TIFF 10 Capsules — Day 1

SCORE: A HOCKEY MUSICAL (Michael McGowan, Canada, 7)

Perhaps this might not have been as much fun seen under any circumstances other than Opening Night at TIFF, after waiting in the Rush Line and having a woman just give away her ticket and not even accepting payment. Or maybe I’m just laughing AT this film’s many amateurishnesses and absurdities in that snobby hipster way.

Certainly I can say I’m embarrassed by how much I enjoyed SCORE: A HOCKEY MUSICAL, which is not an objectively good musical and made my heart sink early, but quickly won me over, as a kind of self-referential comedy. The music is generic bubble-gum pop without soul, and the songs are more like recitatives than arias: they always advance plot, are usually castwide, and are absurdly (to the point of comically) “overwritten,” always trying to get in an extra few words, polysyllabic preferred, at the end. And only Olivia Newton-John (obviously) has any voice. But how can you not laugh at hockey players dancing in the locker room, choreographed fights, and lyrics like “hockey without violence is like macaroni without cheese / it’s still pasta but it don’t aim to please.” Or a Dan Hill ballad being sung without irony (though with knowingness).

The plot centers on the son of hippy parents who’s the greatest hockey talent ever, but he doesn’t fit into hockey’s he-man ethos. Maybe it was how SCORE embraced its amateurishnesses, or maybe it was some quick punchline-flashbacks that showed me both that, title aside, SCORE is a comedy first and that the director has chops. And the male-bonding scenes and montages and the sports-marketing scenes are no-excuses-needed hilarious. So somehow all these musical shortcomings pay off because the film is essentially a self-reflexive comedy about being a “Canadian” musical, an emblem of a country where self-deprecating amateurish inferiority is part of the national psyche. (A contest to fill in “as Canadian as ——,” the winner was “as possible under the circumstances.”)

The plot wrestles, really unconvincingly in the resolution, with the central paradox of Canada’s self-image. The country is obsessed with the most honor-based, hypoer-masculine violent sport in the world (besides actual combat sports). For example, when programmer Cameron Bailey mentioned how “we” won the Olympic gold medal, the Elgin Theater erupted in applause. Meanwhile, Canada’s political mythos is that we’re the peaceful caring polite country, unlike The Big You Know Who. So yes, Noel, the film relies on stereotypes, but that’s how this kind of humor works — think also de Sica’s and Germi’s 60s “Italian” comedies with Sophia Loren and/or Marcello Mastroianni. SCORE is, and quite deliberately like Canada itself — small, plucky, innocent, knowing and enjoyable in its inferiorities to the colossus films of US Hollywood. And I largely wrote this review sitting at a Tim Horton’s.

THE RETURN OF THE FIST (Andrew Lau, Hong Kong, 3)

A film has to first achieve a certain level of coherence before you can even explain clearly why it’s incoherent. RETURN OF THE FIST doesn’t even achieve that — I have no more idea of what “happens” than I got from reading the Guidebook. I couldn’t follow this movie one lick after its terrific opening scene.

In that scene, a sign of the movie that might have been, a handful of WW1 Chinese laborers with only a few knives defeat a whole battalion of faceless Germans with rifles and machine guns. The stuntwork-choreography, where the sets miraculously fall into place, is breathtaking. My favorite moment is when a wrestling-pinned German gets the familiar 20-lightning-punches-in-3-seconds treatment, only the Chinese guy is using knives rather than his fists. The film then flashes forward to 30s Shanghai and there’s elements of a great movie there — stylized over-opulent obviously-sets sets, musical acts and ridiculously glamorous folk. A nightclub called “Casablanca” promises shifting-loyalties-in-an-uncertain-zone war intrigue, and there’s triads and Westerners and Chinese generals and etc.

But for all his action chops, which come out again for scenes involving a masked superhero (don’t ask), Lau is lausy at exposition and tries for way too many characters and subplots and intrigue. Maybe this is cultural mother’s milk to the Chinese — certainly there’s enough Chinese flag-waving and flamboyantly evil “Japs” to make me think Lau is going for the home audience. And the “RETURN OF” title tells me there’s at least cultural antecedents, if not actual movies, to this story. But to this bakgwei, RETURN OF THE FIST simply doesn’t delineate and differentiate the characters enough to make sense.