TIFF 2012 - Arthur Newman and No Place on Earth

Ok, so first things first...I need to tell you that I may have been slightly distracted watching this movie because I was sitting across the aisle, 4 feet away, from Colin Firth.   I may have glanced away from the screen a time or twelve.  He's quite dashing.

Arthur Newman is the directorial debut of Dante Ariola and stars Colin Firth and Emily Blunt as Wallace/Arthur and Mike.  They are two lost people trying to escape their pasts who wind up together. Arthur is a middle aged failure with a broken family who decides to buy a new identity and fake his own death.  He runs into the troubled Mike who has overdosed at a crappy motel and takes her to the hospital.  She figures out what he's doing and decides to come along for the ride.  

The movie was a bit slow to get started for me but was good once it got going.  The performances by Firth and Blunt were great and I'd put it at about a B+ as an overall grade.

Firth, Blunt, director Ariola and screenwriter Becky Johnston hit the stage for a Q&A after the screening. They answered a lot of the usual questions about what it's like to watch themselves onscreen (horrifying),  scenes they enjoyed filming and the getting into character.  Johnson was asked about character motivations and described what she felt the characters would be doing in five years time. 

On a much more emotional and serious note was the premiere of the documentary No Place on Earth.  Directed by Janet Tobias, the film is a mix of historical reenactment and current interviews about a group of jewish families who hid in the caves of the Ukraine for almost two years during World War II.  The caves, and the inhabitation, were discovered by Chris Nicola, an explorer from New York about five years ago.  Members of the families, who were just children at the time, and had emigrated to Canada and the United States after the war, were also interviewed throughout the film.  There was also footage of a 2010 trip that these elderly people took back to the Ukraine with the filmmakers and Nicola to revisit the caves where they had hidden as children.

More emotionally, these same family members attended the screening and were on stage with Nicola and Tobias after the film.  It wasn't so much a Q&A as a storytelling segment with the highlight for me being the 91 and 93 year old brothers Saul and Sam Sterner.  Still sharp, and with amazing memories of stories from more than 70 years ago. 

I'm not sure that I liked the historical reenactment segments of the film, where actors playing the roles made it seem more like I was watching a fictional feature instead of something that actually happened.  But it's an extremely compelling story, and hearing it from the people who lived it makes for a solid documentary (B-).