This post will continue to be updated with quick reactions and brief reviews of films throughout the rest of the Toronto International Film Festival.
Aggro Dr1ft (2023 | USA | 80 minutes | Harmony Korine)
Some of the dumbest most juvenile trash I’ve ever seen. Like a heavily abused Hypercolor t-shirt crawled out of a sewer and got tangled in a rat’s nest of videogame cables on its way toward achieving sentience.
Shot in an ever-shifting rainbow of infrared heatmaps and set to a pulsing electronic score by AraabMusic, we follow an assassin as he makes the rounds around post-apocalyptic Miami. It’s a stretch to say that Jordi Mollà “plays” the main character, who mumbles an array of self-contradictory platitudes about killing, solitude, and a love for his children and his attention-starved voluptuous wife. The philosophizing becomes mind-numbing as we watch him go about the grim business of self-aggrandizement and contract killing. Amid flashy cars, video-game overlays, and unrealistic kill sequences, we follow as he crosses paths with Travis Scott as a snake-tongued militia leader and lumbers his way toward a final boss who keeps women in cages, humps the air violently, and utters pronouncements like “there’s beauty in this brutality”.
Korine clearly intends these narcotized videogame vibes as less a film than a provocation to something beyond cinema. I can only hope there’s something yet beyond this stage in the evolution of storytelling, but why else would you call your new company EDGLRD if not to get a rise out of audiences?
North American Premiere
Dicks: the Musical! (2023 | USA | 86 minutes | Larry Charles)
Some of the dumbest most juvenile stuff I’ve ever seen. Like gay culture gained sentience while crawling from a sewer drain through a pile of cocaine and glitter. Unlike the previous review, I mean this as the highest compliment!
Adapted from their own Off-Broadway production, Fucking Identical Twins, Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp play a pair of big-dicked extremely heterosexual highly successful salesmen who were separated at birth. Reunited by a corporate merger (where Megan Thee Stallion is a badass boss), they hatch an infantile Parent Trap scheme to bring their long-estranged parents back together through the power of terrible wigs and flimsy deception.
Megan Mullally plays an ancient, wheelchair-bound, shut-in mom whose genitals and mental faculties have long since left the building. Nathan Lane swoons around his apartment in designer capes, as a gay dad whose life is devoted to a pair of caged “sewer boys”, ferocious ham-hungry monsters. Oh, and Bowen Yang plays God. The capers are ridiculous, the songs are hilarious, and all the performances are so winning that the parody just works.
This played as part of the midnight madness program, so it’s perfect for a zany punch-drunk late night energy. If they could ever bring it to Broadway, it would either make a billion dollars or be protested out of existence by small-minded tourists who couldn’t handle the truth of the big final number. It is easily the most, hardest, and loudly I’ve laughed (all at things meant to be funny) at all of TIFF this year. So brave!
World Premiere
Poolman (2023 | USA | 100 minutes | Chris Pine)
It took six days of searching and some formidable competition, but by the last screening of my time in Toronto I found the far and away dumbest movie at TIFF, and maybe at any film festival in recent memory. A complete misfire, watching this dopey take on Chinatown felt like spending a couple hours inside Chris Pine’s generously-financed head trauma.
World Premiere
This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist. More information about the strikes can be found on the SAG-AFTRA Strike hubs. Donations to support striking workers can be made at the Entertainment Community Fund.