Sundance got into the 3-D (and nature doc) spirit this year with the screening of CANE TOADS: THE CONQUEST, which director Mark Lewis introduced as "Avatoad" to a packed house at Eccles on Tuesday night. [Some had incorrectly reported that it was the first 3-D screening at Sundance. How soon they forget U2 3D from just two years ago.] One of four films made with the help of Participant, CANE TOADS is a return to Lewis' roots.
The LA Times' Kenneth Turan sets the stage:
"An Australian with a lively and playful sense of humor, Lewis has been to Sundance before, with the irreverent THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE CHICKEN. He's also dealt with the bizarre-looking toad before, in a droll 1988 short called CANE TOADS: AN UNNATURAL HISTORY which related how the toad had been imported to Australia in 1935 when "some bright spark" suggested it could control a beetle infestation. The problem was, nothing could control the toad.
With numbers estimated as high as 1.5 billion, the toad has now crossed one third of Australia and will inevitably cover the rest. "We've tried poison, fences, traps, biological controls, genetically modified organisms and spent huge amounts of money," Lewis reports. "We can send a man to the moon but we can't stop the toad.""
Peter Howell of the Toronto Star, continues:
"The cane toad army is constantly on the march, spreading westward across Australia at a pace that can reach one kilometre per day. The toads now occupy one million square kilometres of land. Nothing humans have tried can stop the toads from breeding (females lay between 30,000 to 40,000 eggs twice yearly) or from roaming.
Those unflappable Aussies have certainly taken their best shots. Lewis humorously documents the many attempts made to stem the toad tide, ranging from electric fences (they climb right through), to whacking them with cricket bats and golf clubs to squishing them by driving over them with cars."
The Carpetbagger Melena Ryzik says "Yes: you will learn more than you ever wanted to know about cane toads, and you will probably enjoy it.":
"The real stars of the movie are loopy Australians. There’s the guy who created a traveling sideshow of hundreds of stuffed and clothed toads enacting various scenes – toads in a tony night club; toads in a boxing match, etc. It didn’t get much business, probably, he surmised, because his Queensland neighbors could see real live toads doing strange things for free...
And then there are the folks who keep giant toads as pets and some who are employing inventive methods to eradicate and/or harvest them. No spoilers, but a design for a toad farm is invoked. There’s also a sequence in which a dog gets high and has an LSD-like trip from licking a cane toad. (Like we said: Serious. Stoner. Movie.)"
Brendan Walsh at Screen Crave says that "(a)fter all the hype surrounding Avatar, and all the talk of how it was going to 'change the way movies are made,' this may be the film that proves it.:
"The most remarkable aspect of this film, however, is its photography. Modern 3-D has changed from throwing objects from the screen out at the audience to adding depth to the screen, allowing viewers to feel immersed, as if they can almost reach right in to the world presented. This allows for amazing detail in textures, which paints an intensely vivid portrait of the Australian environment. The soft, blurry background we are used to from traditional camera lenses is barely present, allowing for sharp images all the way to the back of the image. The rows upon rows of sugar cane are so vast that they almost demand to be run through. Every detail the gravel and sand on the ground is so crisp that all one can do is marvel.
Speaking of textures, the animals of this film look absolutely tremendous. During a reenacted segment about a dog that was hospitalized after eating a venomous cane toad, there are several shots of it lying on a vet’s operating table, and you can see straight across each wisp of fur. A crocodile swimming past a riverboat seems to swim further and further into the screen. And the toads! The sea of toads! Hopping over one another, writhing like a phalanx, is truly an unbelievable sight, both amazing and slightly horrifying at the same time. Never before has such a benign animal seemed so attractive."
Paul Fischer at Moviehole seconds that emotion:
"Make no mistake about it, ''Cane Toads – The Extinction'' is a documentary with a distinctly cohesive narrative style, offering a variety of points of view and telling a very Australian story but yet it feels more universal. His cinematographers create a visual landscape to tell his story of the cane toads, and the vast Australian landscape with all its harsh contradictions is as much a character in this movie as the toads and laconic Australian characters we meet."
But Sam Adams, writing in IFC's Independent Eye blog, raises a stylistic concern:
"CONQUESTs stylized reenactments, in one case recounting a pet dog's brush with death after chomping down on a toxic toad, are filmed with a visual panache that would make Errol Morris sit up and take notice. But the movie's overreliance on effects sabotages the feeling of connection to the natural world. It's hard to forge a connection to Lewis' "little toad friends" when even the shots that purport to depict them in their natural environment seem as if they might be staged. Every time a toad hops across the screen, you wonder if there's a pair of hands just out of frame, releasing the warty creature on cue."
Comments