The following is a completely biased review of Joss Whedon’s adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, written by someone who has followed the man’s work religiously for ten years, and would probably enjoy a three-hour documentary about plywood, were it writ by the scribe of Dr. Horrible.

It is, in a word, delightful. Much Ado is the kind of intellectual, carefree fun that seems to exist only in history. Modern cerebral fare is dark, modern popcorn entertainment adolescent. To find my gentler emotions tickled by elizabethan turns-of-phrase delivered by some of my favourite actors was a rare pleasure.

Amy Acker is wry and radiant as Beatrice, conveying the biting wit of her character balanced with a femininity too-oft ignored in many portrayals of this female foil. Alexis Denisof plays an endearing Benedick, porting some hilarious physical comedy while eavesdropping on the Prince’s (contrived) conversation regarding Beatrice’s alleged infatuation with him. Clark Gregg, Fran Kranz, Sean Maher,and Reed Diamond nail their roles, although have less time for modern re-interpretation than Acker and Denisof. A late arrival by Nathan Fillion, playing against type as the lovably incompetent constable Dogberry, maintains the light-hearted atmosphere through the second half as events elsewhere in the plot become dark.

Joss and his team are en route to become masters of filmmaking. That the film is black and white subtly reminds the viewer that we’re watching history. The camerawork alternates deftly between handheld for flippant comedy, and Wes Anderson-style dolly shots for more serious interior moments. At all times, the lens seems to linger lovingly on the features of the beautiful house, Whedon’s own, which serves him for a stage.

Though the text is four-hundred years old, this treatment is accessible and relatable. The setting of a modern elite political family makes it easy to imagine these events taking place among the Kennedys, or a less wholesome version of the Obamas. The cast’s performance serves the plot on a platter for the layman, while the rapid-fire dialogue leaves the learned viewer wanting to go back and appreciate each tiny nuance and double-entendre they may have missed.

Even inconvenient anachronisms, such as Shakespeare’s offhanded racism, are played as self-aware comedy. Claudio pledges to love Don Pedro’s niece even “were she an Ethiope”, with an african woman framed prominently behind him.

The magical final shot begins as a wide view on the final celebration, then does an agile pan-zoom over to Beatrice and Benedick, wrapped in each other’s arms away from the crowd. As they went about their day, everyone in the theatre thought back on that image once or twice, and could not suppress a grin. Much Ado About Nothing is a rare pleasure which I look forward to enjoying many times in the future.

90 Minutes

This is a brilliantly unnerving film. The first thing that you will notice sitting down to watch 90 Minutes is that it is in Norwegian, and the second thing you will notice is that everything is grey. The colour palette varies from light grey to dark grey, matching the range of emotion of the film.

The film examines the intense violence that can come from even the most tranquil domestic lives. The plot followers 3 individuals who, while outwardly normal, carry out heinous violent acts. 90 Minutes isn’t scary; it isn’t a horror film. Rather, it is emotionally gory.

Aside from the difficult subject matter, the performances in this film are impressive. Despite the sparse dialogue, each actor gives a very convincing portrayal of pain, anger and sadness. 90 Minutes was very cohesive, from score to cinematography. Everything fits together to give a very congruent message.

Wasteland

Director Rowan Athale has really put together something special with Wasteland. The film is a brilliant blend of Snatch and Ocean’s Eleven (even down to the main character Harvey’s release from prison in the opening scenes). The principal cast are charming and funny, while also exuding that UK grit that fans will recognize from the works of Guy Ritchie. Like Soderbergh’s heist series, this film is very smart, but more importantly, Wasteland makes the viewer feel smart as well. This is what marks the great heist movies from the mediocre, and Wasteland has it in spades.

Love, Marilyn

Marilyn Monroe: America’s sex symbol. A gorgeous, vivacious woman, or dare I say, character? So much turmoil thrashing under a perfectly kept facade, only escaping into hastily scrawled diaries and conversations with the closest of friends. Loves lost, addiction, professional grudges, a harsh childhood. Marilyn was a woman of many demons, some hidden better than others. In this documentary these demons are explored in excruciating personal detail, exposing a new side of a woman loved and admired by generations since. There are no dramatic re-enactments here, no scripted dialogues, simply the memoirs of Marilyn and her friends. A packed theatre at TIFF stands as testament to how iconically this woman’s story has shaped us.

More great updates from our team on the ground in Toronto!

Artifact

TIFF day 2 featured Artifact, a documentary about the creation of 30 Seconds to Mars’ most recent album This is War, and the feud with their record label Virgin Records/EMI.

This film is not a balanced documentary by any stretch, but this is not such a bad thing. The events feature frontman Jared Leto and his views on the industry prominently. These views are that the music industry has a structural defect which causes it to abuse artists. Scenes of the recording sessions are spliced with footage of prominent music industry figures, such as System of a Down frontman Serj Tankian, explaining that record labels are truly terrible entities who take advantage of the artists.

That these opinions are practically mainstream means that this film is likely to endear audiences, especially the under-30 crowd that is 30 Seconds to Mars’s target.

[An interesting aside: the director credit for this film is that the listed director Bartholomew Cubbins is actually Jared Leto’s psuedonym which he uses when directing the band’s music videos.]

From Ross Robinson, ross@matinee.io

The End of Time

The End of Time begins with incredible footage of Joseph Kittinger plunging 100,000 feet in the farthest skydive to date. It continues as a 2-hour art piece, with sparse dialog but beautiful shots of technology and nature that fundamentally affect our perception of space and time. Space travel, particle physics, flowing lava, astronomy are all topics which have fascinated me since childhood, and enjoyable places for the mind to explore during this film.

From Trevor Creech, trevor@matinee.io

Look for more ground reports from TIFF daily. If you’ve got a film you’re looking to promote online, you might want to check out Matinée!

Yesterday was a great day for Canadian films at TIFF. After picking up my badges and welcome package (with sampler condoms, it’s always good to start a festival with some optimism), I was immediately off to the first screening.

Lunarcy!

Lunarcy follows the stories of several individuals who share a passion for the Moon. Christopher Carson is a young engineering dropout on a mission to create the first lunar colony. Dennis Hope claims to “own” the moon, according to a loophole in a United Nations space treaty. Alan Bean grounds the film, being the fourth man to actually walk on the moon, who now spends his time illustrating his memories.

The film revels in it’s own contradiction. These men, Carson in particular, dream so big it’s impossible not to sympathize with them. On the other hand, their chance of success, or even making a measurable impact, is infinitesimal. Should we cheer them on, or stage an intervention? I found myself comparing my own dreams to Carson’s, and wondering if I am as much a fool as this adorable space-aficionado.

But the best parts of the film are when it sets aside the particular obsessions of these people, and looks at the broader context of their lives. Bean and Hope clearly take pleasure in their work, however bizarre, and interviews with Carson’s parents show that he’s as happy as he’s ever been after a condition forced him to leave school. Maybe the real victory is just that he’s found something he’s passionate about that he wants to devote his life to, regardless the outcome.

Picture Day

Another first-time director, Kate Melville, weaves this dialogue-driven script into an adorable balance of character and comedy.

The film follows Claire, a teenager caught between childhood and adulthood, with this tension subtly symbolized by her two competing male admirers, Henry and James. Henry is a former baby-sit-ee of Claire’s, recently matured but still very boyish, and James is a 32-year old singer in a Toronto funk band.

Lead Tatiana Maslany sparkles as Claire. It’s easy to draw parallels to Ellen Page’s Juno, but Claire is much less idealized, living with her delinquent mother, skipping class and failing school. Claire’s banter with Henry drives much of the film, as she tries to turn him from an quiet nerdy kid into a popular bad-ass. Spencer Van Wyck’s Henry is hilarious and sympathetic, as the neurotic young over-achiever who tries to cook LSD in his basement.

I hadn’t heard of Picture Day until I attended a panel featuring Melville as one of “Six Canadian Directors to Watch” yesterday morning. I’m quite glad I did, because this turned out to be one of the best pure-Canadian films I’ve seen in years.

Blackbird

A great feature from Canadian Jason Buxton, Blackbird follows a teenager falsely accused of planning a school shooting.

The plot is captivating, and nothing short of infuriating to watch. Imagine being picked on in high school. Now imagine that you made one misstep in dealing with the bullies, and they had you arrested on false charges that you planned to shoot up the school. The bully now becomes the system, propelled by public hysteria, which puts you in jail with violent offenders and asks you to lie in order to go free. I found myself grinding my teeth numerous times, watching condescending bullies, parents, prison-mates, lawyers and even judges ruin a good kid’s life.

Connor Jessup nails the troubled, intellectual teenager Sean, whose trials (metaphorical and literal) make up the bulk of the plot. Once within the system, Sean is essentially powerless, and the emotion of the story follows his father Ricky, as he tries desperately to keep his son out of jail and put their life back together. What begins as a working-class unreachable father cliché is given depth by Michael Buie’s performance in the second half, as Ricky becomes the only person completely on Sean’s side.

A great adolescent and family drama, the take-home of Blackbird to me is quite clear: beware public hysteria. The horror of the film is that situations like this no doubt have happened since Columbine, and the media spotlight can condemn a teenager before they are ever put to trial.

Tomorrow, look for reports on Wasteland, Holy Quaternity, More Than Honey, and 90 Minutes. As always, if you’re thinking of promoting or distributing your film online, you might want to check out Matinée! I’m always happy to chat about films and the film industry at gareth@matinee.io.

A film’s webpage is the center of it’s online universe. It will be the first result people see in Google after they hear about your film, it will be where critics point their readers for more details, and it can be a film’s primary mode of revenue and channel to viewers. Despite this, it is often neglected, or even overlooked by many filmmakers in their online efforts, either due to prohibitive costs (a custom design can cost tens of thousands of dollars), or simply due to the effort it takes to maintain.

At Matinée, we’re building a product that will make this part of film marketing/distribution much easier and less pricey. In the meantime, I thought we’d take a few minutes and point out some filmmakers we think are already doing a great job at this.

Read More

We wanted to share some of our favourite, freely-available short films of the last year. Enjoy!

The Southern Belle

Director: Patrick Biesmans - @pbiesemans 

Afghan

Director: Pardis Parker - @Pardis 

Website: http://www.pardisparker.com/afghan

Archetype

Director: Aaron Sims - @AaronSimmsCo

Twitter: @ArchetypeMovie 

Website: http://www.archetype-movie.com/

Table 7

Director: Marko Slavnic -  @markoslavnic 

Tick Tock

Director: Len Chi  - @Ien_Chi 

Website: http://www.ienchi.com/ticktock.shtml

Cabin in the Woods is the best movie I’ve seen in years. Obsessive Joss Whedon minion that I am, I caught it opening weekend and left giddy with fanboyish pride. But I had a lingering question that begged investigation: why wasn’t this movie released when it was finished, three years ago?

Cabin finished production in May 2009 and was released April 2012. The first clue to this delay is that it switched distributors in mid-2011, when MGM sold it to Lion’s Gate. It turns out this was part of post-bankruptcy restructuring on the part of MGM. MGM went under in November 2010, and was thus unable to release Cabin.

But the story goes deeper than this. MGM has had a difficult time of it in the last decade. Their only blockbuster franchise is James Bond, which hasn’t produced a major hit since Casino Royale in 2006. Without new hits, they have relied on their catalogue of thousands of hours of movies and TV-series to bring in revenue in DVD/Bluray sales and TV syndication deals. This money was their lifeblood.

But the DVD/Bluray wellspring, so fruitful in the mid-2000s, has dried substantially. Revenues are down 25% since their height in 2006. Every studio has felt this decline, but without new box office hits to buffet their finances, MGM was the worst hit and the first to fold.

Of course, the main cause in the decline of DVD/Bluray is Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, and other Video-on-Demand services. Casual fans feel no need to own a $40 DVD when their monthly Netflix subscription gets them hundreds of movies at any moment. It is a superior consumer experience by far, but doesn’t allow the studios to extract as much money from a film as in years past.

Ultimately, Cabin’s distribution woes were the collateral damage of a tectonic shift within Hollywood. The loss of DVD/Blu-ray revenue is a fact that every studio needs to deal with, either by finding new revenue sources, or by restructuring their business to be more lean. Those that fail to adapt will go the say way as MGM.

Filmmaker? I bet we can make your life easier. Find us at Matinée.

We started Matinée to make life easier for independent filmmakers, using our own special trade: software. When we started speaking to filmmakers individually, I discovered a deep sympathy for these people, struggling with getting a film made, working a day job to make ends meet, and getting investors on board. I realized that at a distilled level, making a film is the same as making a company: they are both start-ups, one creates a business and the other creates art.

The analogy stands up to inspection:


Editors, Grips, Boom Operators… <->  Engineers - The ones that make everything happen.  Without them there would be nothing but an idea.  

Cinematographers <-> Designers - They make everything look awesome and professional.  An emotional touch comes from them.

Director <-> Product Lead -The visionary, tries to make the intangible tangible.

Producer <-> CEO - Makes sure the thing gets done, doesn’t sleep, the core of the team, ultimately responsible for success.

Studio Deal <-> Acquisition - You make a bunch of money, but give up the independence.


A start-up and an indie film are both long shots, gambles that require an advantageous combination of luck and skill. CEOs, founders, producers and directors all possess a sort of irrational ambition, a sense of crushing realism but at the same time being eternally optimistic. It is a strange combination.

On a deeper level, start-ups and indie films are both statements of independence. It says “Google, Facebook, IBM, Disney, Warner Brothers, I GOT THIS”.  Both a liberating and terrifying proposition is the idea of starting from nothing.

We started Matinee because we thought indie film was really cool, and that we could help this community with better software tools for them. Along the way, we found a long lost tribe of entrepreneurs: the filmmakers.


Ross
Co-founder - Matinée