TORONTO – Productions like Montparnasse remind me that I need to keep more booze in the house. When Mags, an American model living in 1920s Paris, awakes mid-day in her slip and looped pearls (a rare clothed moment) and grabs the champagne bottle by her bed as she begins to relate the spasmodic, erotic details of her previous night’s tryst with a celebrated painter, I think—I need to get out more. What am I doing, sitting here thinking about how I’m going to write about this later? I shouldn’t spend my time typing! I need to live, like Mags! Go, Mags, to the corner bars and nightclubs, to the studios and bedrooms of grossly talented and sensually obsessed men. Go mostly for your plugged up roommate, Amelia, newly arrived would-be painter, escaping the Christian Temperance Union America but not yet ready to enter the raunchy haunts you inhabit, where inspiration wets the walls and is more easily absorbed than a soixante-quinze cocktail, liberally poured. Go for Amelia, but also for us who want so badly for art to exist in these places, these dark, smoky, stinking, dizzying, only half-real dens of urban dawn, where nothing—beauty, morality, freedom—stands up to examination. It’s too dark in there, and everyone is too drunk. (more…)

[The Walrus will be reviewing films at this week's Hot Docs festival in Toronto. More reviews to follow.]

Emma Franz’s first documentary, Intangible Asset Number 82, records the life and work of a very rare commodity—Kim Seok-Chul, a reclusive Korean shaman and musical grandmaster. Seok-Chul is introduced to us through Simon Baker, an Australian jazz drummer widely regarded as his country’s best. Baker’s obsession with rhythm and musical force finds an idol in eighty-year-old Seok-Chul—the music he produces is nothing like anything Baker (or the viewer) has heard before. He embarks on a quest to track down Seok-Chul and learn from him. It proves to be a nearly impossible task, considering the shaman’s age and illness and his stature in Korean religious life. But Baker perseveres, and Franz follows him.

What follows is an account of Korean musical traditions that continue to resist the force of modernization. On his way to Seok-Chul, never sure that he will meet him, Baker encounters some people and practices so extreme that they are hard to reconcile with any notion of normalcy: one shaman, a bubbly, round-faced, boyish singer, spent seven years living on wet rocks by the side of a waterfall, singing (or shouting) seventeen hours a day, learning his craft from the flow of the water. Incredibly, he and Baker become fast friends.

The film can feel, at times, like an anthropological account—something you’d be shown for university study—but when Franz focuses on character the results are quite moving. She is clearly a dedicated documentarian, with the ability to suss out narrative in a complex story and the sense to exclude herself (she is also a musician, and so likely has her own opinions on Baker’s take on music) from the piece. It will be interesting to see how her work develops.

There’s a scene in Best Worst Movie that marks the beginning of the downturn: Dr. George Hardy—blonde, buff, infinitely popular—sits at his kitchen table surrounded by friends. “I just always thought I had this presence…I always thought I could do it,” he says. Everyone knows George should have been an actor. Why doesn’t he do it now? He could leave dentistry. His children are grown. “It just wouldn’t be practical,” he says, his voice quiet. “It wouldn’t be practical.”

A few minutes later, we see George look on as an actor at a film convention signs autographs for fans. No one wants George’s autograph but he tries to smile, always happy for others. He hovers in the background.

The small audience at Innis Hall is unsure how to react. The subject of Best Worst Movie has thus far been a vehicle for documentary rom-com: George, the cheerful dentist, was once in a movie—and it was the worst movie ever. Hilarious! But now George is recast: a failed actor in a failed film. There’s been a dramatic shift. It’s not funny anymore. Stuffed behind students’ desks in the makeshift cinema, we move uncomfortably in our seats. (more…)

[The Walrus will be reviewing films at this week's Hot Docs festival in Toronto. More reviews to follow.]

In 1919, in Paris, the leaders of hundreds of nations and disparate groups convened in Paris to map out the political geography of the postwar world. New alliances and lines would be drawn, and the Treaty of Versailles would be broached, edited, and signed. This was important stuff, I thought. I wanted to know more. So I went to see Paul Cowan’s Paris 1919, based on the book of the same name by Margaret Macmillan. I had been taken in by a festival write-up promising a portrayal of that “significant event [that] has never lost its geopolitical influence.” Apparently, its failure continues to haunt us. This sounded important. Naturally, I wanted in. Unfortunately, Cowan’s film did not deliver. (more…)