Toronto Film Festival 2007 anticipation thread

As of now, looking extremely unlikely for me. :(

I've got a wedding the weekend before. A trip to Chicago at the tail end of the month. I don't really see this happening this year.

I'm not going to be a volunteer this year, thank God.

At least so I don't have to sit shiftily through those "Thank the Volunteer" adverts before every movie.

Happy birthday Eric. When will you be in Chicago?

accredited!

Thanks, J. As of right now, I'm shooting for late September or maybe very early October.

I wd like to go to Chi when the weather moderates, as the end of this month is looking more unlikely.

I think Alfred is paying us a visit in late July as well. Couldn't all of the gay film snobs on ILX have just come at the same time? You could've had a summit of some sort.

The universe would implode.

And when I say "come at the same time," I mean...

Oh boy. Helen Hunt has directed a feature.

Well I'd go to Chicago for GAYLX Summit. Maybe.

as long as jaymc didn't know about it

This year's GAYLX/Gay Film Snob Summit dinner:

http://homepages.ius.edu/ADAMSE/images/headingpicture.jpg

Ticket Passes and Packages are available for purchase by VISA cardholders beginning Monday, July 9 at 10:00am. Purchase online, by phone at 416-968-FILM or 1-877-968-FILM or in-person at the TIFFG Box Office at Manulife Centre, 55 Bloor Street West.

Well, it appears I'm definitely not going either, but...

Toronto International Film Festival Ticket Passes and Packages are on sale now for purchase by VISA, debit, or cash.

More movies unveiled...

A slew of international titles have just been announced, among them a gala presentation of Alexi Tan’s Blood Brothers, special presentations of Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, Sergei Bodrov’s Mongol, Johnnie To’s Mad Detective plus confirmation on new titles by Francois Ozon, Lone Scherfig, Ken Loach, Takeshi Kitano, Shinji Aoyama, the Cannes-commissioned Chacun Son Cinema shorts and a host of others ...

http://twitchfilm.net/site/view/major-titles-announced-at-tiff/

Cue the Film Awards Season and Strike a Somber Note
By MICHAEL CIEPLY

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 22 — Given the signals preceding next month’s bellwether Toronto International Film Festival, party planners might want pick to up some black crepe to go with those red carpets in the movie awards season to come.

A list of 20 gala presentations — announced Wednesday at a Toronto news conference introducing this year’s lineup of 349 films — showed a skew toward markedly somber topics among Hollywood’s offerings at the festival, which begins on Sept. 6.

During the last decade, the festival, now in its 32nd year, has emerged as the unofficial beginning of a six-month movie-awards cycle that culminates with the Oscar ceremony in late February. While some high-profile offerings are tucked elsewhere in the program, the gala presentations tend to attract the movies’ stars and a frenzy of media coverage. This time around, the opening notes are a bit intense.

On the festival’s first weekend, New Line Cinema’s “Rendition” highlights the United States government’s practice of seizing terrorism suspects for interrogation in other countries. The film, directed by Gavin Hood (“Tsotsi”), is the fictional story of an American woman, played by Reese Witherspoon, whose Egyptian-born husband is snatched in a clandestine antiterror operation.

The next night, Focus Features celebrates “Eastern Promises,” the director David Cronenberg’s drama about sex trafficking among Russian gangsters in the underworld of London. The following week brings “Cleaner” from MGM, with Samuel L. Jackson as a man who cleans crime scenes for a living, and “The Walker” from ThinkFilm, with Woody Harrelson in a tale of subterranean homosexuality in Washington, written and directed by Paul Schrader.

In all, at least a dozen of the 20 galas tackle matters as weighty as childhood in Poland during the Holocaust (“Fugitive Pieces”), the death of a child and vigilante justice (“Reservation Road”), and the dirty work of a law firm (“Michael Clayton”). Those make the occasional period drama, like Universal’s “Elizabeth: The Golden Age,” or the animated “Terra” (seeking a distributor at the festival), about the military takeover of a gorgeous planet, feel light by comparison.

“The world has changed, and the kind of films coming out have changed to a certain degree,” said Barry Avrich, a member of the festival’s governing board, speaking of the lineup in a telephone interview. “I think the festival is recognizing its role as a communicator.”

Historically these Toronto galas have promoted the kind of films that are buoyant enough to please the crowd but smart enough to survive the vetting of a long awards season. Thus “Walk the Line,” which won Ms. Witherspoon an Oscar for her musical turn as June Carter Cash, was a gala presentation in 2005. “Ray,” which appeared the year before, did the same for Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles. And “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit,” which won the Academy Award for best animated feature for 2005, met the press and public at a Toronto gala.

Some lighter fare remains on this year’s gala schedule. Sony Pictures Classics, for instance, will show “The Jane Austen Book Club,” a comedy about an “all Jane Austen, all the time” book club, from the writer and director Robin Swicord.

The galas’ turn toward the dark amplifies themes seen in last year’s lineup, when the festival set a decidedly political tone that carried through much of the fall. The Dixie Chicks documentary “Shut Up & Sing” and the liberal paean “Bobby,” about the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, had gala screenings, for instance. But the gloomier and more pointed fare was featured deeper in the festival program, including “Death of a President,” the pseudo-documentary about the imagined assassination of President Bush that stirred sharp controversy.

Even the Midnight Madness program turned political, as Sacha Baron Cohen romped through Toronto with his satirical “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.”

Once again the festival promises to be peppered with politics, particularly on a documentary program that includes “Body of War,” about a wounded Iraq veteran’s turn to activism; “Darfur Now,” about genocide in the Sudan; and “Dinner With the President: A Nation’s Journey,” about Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan.

But this year’s underlying vibe might prove to be less bristly than bleak. Among the more prominent films being shown without galas are Paul Haggis’s “In the Valley of Elah,” a drama about American veterans damaged in the Iraq war; Sean Penn’s “Into the Wild,” about death in the wilderness; and “No Country for Old Men,” about violence on the Rio Grande, from the writers and directors Joel and Ethan Coen.

What passes for fun on the midnight program is “Stuck,” in which Mena Suvari keeps an accident victim (Stephen Rea) embedded in the windshield of her car.

All of which may pose a challenge for those whose job it is to convert the fuss of a Toronto gala into ticket sales a few weeks later.

“Obviously we want to gain publicity for the film,” said Steve Golin, a producer of “Rendition.” He noted that the star Peter Sarsgaard, along with Ms. Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal — reported in the celebrity press to have an on-and-off relationship — would be on hand to make sure that his gala does exactly that, issues notwithstanding.

“When Reese and Jake are there,” he said, “the questions end up being more about celebrity.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

oh, the full list is up:

http://tiff07.ca/filmsandschedules/filmsearch.aspx

reports, s1ocki?

thought fugitive pieces was v good. first half was weaker, when they were dealing with a film that fell closer somehow to war-movie cliche (without actually being a war movie), but i really loved the way they developed the loneliness and love-story of Jacob and Michaela in the film's second half. (interestingly, that's where they really diverged from the novel - and it's as if the filmmakers had more room to breathe.) great performances by Stephen Dillane, Robbie Kay and Ayelet Zurer; wasn't much impressed with Rosamund Pike or Ed Stoppard. and good music!

Award-obsessed blogger Jeffrey Wells walked outta that one, I think.

Am interested in evaluations of Maddin's My Winnipeg.

oh and i totally have a vested interest in FP so buyer beware etc.

anyone seeing The Assassination of Jesse James?

well, Alan Ball struck a nerve:

http://www.thereeler.com/the_blog/dear_alan_ball_fuck_you_love_the_reeler.php

Am interested in evaluations of Maddin's My Winnipeg.

-- Dr Morbius, Friday, September 7, 2007 1:47 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Link

i loved it!!

dudes i have seen a lot of movies and interviewed a lot of people. i am mad burnt out. and julian schnabel just stood me up.

ok so far 23 movies.

i figured it out.

well, what's yr top 5, mark?

23!! jealous

(i mean, not so much of yr stress/eyestrain, but still)

hmmm
ok here's what i've seen in semi-chrono order

EL ORFANATO
LUST, CAUTION
CONTROL
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MONKEYS
PERSEPOLIS
MARGOT AT THE WEDDING
MY WINNIPEG
JUNO
L'AVOCAT DU TERREUR
LA GRANDE ILLUSION (hosted by Peter Bogdanovilicious)
YOU, THE LIVING
ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD
RUN, FATBOY, RUN
THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY
PING PONG PLAYA
AND ALONG COME TOURISTS
DEATH DEFYING ACTS
GEORGE A. ROMERO'S DIARY OF THE DEAD
I'M NOT THERE
SON OF RAMBOW
BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD

wow, sure saw a lot of american movies this year.

ok what did i miss there?

o ya

THE COUNTERFEITERS
MY KID COULD DO THAT

you know, i really liked most of what i saw this year!

also stress, eyestrain, sore butt, not so bad. can't complain about doing this for a living. i'm just a little tired!

how was DIARY?

pathetic

hey, I saw 35 at TIFF in '04 and I wasn't even reviewing.

it's juggling the screenings with running around hotels interviewing ppl that's the taxing part--also fitting in the writing and stuff. i've done interviews with about... 20 ppl already?

plus the occasional party of course.

No Eastern Promises? (I'm asking on my wife's behalf.)

the lead quote blurbs on the EP ad are Travers, Roeper and Wilonsky. Adjust expectations accordingly.

Ebert called it "extraordinary" in one of his festival recaps but chose not to say anything more until it opens wide.

unanimity among the critics who like everything, then.

eastern promises opens here on friday so i wasn't in a rush to see it at the fest (i had one of my writers interview cronenberg tho).

i was at a dinner for it on sunday though, at a table next to DC & vigo. good dinner.

A World Where an Antonioni Might Not Get a Distribution Deal
By MANOHLA DARGIS

TORONTO

It was the fifth day of the Toronto International Film Festival, just before a 3 p.m. screening of a new Johnnie To movie, when the stranger stopped dead in front of me. Having returned to the darkened theater, where the lights were too low to read by and almost to see, he had entered the wrong row. “I can’t take it anymore,” he declared morosely, shaking his head. “This festival is killing my love of cinema.”

I felt for my befuddled stranger, lost in the dark and clutching a cup of megaplex coffee. It’s hard to know what and how to love when there are so many suitors. Now in its 32nd year, the Toronto festival has grown into an immense industrial happening, with 349 films from 55 countries. You may have already heard about some of these titles — “Atonement,” “Rendition,” “Elizabeth: The Golden Age,” “Reservation Road” — the ones with the supernova stars and name directors who pop up in the next day’s news and then, in the months leading up to the Academy Awards, every media outlet imaginable. For many of these movies, Toronto is just the beginning of the end, the launch site for the seasonal red carpet bombing.

The movie that the lost man and I had come to see, “Mad Detective,” directed by Wai Ka- fai and the astonishingly prolific Mr. To, may not have restored anyone’s love of cinema, but it sent a jolt of energy through the audience, which laughed and twitched throughout this daft genre exercise. Even the credit sequence has its pleasures: to conjure up the mind-set of a murderer, the madman of the title repeatedly stabs a pig’s carcass, and then has himself zipped into a cloth suitcase and tossed down one flight of stairs after another. The ice cream man done it, he announces on tumbling free. Bullets, elegant mayhem and a homage to Orson Welles’s “Lady From Shanghai” follow amid circling cameras; bodies in fast, furious motion; and shattered film space.

“Mad Detective” isn’t Mr. To’s finest hour and a half; it just reaffirms his status as an action master. It’s also precisely the kind of movie that’s guaranteed to play at Toronto, which has long been a showcase for global genre cinema alongside rarefied art-house fare and prestige Hollywood product. Nothing if not democratic, the festival has now become big enough to be all things to all movie people. Here, jostling side by side with industry executives and nonprofessional enthusiasts, aesthetes and fan boys, journeymen journalists and bloggers, long- and short-lead critics can each carve out a festival to their own choosing, finding the movies that matter, if only for 89 minutes and their next column.

Among the films that made my festival were some that will open within the month, like Todd Haynes’s imaginative tour de force “I’m Not There,” a multiple-personality portrait of the artist formerly known as Bobby Zimmerman, as well as as a folkie, a sellout, a has-been and a born-again Christian. Other films, like “Happiness,” a touching South Korean melodrama from Hur Jin-ho about two lovers who meet at a hospice, may never make it into American theaters because it may not seem aesthetically daring or novel enough to warrant the risk. Non-martial arts Asian films generally don’t fare well at the American box office, even those that come with glowing reviews and that, like “Happiness,” cause an entire audience to break down audibly weeping.

Because the Toronto is so large and functions both as a preview for the fall studio season and as an international bazaar, with goods from Germany, Kazakhstan, Russia and Mongolia (the multinational provenance for the period epic “Mongol”), it affords an instructive view of the state of the American art and industry. More than any other major festival, Toronto makes clear the divide between those movies that matter aesthetically and intellectually — think the work of Hou Hsiao-hsien, the Dardenne brothers and Gus Van Sant — and those movies that matter largely because of their awards potential and the presumed interest to what remains of the discriminating, adult audience. Think “The Queen,” “Good Night, and Good Luck” and any number of films nominated for best picture in recent years.

These two subsets — the art cinema of Mr. Hou and the quality studio cinema of George Clooney, in Toronto with “Michael Clayton” — are dwarfed by big-studio trash like “Pirates of the Caribbean,” of course. But that’s another story. The story here, one as complex if more urgent, involves radical shifts in distribution and exhibition; the ever-escalating numbers of movies pouring into (and quickly out of) theaters; and the demise of the sort of movie love that once inspired cartoons in The New Yorker. This isn’t a story about the death of cinema or even of movie love, which is alive and excitably well at a blog near you. It’s about how the films that once thrilled a segment of the audience — Bergman, Antonioni — have become marginalia, increasingly obscure objects of cinephilic desire.

The truth is that if Antonioni were directing features today, there’s a good chance that his films would not be picked up for distribution in the United States. He would play the festival circuit. And, if he were lucky, he might sign a deal with IFC Films, which this year snapped up some of the best films at Cannes, some of which were also at Toronto and will also be in the New York Film Festival later this month, including Mr. Hou’s “Flight of the Red Balloon,” Mr. Van Sant’s “Paranoid Park” and Catherine Breillat’s “Vieille Maîtresse.” One of the best films I saw at Toronto — which showed in Berlin and is inexplicably missing from New York — is Jacques Rivette’s eccentric romance “Ne Touchez Pas la Hache” based on Balzac’s “Duchesse de Langeais.”

The marvelous (if distractingly thin) Jeanne Balibar, all sharp angles and shuttling eyeballs, plays a married noblewoman whose flirtation with a Napoleonic-era general, played by an equally idiosyncratic Guillaume Depardieu, leads to tragedy. Love blooms, as do betrayal, confession and sacrifice.

Mr. Rivette’s superb camera moves through the period spaces and around the performers fluidly, surprisingly; at times, the director disappears behind the two lovers; at other moments, he takes care to remind us of the performative aspect of their mutual seduction. The tilt of the duchess’s head suggests a thousand and one nightly intrigues; the ravaged contours of the general’s face invoke other, more distant torments, while Mr. Rivette’s direction affirms that he remains at the height of his artistic powers.

“Ne Touchez Pas la Hache” isn’t a difficult film. It isn’t slow, oblique or exotic, though neither is it fully transparent. The complexities of Mr. Rivette’s direction and of the performances, which embrace both emotional realism and near-theatrical artifice, prod you to think about what you’re feeling, intuiting, while you’re watching the screen.

I expect that the film will offer up more of its secrets the second time I see it, along with beauty, grace and form, as will “Flight of the Red Balloon” and “Paranoid Park.” What remains uncertain, now far more than when Mr. Rivette was first making his name in an earlier era, is whether movie lovers who complain that there’s nothing to see will seek it out. The audience, I fear, does not always listen.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

hmmm maybe i'll see the rivette tomorrow.

also totally didn't even realize johnnie to had a movie in tiff this year. he released 2 movies and showed one more at fantasia in mtl this year alone!

dudes... FLASHPOINT.

lousy title, what is it?

HK donnie yen action movie. totes awesome.

thinking of seeing this today:

http://tiff07.ca/filmsandschedules/filmdetails.aspx?id=707111541011386

how was DIARY?
-- jeff, Wednesday, 12 September 2007 19:52 (2 days ago) Link

pathetic
-- s1ocki, Wednesday, 12 September 2007 19:54 (2 days ago) Link

Damn, but I liked Land of the Dead.

it's basically the same movie as brian depalma's redacted as far as i can tell.

the whole concept is that it's like, found video and youtube stuff. but none of the movie looks or feels ANYTHING like what "real" video is like

for instance when you open your movie with purported un-aired news footage there's just no excuse for not shooting it with a news camera, or at least an approximation of one. don't make it look like moody 35mm. wtf.

So I was right to be nervous about De Palma's Venice award, then?

sorry, i was still talking about romero there--haven't seen redacted yet.

Oh, OK. I can't remember, were you one of Land's supporters or detractors (or ignorers)?

detractor!

i mean, i thought diary had one or brilliant moments but they just served to illuminate how dismal the rest of it was. land was like that too, only with more good stuff.

C'mon, even I like Land.

This authentic-camera stuff sounds mighty familiar (lame complaints vs Spielberg's WOTW).

spielberg's wotw is a different thing though... i love that movie's POV.

Eric, Uhlich at 'House' sez it's "labyrinthine and multifaceted"

the premise of diary is basically that it's one of those "loose change" get-the-truth-out internet amateur docs.

although in the context of what the movie's about it doesn't make that much sense.

OK, now that I know you were not a Land fan, I can be excited again. Dawn had dismal moments. Night had even more dismal moments. Day had tons of dismal moments. I think they're all brilliant.

I could definitely see Romero running with the "Loose Change" premise.

Morbs, I just found out The Man From London will have a screening at the Walker in late October ... when I planned my trip to Chicago! Ah well.

the dismal : brilliant ratio in dawn of the dead is inversely proportional to same in diary of the dead.

Forget Romero, forget De Palma. It sounds like the (totally expected) big fat misfire in play here is Argento's ill-advised trilogy-completing Mother of Tears.

M'DA on the Romero (via private MB):

[Glenn Kenny's] review is about 16 kinds of dumb. As someone
already noted, Kenny somehow got the impression that
the movie admires its gaggle of dumbass college kids, which
is a bit odd since he (Kenny) then goes on to call it "one
of the most revealing and fascinating critiques of
image-making since Michael Powell's PEEPING TOM." Uh,
Glenn, those are the same kids you think Romero thinks are
our future (in a positive sense) doing the very
image-making you say the film is critiquing. Except this
"critique" consists entirely of (a) one character refusing
to ever put down the video camera and (b) various other
characters noting aloud that he's obsessed with filming
everything, in case we hadn't noticed. An arresting idea
-- or so it seemed eight years ago in BLAIR WITCH, which is
to DIARY OF THE DEAD as DAVID HOLZMAN'S DIARY is to CQ.

I want my Wack Experiment back. Show this movie to people
with some unknown name on it rather than Romero's and I feel
confident they'd recognize it for the mediocrity it is.

Forget Romero, forget De Palma. It sounds like the (totally expected) big fat misfire in play here is Argento's ill-advised trilogy-completing Mother of Tears.

-- Eric H., Sunday, September 16, 2007 3:06 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

ehhh seems like elizabeth and/or across the universe are the big WTFs this year.

Across the Universe was planned to be WTF though, it seems like.

come on and dario argento movies aren't?

ppl's reactions to elizabeth were pretty hilarious tho. i was planning to go see it drunk sunday night but i was too late for teh screening.

"Planned to be WTF," not just WTF. I don't know if I think Argento's movies are planned to be anything in particular at all.

Whereas Across the Universe looks forcibly WTF-ed.

the argento movie features evil monkeys, a women strangled by her own bowels, and udo kier as a priest. that's wtf-planning if i've ever heard it.

Actually, that sounds pretty good.

I may miss the Tarr at NYFF after all (I forgot I was going to the Mekons show).