TIFF 2025: Saipan, Scarlet, and Obsession
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It’s late and I am now on day 6 of my TIFF experience. No long preamble, here’s some more thoughts on films I saw:
Saipan: The feel..bad? sports movie of the year? Saipan is not a bad movie at all, quite enjoyable actually. Taking us to a dramatized version of what took place when Roy Keane was sent home/quit as Ireland was preparing to go to the World Cup in 2002. Steve Coogan and Éanna Hardwicke area winning pair as Mick McCarthy and Keane, respectively, giving each man their due in both positive and negative moments. This isn’t a movie that goes for easy answers and instead drops us into the maelstrom and asks the audience to decide for themselves.
Scarlet: Shakespeare is rife for adaptation and in fact, should probably be getting adapted more these days. Animated movies like The Lion King have made great meals of the Bard and Scarlet, a new adaptation-lite film of Hamlet was a really fascinating watch. There’s some spectacular visuals in this movie, it would be worth seeing on the big screen for that alone. I do want to disabuse everyone of the notion that this is a faithful adaptation, it’s not. I applaud Mamoru Hosoda for not feeling too intensely beholden to the original text in order to let his own wings stretch. I do think that the movie suffers a bit from the confusion caused in the beginning and asking the audience to discover everything on the way, especially as characters show up in places they were not prior to being in their new location. The movie gets a bit too saccharine for me nearing the end, but it is an admirable effort.
Obsession: Boy we had a time watching this. A great movie to see with a crowd, and just a really solid movie overall. A guy makes a wish that his longtime crush would love him more than anyone in the world and then utter chaos and foolery. Inde Navarrette is UNREAL in this movie as the love interest turned lover turned tormentor. Just insane levels of commitment to every single moment from her. Despite the fact that his character’s actions pissed me off, Michael Johnston really sells in the nice guy who is now way in over his head…but who might want to stay there. I was not aware of Curry Barker prior to this, but he’s now certainly a director that I’ll perk up if I hear their name attached to a film.
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