Karl Leschinksy
Contributor
Meek’s Cutof
Meek’s Cutoff, from director-to-keep- an-eye-on Kelly Reichardt, is a Kafkaesque pilgrimage Western about white settlers who have lost their bearings along the path to where they hoped to begin anew.
It’s a grueling quest. The movie asks tough moral questions about the group’s boastful guide before a better navigator – a local Indian, according to the film’s credits – is found and captured.
The problem with English-speakers choosing him as their lead is he can’t understand them and they definitely don’t understand him.
The film wanders toward a kind of poetic justice designed to leave the audience with only a feeling of dislocation, enough to make a shoe- on-the-other-foot point about colonialists leading natives astray after pushing them to the edges of the land they called home.
The High Cost of Living
The High Cost of Living is one of those complicated indie movies – and it’s nicely done.
Quebecois actress Isabelle Blais is a Montreal mother who, after a tragic accident, is cared for by an idealistic barbiturates dealer played by Zach Braff in one of his best performances. Braff has a unique acting presence in the film, both deeply sensitive and free-spirited, reckless but with good intentions, and the movie debates whether we can forgive his trespasses.
A stunningly mature debut from Canadian filmmaker Deborah Chow, The High Cost of Living won best Canadian first feature at the festival, and deservingly so. Her story stays cred- ible where lesser films could falter: it was a smart call not to push a happy ending on us while still allowing these all-too-recognizably real people to try to get some closure.
Tabloid
Tabloid, the newest documentary from genius director Errol Morris, is a stranger-than-fiction masterpiece.
Entertaining from all angles and mysterious at its core, it uses unconventionally hysterical humour to explore what would at first seem like a horror story about a scandalized model who kidnapped her Mormon boyfriend to make him a sex slave. At least, according to the sensational reporting of British magazines who made it a gossip tale in the ’70s.
As Tabloid follows the stories of insiders closer to the events – including the star herself, a hopeless ro- mantic who says she was performing an intervention on her brainwashed lover in a genuine attempt to save him – it becomes impossible to keep tabs on the truth. Not that Morris has ever been the sort who’s interested in answers, or even necessarily questions, so much as he’s interested in reading the space that exists between all these wildly differing accounts.
