Blow Out the Candles; Plus More from Toronto

R.I.P. John Hughes, who died of a heart attack today at the age of 59 today. His contributions to cinema were a mixed bag at best (Curly Sue, Dennis the Menace and fuckin' Baby's Day Out), but he certainly captured something special in his better offerings (Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off). Making overnight stars out of the likes of his teen stars, most notably (for me) Molly Ringwald, it's hard to say whether he really chronicled a generation; I guess it depends on who you ask, as I've heard the same unqualified claim about Bret Easton Ellis. Whether it's cheap nostalgia or not, his (good) films certainly have stood the test of time. In other news, Toronto announced another eleven titles, including new films from Mika Kaurismäki (L.A. Without a Map, Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made), Ana Kokkinos (Head On, The Book of Revelation), Jan Hrebejk (Beauty in Trouble, Divided We Fall) and Harmony Korine, as well as an omnibus Paris je t'aime-esque portrait of Bangkok from Pen-ek Ratanaruang (Last Life in the Universe, Ploy), Wisit Sasanatieng (Tears of the Black Tiger), Aditya Assarat (Wonderful Town) and Kongdej Jaturanrasamee (Midnight My Love, Spasm).

Contemporary World Cinema

- Beyond the Circle - d. Golam Rabbany Biplob (On the Wings of Dreams)
- Blessed - d. Ana Kokkinos - w. Miranda Otto, Frances O'Connor
- Giulia Doesn't Date at Night [Giulia non esce la sera] - d. Giuseppe Piccioni (Light of My Eyes) - w. Valeria Golino
- Heiran - d. Shalizeh Arefpour
- The House of Branching Love [Haarautuvan rakkauden talo] - d. Mika Kaurismäki
- Por vida [For Life] - d. Alan Jacobs (American Gun, Nina Takes a Lover) - w. Danny Glover, Snoop Dogg, Elizabeth Peña, Emily Rios
- Rabia - d. Sebastián Cordero (Crónicas) - w. Gustavo Sánchez Parra, Àlex Brendemühl
- Sawasdee Bangkok - d. Wisit Sasanatieng, Aditya Assarat, Kongdej Jaturanrasamee, Pen-ek Ratanaruang
- Shameless [Nestyda] - d. Jan Hrebejk
- Slovenian Girl [Slovenka] - d. Damjan Kozole (Spare Parts)
- Tanner Hall - d. Francesca Gregorini, Tatiana von Furstenberg - w. Amy Sedaris, Chris Kattan, Anne Ramsay, Tom Everett Scott

Visions

- Between Two Worlds - d. Vimukthi Jayasundara (The Forsaken Land)
- Gaia - d. Jason Lehel
- Hiroshima - d. Pablo Stoll (Whisky)
- I Am Love [Io sono l'amore] - d. Luca Guadagnino - w. Tilda Swinton
- Lebanon - d. Samuel Maoz
- To the Sea - d. Pedro González-Rubio
- Trash Humpers - d. Harmony Korine

Staying Alive?

Tony Manero - dir. Pablo Larraín - 2008 - Chile/Brazil - Lorber HT Digital

Written for Gone Cinema Poaching.

Like Taxi Driver and Man Bites Dog, Pablo Larraín's Tony Manero offers a new addition to the league of cinema's most fascinatingly maladaptive sociopaths with Raúl Peralta (Alfredo Castro). Set in Chile during Pinochet's oppressive reign over the country, Larraín takes an unflinching look at his nation's history through Raúl, who'd rather be referred to as Tony Manero after John Travolta's character in Saturday Night Fever. While bearing some resemblance to Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely, the two films part ways quickly as Raúl's celebrity projection turns rapidly grim when we discover that he also brutally murders innocent people without a glimpse of reservation.

More than Taxi Driver, to which it shares a political leaning, Tony Manero recalls some of Michael Haneke's notable works. Like a hybrid of Funny Games' Paul (Arno Frisch) and The Piano Teacher's Erika (Isabelle Huppert), Raúl incorporates Erika's appalling acts of sadism with Paul's absence of remorse. He's not inhuman as much as he's beyond it, a product of the devastating reality of his world and Hollywood's endless dream-pushing.

I resist calling Tony Manero a satire or even a dark comedy as, like The Piano Teacher, its moments of rabid cruelty only spark laughter as a relief from the unshakeable dread the film creates and the repugnance that it instills. In one of the film's most memorably ghastly scenes, the local theatre's change of attraction from Saturday Night Fever to another Travolta vehicle Grease propels Raúl to crush the elderly projectionist's skull inside the projection booth.

While the underlying idea in Tony Manero rings familiar on a couple of levels, those associations never infiltrate the hypnosis Larraín and Castro, who co-wrote the screenplay, place the audience under. Whether it's mortification or a seedy desire to where the film could possibly be headed, there's something thoroughly transfixing about Tony Manero, which sustains its foreboding uneasiness to its final, astonishing sequence.