INDEPTH: TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL
Something and 'Nothing'
CBC News Online | September 9, 2003
Toronto's film festival, like life, is about choices. For the journalists who are in town to write about Canadian movies, there was a particularly hard choice to make this morning. They could go to the press screening of The Corporation, a new – and lengthy – documentary about corporate excess. Or they could see The Snow Walker, Charles Martin Smith's adaptation of the Farley Mowat short story Walk Well, My Brother. But they couldn't see both, since the two movies were showing in different venues at the same time.
Those who opted to take in The Corporation got a pleasant surprise. This film's critics will dismiss it as another left-wing diatribe, which is absolutely correct, but the good news is that it's executed with verve. The Corporation works as a movie, not just as a polemic.
It works because the people behind the film (it was directed by Jennifer Abbott and Mark Achbar) understand a simple truth: if you don't make it entertaining, there's no way anyone is going to sit through a 165-minute-long tutorial about how modern corporations function like psychopaths. Although the intent is serious, this film owes just as much to MTV as it does to Ken Burns or 60 Minutes.
Take the opening montage. The first thing we see is a clip of U.S. President George W. Bush defending corporate America. The Enron debacle is an example of how a few bad apples spoil the bunch, Bush argues. The next thing we hear is the grinding guitar of bluesman David Wilcox's Bad Apple playing over a montage of disgraced executives. This is documentary filmmaking aimed at the funny bone as well as the brain.
(Oh, and don't confuse The Corporation with The Company. The latter is Robert Altman's new picture about dancers.)
Abbott and Achbar interview the usual suspects: Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Michael Moore. They break up the interview footage with educational film strips from the 1950s and funky musical interludes. The entire blend is something like the best issue of Harper's Magazine set to music.
They also talk to some unlikely people, like Ray Anderson. Anderson is the CEO of carpet maker Interface, the man who had a conversion on the road to profit and became determined to make his company a sustainable business. He would have made a good movie all by himself.
Go Further, Ron Mann's account of Woody Harrelson's environmental crusade, has been getting a lot of attention at this festival. That's mostly because Harrelson himself has been in town to do publicity stunts, like leading public yoga sessions. But don't believe the hype. The real documentary story from Canada this year is The Corporation.
Just like that, the festival is entering the home stretch. Gone are the really big stars, like your Nicole Kidmans, replaced by emerging stars, like your Jack Blacks. Last week was about glitz; this week is about slightly more adventurous fare.
One such movie is Nothing, the latest from Toronto's Vincenzo Natali. Natali has been carving out a reputation as the thinking man's science-fiction auteur with films like 1997's Cube, and this picture will only reinforce that reputation. Even better, there's a strain of humour running through the film, which concerns two average Canadian guys who wake up one morning to find they have successfully wished the world away. An apt subtitle might be Bob and Doug's Existential Adventure.
In a sense, Nothing is the opposite of Cube. Where Cube was about a group of people trapped in a maze, Nothing is about what happens when all you have is space. The house owned by the heroes, Dave and Andrew, is surrounded on all sides by a white, spongy void. At first, they take this as a licence to goof off and do nothing but play video games. Then, they slowly start asking the Larger Questions.
The question science-fiction fans will ask, though, is this: when George Lucas set part of THX 1138 in a white wasteland back in 1971, did he know it would eventually lead to so much imitation?
Dan Brown will be attending the Toronto International Film Festival for its entirety, from Sept. 4 to 13. Throughout the 9-day festival he will bring you reports on the latest Canadian films. Read his dispatches and follow his comments by clicking on the links.
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Dan Brown is the site's senior arts editor/reporter. Before joining us he was a lineup editor and senior writer for Newsworld International. Dan helped to launch the National Post's Arts & Life section, where he was a columnist and reporter. A former editorial writer, copy editor and journalism instructor, Dan has degrees from three universities.
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