Kicking off today is Toronto International Film Festival and with it brings a batch of last-minute trailers for some films stopping by there. First up, we have the full U.S. trailer for Guy Maddin‘s The Forbidden Room, which arrives on October 7th. We said in our review from Sundance, “Lacking the accessibility of Guy Maddin’s earlier and most accomplished features, including My Winnipeg and Brand Upon The Brain, one ought to enter The Forbidden Room with caution, like his previous feature Keyhole. While I was left in cinematic awe last year upon screening Godard’s Goodbye to Language (a challenging cinematic essay that offers up no easy answers), I found the experience of The Forbidden Room to unfortunately frustrate to the point of exhaustion, all while admiring the beauty of its quest through silent films, vaudeville, and 50’s drive-in B-movies as a marriage of German expressionism and Soviet Montage.”
We’ve also got the U.S. trailer for Takashi Miike‘s wild-looking Yakuza Apocalypse, which will hit theaters on October 9th and one can check back for our review from the festival. Then there’s the intriuging first trailer for Matthew Saville‘s A Month of Sundays, his follow-up to the Joel Edgerton-led Felony. Lastly, one of the under-the-radar films at the festival that grabbed our attention is Stephen Dunn’s coming-of-age film Closet Monster, and one can see the trailer below.
The four-man crew of a submarine is trapped underwater, running out of air. A classic scenario of claustrophobic suspense—at least until a hatch opens and out steps… a lumberjack? As this newcomer’s backstory unfolds (and unfolds and unfolds in over a dozen outlandish tales), Guy Maddin, cinema’s reigning master of feverish filmic fetishism, embarks on a phantasmagoric narrative adventure of stories within stories within dreams within flashbacks in a delirious globe-trotting mise en abyme the equal of any by the late Raúl Ruiz. Collaborating with poet John Ashbery and featuring sublime contributions from the likes of Jacques Nolot, Charlotte Rampling, Mathieu Amalric, legendary cult electro-pop duo Sparks, and not forgetting muses Louis Negin and Udo Kier, Maddin dives deeper than ever: only the lovechild of Josef von Sternberg and Jack Smith could be responsible for this insane magnum opus. A Kino Lorber release.
Kamiura (Lily Franky) is not your typical yakuza boss: he’s a kindly man who dotes on the locals in his ‘hood and extends life-saving loans to small businesses in order to keep the big corporations out. But when a Django-esque gunslinger in seventeenth-century Spanish garb comes to town, Kamiura is exposed for what he truly is: a vampire! Soon, Kamiura’s young protegé Kagayama (Hayato Ichihara) is invested with his mentor’s powers, and takes to the streets with a new gang made up of regular citizens who have sprouted fangs and are ready to fight for their turf.
Real estate agent, Frank Mollard, won’t admit it, but he can’t move on. Divorced but still attached, he can’t sell a house in a property boom – much less connect with his teenage son. One night Frank gets a phone call from his mother. Nothing out of the ordinary. Apart from the fact that she died a year ago.
A MONTH OF SUNDAYS is about parents, children, regrets, mourning, moments of joy, houses, homes, love, work, television, Shakespeare and and jazz fusion: about ordinary people and improbable salvation.
Because everyone deserves a second chance.
Even a real estate agent.
The coming-of-age (and out-of-the-closet) story gets an imaginative twist in the first feature by writer-director Stephen Dunn. Mixing affecting drama with whimsical fantasy and elements of Cronenbergian body horror, Closet Monster is ceaselessly inventive in its chronicle of an East Coast teen wrestling with his sexuality and learning to find his own way in life.
