TIFF16 Film #1

Reason for Pick – Eli’s Hayes’ review out of Cannes

Toni Erdmann is a complex dance that paints the outline of the relationship between a lonely father and his career occupied daughter, who's living abroad.

I went in with the impression that this was going to be two hours and forty minutes of non-stop laughter. It isn’t. While there are frequent laugh-out-loud moments, and two scenes that sends the audience into fits, the remainder ranges from poignant to painful to awkward. Writer / Director Maren Ade isn’t afraid to linger on a shot, often cutting a few seconds after the natural beat, which gives a feeling of reality over scripted drama. She also isn’t afraid to use…

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Well, Christian Petzold broke the ice, but it looks like Maren Ade's going to bring it home: the "Berlin School" has broken beyond the rarefied festival circuit to produce bona fide hits. What's particularly shocking about this turn of events is that, unlike other segments of the austere art-film universe, the Berlin School appears to have crossed over into the mainstream almost by accident. Apart from slightly more direct plotting, there's nothing about Petzold's Phoenix that made it inherently more accessible than his earlier films. And now, Ade gives us Toni Erdmann, a generational comedy that, at its core, is about the inappropriate character and unavoidable embarrassment that accompanies "humor" between the generations.

Ade has long been the stealth…

Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the upcoming Academy Awards, and supposedly the favourite to win the Oscar statuette although I fail to see what's so great about it, Toni Erdmann is a bland, overlong & tediously paced cinema that's amusing in bits n pieces but those moments are few n far between.

The story of Toni Erdmann follows an old-age hippie with a penchant for weird pranks who tries to reconnect with his estranged daughter by paying her a surprise visit but only ends up messing her lifestyle. Things do take an interesting turn when he reappears in a different persona and claims to be her CEO's life coach.

Written, co-produced & directed by Maren Ade, the film opens on…

It's no original observation to note that we wear masks to protect ourselves from others, nor to suggest that our sum total is in part defined by our portfolio of masks. I don't exactly ascribe to that idea, but it seems to dwell here in this film in a potent way. It's not so much that Winifred is trying to shock Ines into revealing the self beneath the mask so much as he is trying to be part of her life in a way that reveals more masks to him, inserting himself into various situations--work, social outings, and so on--intentionally or not altering the masks she wears in each. Notice how Ines attempts to micromanage her image, controlling every stray…

A father who loves practical jokes tries to reconnect with his hard working daughter and ends up creating a fictional character, Toni Erdmann, to spice up her life. It's a strange movie indeed. Some have described it as a comedy or a dark comedy but I agree with the director in that this is a sad and serious drama. It just so happens that one of the characters is making jokes all the time. Quite often the strangeness and the awkwardness were too much for me, but when they weren't, this was a delightfully original movie with a solid message, well written story and good acting. The much praised naked party scene works on many levels. The only thing I…

Tre stelle e mezzo è quel voto che significa che il film non è né bellissimo, né solo sufficente. Toni Erdmann parte da un'idea molto bella : parla di un padre che vuole ricordare alla figlia che bisognerebbe sempre prendere la vita con leggerezza nonostante tutto, che bisognerebbe sempre mantenere lo "humor", parla della ricerca del significato della parola "felicità" e di cosa è veramente importante nella vita. Tutti temi che porta avanti molto bene e in modo anche abbastanza leggero e divertente. Il problema del film per me sta nella durata, 2 ore e 40 non sono davvero giustificate per questo film, visto che ci sono moltissime parti abbastanza inutili che non contrubuiscono a delineare meglio i personaggi o…