the basis of the story. Mr. McGartland isn't completely happy with the film and suggests that readers go to his website at [url=http://www.fiftydeadmenwalking.co.uk]http://www.fiftydeadmenwalking.co.uk[/url] in order to get the true story. Despite these differences of opinion, I still feel that Fifty Dead Men Walking is an interesting film and one of the better films at this year’s Festival. Other films I enjoyed included Flame & Citron about the Danish resistance during World War II and Appaloosa, a western that stars Ed Harris. This is an exciting and absorbing film about a town being bullied by a ruthless rancher, until a couple a professional gunmen arrive and take on the role of town marshall. They clean up the hooligans in fine fashion. Hunger is about a hunger strike during the British battles with the IRA. It is an excellent film, brilliantly conceived and carried out. It was one of the best films at the Festival. Who Do You Love tells the story of the founding of Chess Records, one of the leading record companies in the United States in the area of soul music. Chess recorded and distributed such artists as Bo Diddly and Muddy Watters. Soul Power was a documentary film about the soul concert put on in Zaire in 1974 in conjunction with the Muhammad Ali and George Foreman fight for thehe avyweight boxing championship of the world. The concert was staged a short time before the fight and then the film became mired in legal difficulties. Eventually the film was edited and we are now offered a time capsule of those days more than thirty years ago. We get to see such artists as James Brown, BB King, Miriam Makeba and many more. My only complaint is that the film is only 93 minutes long. The concert was twelve hours long. I think we got a little shortchanged. I thought that American Swing was about swing music. I walked into the screening and was a little surprised to discover that the film was about a swingers club in New York City during the 1970s and 1980s that allowed people to have sex on its premises. Very interesting, but somewhat dated. I've been told that this kind of thing is not so rare any more. Stone of Destiny was an interesting story about the Scottish nationalist movement in 1950. It seems that there was a stone sitting in Westminister Abbey that had originally been claimed by England's Edward I and brought back to England. Several young Scottish students take it upon themselves to reclaim the stone and bring it Back home. It is a humorous film, but definitely with a serious side to it and one that brings some new insight into the continuing struggle for Scottish nationalism. Good takes a look at what makes an ordinary and good man turn to evil. In this case, a German literature professor joins the Nazi Party in order to further his career and winds up being caught up in the Nazi killing machine, even playing a key role in the his friend's deportation to a concentration camp. And then we have JCVD, a tongue in cheek satire of Jean-Claude Van Damme and his image as a macho martial arts star. In this film, Jean-Claude winds up being a hostage in a robbery. Will he be able to use his martial arts skills in bringing the bad guys to justice, or is he just an ordinary man when off screen? Watch and see for yourself. The Wrestler is a terrific film that should revitalize the career of Mickey Rourke. This story of an aging wrestler who knows nothing else but how to entertain people in the ring, gives a broad view of the difficulties of life after the best days have been and gone. Randy Robinson's life is a disaster, as he scrapes through each day without a family and without friends. His life was the wrestling ring and when he can no longer wrestle, he is unable to accommodate himself to a new life. And finally we have Che, the four-and-a-half-hour tome to the life and politics of Che Guevara. Guevara was an Argentine doctor who believed in revolution and joined Fidel Castro in his revolution against a corrupt military regime in Cuba. Afterwards, Guevara went to Bolivia to carry on his revolutionary ideals in Bolivia. The film was shown in two parts. The first part about Guevara's adventures in Cuba is an interesting historical story that tells the story of Castro's successes in 1950s Cuba. The second part seems to have been stretched out and isn't quite as interesting, especially as the Bolivian peasants had no intention of following the advice of a foreigner and refused to join the revolt in sufficient numbers to create any major problems for the Bolivian government. There was a fifteen-minute break between the two parts, which gave us an opportunity to compare the film to Lawrence of Arabia, a much superior film. There were many more films, but I wanted to make sure that the good films got their due. Many of these films will be appearing at movie theatres near you in the near future, so watch for them and enjoy them.


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Larry Anklewicz -- Bio and Archives

Larry Anklewicz. B.A., LL.B., is a lawyer, writer and film and video reviewer.  Mr. Anklewicz is author of “A Guide To Jewish Films On Videos” and has been a columnist for Canada Free Press, the Canadian Jewish News, and other local newspapers.  Mr. Anklewicz worked with the Toronto Jewish Film Festival for thirteen years, the last eight years of which he served as Program Coordinator and Program Director.


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