A LAWYER SHONDA RHIMES COULD HAVE INVENTED
When an American network green-lights a legal drama based in Afghanistan, they’ve got a ready-made real-life heroine
Motley’s Law at Doc Soup: Despite the fact that TV audiences have a huge appetite for shows about lawyers, we’re still waiting for an American network to green-light a legal drama set in Afghanistan. Once they do finally get around to creating
Law & Order: Kabul, they’ve got a ready-made real-life heroine in the subject of Motley’s Law, the doc that opens the fall season for Hot Docs’ monthly Doc Soup series.
In 2008, a North Carolina litigator (and former Miss Wisconsin) named Kimberley Motley came to Afghanistan for a nine-month legal education program. She ended up becoming the only foreign lawyer licensed to work in the Afghan courts.
Director Nicole Nielsen Horanyi’s film presents Motley as both a tireless defender of people who’ve fallen afoul of the country’s chaotic legal system, and a remarkably frank critic of the corruption and confusion that her own nation has sown there.
Whether she’s nonchalantly describing the grenade that someone threw into her home (luckily, it didn’t detonate) or swearing a blue streak over the latest ineptitude she has to contend with,
Motley is the kind of character for which Shonda Rhimes would have killed to take credit.
Horanyi is on hand for intros and Q&As at the three screenings of
Motley’s Law at the Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema on Wednesday and Thursday. Emerging Female Voices and more at Lightbox: As if the massive new Star Trek retrospective and the landing of Matt Johnson’s Operation Avalanche weren’t scintillating enough, TIFF Bell Lightbox’s fall season heads into high gear this week with an impressively diverse slate of events.
Especially worthy of attention is Emerging Female Voices, a set of short films by fast-rising filmmakers such as France’s Maimouna Doucouré and Hungary’s Fanni Szilagyi. Part of TIFF’s monthly Short Cuts program, it plays Tuesday. Other tantalizing options for Lightbox-goers include a talk by FX wizard Douglas Trumbull on his own 1972 SF classic
Silent Running (Saturday); a Canadian Open Vault presentation of the risqué 1993 indie Paris, France (Sunday); Goethe Films’ new series on movies about female criminals starting with
Run Lola Run (Tuesday); and special screenings of cinephile essentials such as Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Tuesday) and Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day (Oct. 6). Uncle Kent 2 at MDFF: As the head writer for Adventure Time and one of the minds behind SpongeBob Square
Pants, Kent Osborne has had many opportunities to express his very weird sense of humour. Even so, none of his animation work can prepare viewers for the unmitigated loopiness of Uncle Kent 2. Though ostensibly a sequel to the 2011 mumblecore drama in which Osborne played a thinly fictionalized version of himself coping with relationship woes, the followup swiftly heads off into more surreal territory with Osborne’s onscreen alter ego losing his grip on reality during a visit to Comic-Con in San Diego. A cult favourite since its debut at SXSW in 2015, Uncle Kent 2 makes its Toronto premiere in the latest in MDFF’s screening series at the Royal on Tuesday. She’s All That and Mean Girls: Two beloved teen flicks get feted in special events this week. Proof positive that no Pygmalion story could be complete without an Usher-led dance routine, She’s All That plays the Carlton on Friday in a prom-themed spectacular that includes a ’90s dance party and prizes for patrons’ best prom outfits.
If 2000s nostalgia is more your bag, then you probably already know the significance of Oct. 3 to fans of Mean
Girls. Inspired by the significance of that date in the movie itself, devotees now use the day as an excuse to celebrate the greatest achievement in Lindsay Lohan’s screen career.
You too can feel grool (don’t admit it if you have to look it up) at Mean Girls screenings at several Cineplex VIP locations in the GTA.