First, I encourage you to explore my favourite Ottawa festival—the Ottawa International Animation Festival, Sept. 24-28. To help you do so, I’ve written about where to start at the Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF) this year. Many of the screenings are at the ByTowne. This is the largest animation festival in North America and one of the world’s premier animation festivals. It’s a wonderful opportunity to see the full range of the magic that animation brings to the cinema!
In addition to the OIAF, I have a few live-action fiction films and documentaries to recommend at the ByTowne and the Mayfair. I’ll start with some great classics from the vault.
Amélie was the delightful French dramedy that introduced many folks to the ByTowne in 2001. (The ByTowne premiered Amélie and then held it over for weeks in response to its success.). It’s about a shy Parisian dreamer who, after finding a little box of childhood treasures behind her apartment’s baseboards, sets about changing the lives of her neighbours and eventually finding her true love. This real charmer is back at the ByTowne!
Another crowd-pleaser–The Rocky Horror Picture Show–is back at the Mayfair for its umpteenth screening. Let’s do the Time Warp again!
For more music, check out Gold Diggers of 1933 in the ByTowne’s Golden Age series. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy, this sparkling musical features the not-to-be-believed dance sequences from one of the greatest motion picture choreographers of all time, Busby Berkeley!
Mean Girls is in ByTowne’s Drunken Cinema series. In her first big role, Lindsay Lohan is a naive teen transplanted from Africa to an American high school. She thinks she knows about the law of the jungle, but that’s before she unwittingly gets accepted into the school’s nastiest clique – “the Plastics” – three horrid girls who rule the school with psychological warfare and unwritten social rules.
La haine (Hatred) takes its title from a line spoken by one of the three main characters: “hatred breeds hatred.” This hard-hitting French film portrays racial and cultural volatility in a Paris banlieue district. It follows a day and a night in the lives of three aimless, disaffected young men — a Jewish person, an African and an Arab. Their seething resentment at their miserable, dead-end lives eventually explodes. Mathieu Kassovitz, the film’s writer, director and co-editor, won Best Director at Cannes. La haine is in the ByTowne’s Spectacle series.
Last year, I recommended Francis Ford Coppola’s passion project, the $120 million (of Coppola’s own money!) Megalopolis. Now you can see Megadoc, the fly-on-the-wall “making of” documentary about Megalopolis by Mike Figgis. Both films are at the Mayfair.
Documentaries often unveil valuable historical information, and that’s true of three very different recent documentaries.
People consider The Beatles’ Abbey Road album a masterpiece. It contains musical gems such as “Come Together,” “Something,” and “Here Comes the Sun.” Side 2 is a remarkable suite of songs. “Beatleologist” Scott Freiman has “deconstructed: each of the Beatles’ albums. Deconstructing Abbey Road is probably his most elaborate work. You’ll go on a track-by-track journey in which the enthusiastic Freiman explains the inspiration for each song and how each evolved in the studio. For Beatles fans and folks who love music, it’s at the ByTowne.
The other two documentaries are about World War II and its aftermath. Riefenstahl is about one of the most famous/infamous women of the 20th century, Leni Riefenstahl. The film explores her considerable artistic legacy and her complex ties to the Nazi regime, juxtaposing her righteous self-portrayal with new evidence suggesting she was definitely aware of Hitler’s atrocities.
Paper City is a part of Carleton University’s conference “Cartographies of Loss: The Afterlives of War,” and admission is free. This documentary tells the stories of three survivors of the United States’ horrific firebombing of Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945, focusing on their efforts to restore awareness of Tokyo’s devastation. Both are at the Mayfair.
Turning to recent fictional films, because I loved Thelma, especially its terrific 93-year-old star June Squibb, I’m really keen to see her in Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, Eleanor the Great. Unlike Thelma, although there’s witty humour in the film, it has a somewhat darker theme. After her best friend, a Holocaust survivor, dies, Eleanor tells her friend’s story and is inadvertently mistaken for a Holocaust survivor herself. At the ByTowne.
Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor seem to be in many prestigious films these days. The History of Sound, at the ByTowne, is about two young men at the beginning of the 20th century with a profound love of music – especially American folk music – and for each other. Lionel (Paul Mescal) is a talented singer from rural Kentucky who has synesthesia, the ability to comprehend music in taste and colour as well as sound. In 1917, he left his family farm to attend the Boston Music Conservatory. There, he meets David (Josh O’Connor), a music-composing student who is soon drafted. In 1920, the two spent a winter walking through the forests and islands of Maine, collecting folk songs to preserve them for future generations. The music in the trailer haunts me.
The global news is pretty bleak right now, so I’ll end with recommendations for two films that look like they’ll cheer you up.
The first is the Quebec film Peak Everything (Amour apocalypse). Adam Tremblay is a kind-hearted kennel-owner, hypersensitive and borderline depressive, with many existential (real and imagined) fears — climate change, civil wars, natural disasters, and collapsing systems. Neither his insensitive father nor the other folks in his life are supportive. Even his psychologist can’t help him. Then he meets a woman on a customer support line whose soothing voice and words calm his worries. The trailer makes me smile every time I watch it. At the ByTowne.
The second film, The Naked Gun, is a comedy distraction. Probably worth the price of a ticket just to see that rugged man’s man Liam Neeson wearing a little girl’s plaid skirt and panties with red hearts on them. But I digress. The Naked Gun harkens back to those hugely funny comedies helmed by Canada’s own Leslie Nielsen as police Lieutenant Frank Drebin. Now Lieutenant Frank Drebin Jr (Neeson) is back! Enjoy it at the Mayfair.
So many films to choose from! Have a great time with whatever you see at the ByTowne and the Mayfair.
Dates, times, and tickets for the ByTowne are at www.bytowne.ca. You can also buy tickets at the box office. The ByTowne publishes its calendar several weeks in advance. Dates, times, and tickets for the Mayfair are at www.mayfairtheatre.ca. The Mayfair finalizes its upcoming films’ schedule weekly, which they post online and via email. Both provide information about future weeks’ films. You can buy tickets via their weekly email and at the box office.
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