Toronto Dispatch. 1.

There's a lot to look forward to at the Toronto International Film Festival as it opens - Death of a President, the curtain-raiser The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, and the whole new series packaged as Mozart's Visionary Cinema: New Crowned Hope.

Updated.

If there's a new quality among many in Toronto that might be differentiated from the rise and fall of the general pool of movies out there, it is what looks like TIFF's greater commitment to documentaries in the Real to Reel section. The most-awaited film in this section is The US vs John Lennon, a look back at the US government's public and clandestine campaign against Lennon and Yoko Ono, part of a broader maneuver against the Left in general that peaked in the late 1960s and early 1970s [more]. Does it sound familiar, as the Bush administration deploys the fear factor to defend warrant-less wiretapping and stigmatize critics as traitorous and lily-livered?

The doc that's caught my eye as the festival begins is American Hardcore, one of the few docs on the program that is not a premiere. (It played at Sundance 2006.) The subject of Paul Rachman's perceptive film is the rise and fall of hardcore punk, the pounding, relentless outsider music that was an un-commercial, anti-aesthetic and unapologetic reaction to mainstream punk (you can call it "parlor punk")... and mainstream everything else.

The groundswell began more than 25 years ago, when the Sex Pistols had already spewed their songs out on England, which helps explain why hardcore's veterans now look like relatively respectable men (yes, they're mostly men) as they recall spitting out lyrics and brawling on the stage. We hear of their contempt for Ronald Reagan at the time of his election in 1980, and of their despair when he was re-elected overwhelmingly in 1984. Reagan became a demonic icon for the hardcore guys, who seem to have competed to turn out the most grotesque effigies of the Great Communicator on no-budget signs for their shows that they photocopied and stuck on walls. (There's plenty of imagination in this guerrilla advertising - enough for a small book.) The names said it all - Black Flag, The Adolescents, Millions of Dead Cops, The Circle Jerks, Jerry's Kids, DOA.

In more than 90 minutes, I can't remember hearing a single song played in its entirety as the film moved from interviews to archival footage. Most of the musicians admit to not being particularly adept at playing their instruments, not that it mattered much. The songs have at most three chords, but plenty have two, or just one. (The Sex Pistols, who started the whole thing, were frank about barely being able to play.) Performance was crucial, since this was more theater than music, which may explain why so many of these performances were filmed.

The exception to the rule in this field - where every rule seems to have been broken - were the Bad Brains, a black punk band from Washington DC. They were virtuosos, and they were admired by the world of hardcore for their virtuosity. Group members, who describe these wild times with remarkable composure, given the frenzy of their performances, noted that fans felt betrayed when they converted to Rastafarianism over time and started playing reggae.

By the late 80s, other bands collapsed and disbanded, mostly from burnout and from the other weaknesses that come with age. The politics that helped fuel the anger that got hardcore going hadn't changed - Iran-Contra compromised any Reagan administration claim to integrity for all but true believers, and George Bush Sr. would soon invade Iraq.

Hardcore was a suburban sound, huge in Los Angeles, where almost everything is a suburb. (Remember that the majority of the US population lives in suburbs now.) Yet the epicenter of the brawling and the raging was Orange County. American Hardcore punctuates segments by cutting away to a map of the US, as it moves from one city's scene to another's. Funny how so much of the archival footage looks the same. And why not? These guys slept on each other's floors, shared garages, made their own records, which they stuffed in record sleeves that they designed and assembled. These rebels knew they would never "break through," and never wanted a part of what they wouldn't break through to - all of which makes the film refreshing, since they still seem to feel (and dress) that way. Of course, the doc is being distributed by Sony Classics, not exactly the garage band of film companies.

Hip Hop, which had far humbler beginnings, was a lot better at providing a ladder of economic opportunity to climb than Hardcore was, unless you count anomalies like Courtney Love. The veteran hardcore musicians don't mention it, but they must have felt some predictable chagrin at seeing suburban kids eat up gangsta rap, as the overnight-millionaire rappers taunted, "Be rich, be very rich."

Being rich is a central theme of A Good Year, a gala premiere at Toronto, and in no way representative of anything on the program. Sir Ridley Scott's uncharacteristic romance is about the Alpha Male Scumbag who has everything, and then leaves all that he might someday earn in the London world of finance for the serenity of an estate he inherits, with all the wine he can drink and a luscious French restaurateuse. By the way, if you didn't see that ending coming, there's probably a job in the CIA for you. It's a bit like not seeing the TGV coming. The star in this studio voyage to Arcadia is Russell Crowe, who plays Max (ballsy name, of course), a stock trader in the mold of Gordon Gecko. I'm not sure it's intentional, but Norman Foster's Gherkin, the upright phallus of a building that dominates the skyline of the City, is silhouetted in the background of the half of the shots of Max and his suspendered minions savaging their way through questionable and profitable trading. The London palette here is all in metallic blue. Get it? No nature, please, just Darwinian man.

There's a parallel plot in A Good Year, as Max and his devilish Uncle Henry (Albert Finney) play games and sip wine on their huge estate in what seems to be the Luberon, north of Aix-en-Provence. It's a nice life, but not nice enough for Max to abandon the City when he hears that the uncle he hasn't seen in a decade has died and left him everything. He's more interested in cashing in on the real estate boom. But then there's the dark-eyed proprietress (Marion Cotillard) of a local restaurant (as ballsy as Max) and the arrival of an American girl with Uncle Henry's nose (Abbie Cornish), who shows up looking for the man who fathered her on his romp through a Napa vineyard some years back. As tensions flare over Max's Treo (a product placement?), and regulators ban him from the City for unethical trading, Max twists and turns before settling for the good life. The scumbag turns out to have a heart of gold. It's a Hollywood movie.

If this isn't a studio formula (mixing Wall Street, Under the Tuscan Sun and Chocolat), I don't know what is, but it is a little unlikely to get it from the director of Gladiator and Blackhawk Down. I have to wonder whether executives at 20th Century Fox debated whether it was worth courting disbelief by trying to humanize Russell Crowe, given what the guy can do to you with a telephone if provoked. But consider this - A Good Year is a studio confection calculated to make money by telling a moral tale about the hollowness of a life devoted to making money. Choose poverty for two hours, and you'll make us money.

There's more. Who wins Max over in the end? The French, our enemy, the evil French, who are branded as "weasels," if not worse, on a daily basis, in the New York Post, the tabloid that's part of the empire of Fox's parent company, News Corp, which is controlled by none other than Ruppert Murdoch.  It seems odd. This film's protagonist is a defector, a turncoat, a man who has fled a profession devoted to maximizing his earnings, and gone to the other side, to the French world of lavender and license. If Bush and Cheney were true to their principles, wouldn't they already be denouncing this movie as pernicious propaganda that seeks to corrupt and weaken real men? Or, at least, Murdoch and his employee Bill O'Reilly (leader of a boycott of France and all things French) would be sounding the alarm. Instead, Fox is selling it. Aux armes!

Update: Paul Rachman has note at the Doc Blog about who all will be showing up for the American Hardcore screening.

Posted by dwhudson at September 7, 2006 12:26 PM