Yes, you could spend this weekend in the theatre checking out Battle: LA or indulging your inner teenage girl at Red Riding Hood, but if you happen to be in Toronto may I be so bold as to point out that the largest music festival in the country happens to be running right now and -- wouldn't you know it -- Canadian Music Week happens to include a film festival. Which I program. And, if I do say so myself, I'd say the lineup is rather good this year.
The CMW film festival is a compact affair, with nine feature and two shorts screening at the TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 John St W) over two days. Admission to all screenings is free if you have a CMW wristband with individual tickets also available at the Lightbox box office. Here's the rundown:
On Friday - that'd be tomorrow - we kick things off early with a 2:30pm screening of Pickin' & Grinnin'. The directorial debut of Jon Gries - a veteran character actor probably best known for his bit as Uncle Rico in Napoleon Dynamite - makes its Canadian Premiere at CMW and it's the sort of quirky, quietly absurd comedy that you'd expect from Gries. Star Johnny Dower will be on hand, so come and say hello.
Also on hand? For Van Halen lead singer Sammy Hagar who will be introducing the world premiere of Go There Once, Be There Twice, a documentary about Hagar, his club in Mexico and his annual birthday blowouts. Got a bit of big hair in your past? This is pretty much essential.
After that Friday gets vintage with back to back screenings of The Who's Quadrophenia and Tommy. If you don't know what these are then you have clearly been living under a rock for the past few decades. You don't get many chances to see these on the big screen - particularly not Quadrophenia, which was a bear to track down rights and a print for - so don't miss them!
Saturday starts at 1pm with the Canadian premiere of Julian Temple's Oil City Confidential. Temple, bluntly, is the best rock-doc filmmaker in the world today and his portrait of British proto-punk pub rock icons Dr Feelgood is just flat out infectious. This is classic rock and roll iconography, small town boys blown up impossibly large only to come crashing to earth. And the concert footage? Good lord this band was amazing in their time.
Up next is the local premiere of Lose This Child -- a stop motion music video from Israeli alt rock act Eatliz, playing live during the festival as well -- followed by the impossible to peg down An Island. Is it a concert film? Is it a doc? Some kind of film experiment? Yeah, all of those things in a way that I'd never seen before this one. A collaboration between Danish act Efterklang, director Vincent Moon and the inhabitants of a small island off the coast of Denmark this is one meant to be experienced. The band call it a sort of visual album and that seems fair enough.
Got a thing for early eighties scifi? So does Beyond The Black Rainbow director Panos Cosmatos. Think early Cronenberg on acid or Solaris as filtered through Logan's Run. Black Mountain keyboard player Jeremy Schmidt created the film's hypnotic score on nothing but vintage analogue synths and the result is something that ... well ... those who enjoy a bit of chemical enhancement may well choose to indulge.
We've got another world premiere as we get into the home stretch with Cure For Pain: The Mark Sandman Story. Sandman, for those who don't know, was the lead singer of Boston based trio Morphine, one of the leaders of the fledgling alternative rock scene in the early nineties. These were the days when alt rock meant anything went and in the case of Morphine that meant a two string slide bass, drums and baritone sax -- all of it blending into a sultry stew that Sandman described as "Fuck rock". Morphine were one of the most iconic bands of their time, a time cut short when Sandman collapsed and died on stage in the middle of a set at a festival in Italy. If Temple's the old guard in the rock-doc world with Vincent Moon the up and comer then Cure For Pain's Rob Bralver is the newcomer demanding to be noticed. This is a beautiful, tragic film.
And finally we come to the end. Things close off with Year Of The Bone -- a new animated short from the Oscar nominated directors of Madame Tutli-Putli with music from Godspeed You ! Black Emperor -- before moving on to Andrew Zuckerman's Music. A multi media project that also includes a book and an iPad app, Music works from a very simple premise that yields simply fascinating results. Zuckerman comes armed with just a small handful of questions and a seemingly never ending Rolodex of famous names, the end result being the likes of Iggy Pop, Lenny Kravitz, Ravi Shankar, Ben Gibbard, Ziggy Marley and literally scores more all talking about their creative process. The ones you'd expect to be dicks -- hello, Billy Corgan -- pretty much are but what makes this amazing is that moment where you realize that whatever the end results may be the process of creation for artists as diverse as Ravi Shankar and Iggy Pop is virtually identical. A good documentary is both entertaining and educational and this is very much both.
For times and trailers you can head on over to the CMW Film Festival website.