Showings at: The CORE Centre, Belleville Public Library and The Empire Theatre
Festival Pass: $30 for Adult or $15 for Students/Unwaged
On sale at: The Empire, QAC office and numerous other locations
A Festival Pass gives you admission to over 30 films, and includes the Friday and Saturday Galas
Complete details at www.downtowndocfest.ca or call 613-966-5852
A skilful blend of comedy and drama, The Artist relies on film making techniques from a bygone era to tell a charmingly simple love story. Though its silent, black-and-white style hearkens back to the past, the film feels timeless thanks to the romance at its core.
From the opening shot of leaves upturned in the wind and billowing clouds taking on threatening shapes, you sense something is not right.
Curtis LaForche (Michael Shannon) senses it too. Looking anxiously to the sky, he studies the clouds, hears the thunder and rubs drops of dark rain between his fingertips.
LaForche has a good life in the American Midwest. He is the crew chief of a sand mining company and with his wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain) and daughter Hannah, who is deaf, has an overall happy home.
But something is brewing in Curtis’s consciousness. With a sudden crack of thunder and a white flash of lightning, this sane and stable man slowly begins to unravel.
His dreams start to haunt him – dreams he believes are heralding the actual end of the world. He continues on his daily journey, trying to get help from doctors and answers from his mentally ill mother, but that doesn’t bring him any peace.
Curtis’s unsettling dreams of dark skies and poison rain morph menacingly into nightmares about attacks, violence and horror. Suddenly those he loves – his trusted dog, his beloved wife and best friend/co-worker – all become threats born from his own mind. Curtis becomes more withdrawn and more obsessed and begins building a storm shelter in the backyard.
What is brilliant about this movie is the threat itself. There is no axe-wielding murderer or horrible demon made from special effects. What drives the fear are the thoughts within. This is the horror of real life, not the supernatural world.
Nor is there much violence. The threat always bubbles below the surface and when it does come crashing out it is frothing at the mouth, frightening to the core and filled with hysteria.
The film is drenched in a mounting, excruciating anxiety that something terrible this way comes. Layered on top of all of that is the suspicion that the main character is simply and tragically mentally ill, just another misguided doomsdayer with a sign reading, ‘The End Is Nigh.’
Pacing is everything in this movie. Some will call it plodding, with scene after scene of mundane moments. Nonetheless, the excruciating sameness creates a reality not often achieved in feature films and builds the suspense, because we are lulled into the calm before the storm.
All of the acting is top-notch. Shannon’s measured performance is immediately likeable and relatable and Chastain’s understated grace shines through in every moment, just as it did so beautifully in The Tree of Life.
But the real star here is the Apocalypse itself. That overarching character permeates every scene, even though it is off-screen and out on the horizon, for most of the film.
It might be out of sight, but it is always there.
The End Is Near.
And it’s closer than we think.
By Mike Lake
In his film The Guard, Irish-born writer-director John Michael McDonagh takes the ‘buddy cop comedy’ formula popularized in Hollywood and infuses it with his own unique sensibilities. The result is a hilarious, foul-mouthed and at times, strangely poignant film.
By Scott Whalen
In the documentary Project Nim (UK, 2011) Jenny Lee is asked how her mother could have possibly agreed to have a newborn chimpanzee come and live with their family in New York City. Lee’s answer is simple, but it speaks volumes: “It seemed natural. It was the Seventies,” she tells the interviewer.
By Scott Whalen
If you think about world politics at its simplest level, it begins to resemble a schoolyard. There are alliances, conflicts and skirmishes. There are bullies and heroes, terrorists and freedom fighters. The weapons are sticks and stones and bats and balls in the schoolyard. It’s guns, tanks, missiles and ground troops in the international theatre of conflict.
The first annual Belleville International Documentary Film Festival, Downtown DocFest, will hold its gala opening at the Empire Theatre on March 2, 2012 with plans to screen more than 30 international, national and local films over the weekend of March 2 & 3, 2012.
