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So, with my first rant of the season about the interaction between awards and movies out of the way, let’s talk briefly about the movies I saw at TIFF this year.

American Heist

The first screening I attended was also the least memorable. American Heist tells the story of two brothers caught mostly unwittingly in a scheme to rob a bank in New Orleans. Hayden Christensen and Adrien Brody play the leads, and their performances are fine as far as they go, but the script is trite, predictable, and at times asinine. The relationship between the brothers is supposed to be complex and emotional, but it is instead unbelievable, contrived, and downright moronic.

To make matters worse, the film is sloppy all over the place. In a key scene, the camera turns to a shot of New Orleans under heavy rain as a bus drives away. All of the people in the background - on the streets - meanwhile, walk around normally, without umbrellas or urgency, as if nothing were happening.

The movie also opens with a tried and true scene: something scary happens, gunshots are fired, the viewer doesn’t know what happened, and the movie cuts to a “one day earlier” shot. Fine. Except…the movie then has two days of action before returning to the key scene. And, actually, strike that - the scene is not key at all - it’s not a significant point in the plot in any way, and is forgotten immediately after it happens.

The second half of the movie, the action part, is a slight improvement, as the filmmakers do a passable job of stringing together fast-paced action sequences with car chases and shooting scenes. But, by then, the robbery seems almost like an afterthought, buried in a mess of eye-rolling lines, flat characters, corny relationships, and even repetitive conversations.

Trying to bend in elements of Aronofsky, Scorsese, and De Palma, the filmmaker instead ends up with alphabet soup goo - a sloppy pastiche of nothings simply does not add up to something for this movie. You have seen at least a dozen versions of this movie before, and they were all infinitely better.

The movie picked up a distributor at TIFF - don’t ask me why - but thankfully there is no release date yet for the United States. Avoid it at all costs - this isn’t even worth watching on Netflix.

This Is Where I Leave You

The ensemble dramedy starring, amongst others, Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, and Jane Fonda, was an entertaining, sentimental, and at times touching story about a superficially dysfunctional but in reality loving family as they are reunited following the death of their patriarch. But this family is less August: Osage County and more The Family Stone.

My understanding is that the distributors decided for a TIFF prerelease to see if it would garner any awards attention. It rightly did not. But the movie is still fine as it goes. The script contains the right blend of sardonic and light-witted humor with drama and seriousness. Some moments are truly hilarious, even if some of the plot twists and turns are by now expected of these romantic family dramedies. As light-hearted as it is witty, one has come to expect solid performances and assured laughs from the likes of Fey and Adam Driver, who also stars in the movie.

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