Film Blog Group Hug: More From TIFF

The Toronto International Film Festival has come to an end, but we'll still be wrapping up coverage with reviews and interviews over the next week or so. In the meantime, I thought I'd peek around and check in on what some of our fellow film journalists and bloggers had to say about the fest.

Over at the Hollywood Reporter, they have a ton of TIFF coverage, including a fest wrap-up by Anne Thompson and Gregg Goldstein. THR is usually pretty smart about the biz side of the film world, and Thompson and Goldstein nicely sum up that side of the fest. Also on her Risky Biz Blog, the erudite Ms. Thompson writes about Mexico's Big Three directors, Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu (Babel), Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth) and Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men), and has an interesting piece up on Todd Field, writer-director of one of my fave films from Telluride and Toronto, Little Children.

The Rotten Tomatoes gang has been covering TIFF in full-force, with red carpet photos, party and scene write-ups and -- oh yeah -- their thoughts on a lot of the films from the fest as well.

Over at The Hot Blog, David Poland waxes eloquent about Toronto and Oscar, getting his commenters all stirred up by saying "if you think Bobby is a powerful, emotional movie, you are missing brain cells." Poland also rants about a publicist standing him up for an early-morning screening of Sarah Polley's Away From Her (I missed that same screening because I woke up that morning with my body finally succumbing to exhaustion from the film festival beating I'd been putting it through, but hope to catch it later). And you know, some of Poland's commenters accused him of whining, but seriously -- if you're covering a film festival for work, it's not all fun and games, and a publicist not showing up with a promised ticket for a screening that he or she pushed me to go to would seriously piss me off too. As Poland notes, factor in wasted cab fare, the other film you had slated for that slot but pushed off to make it to that screening, and the shuffling around of a packed schedule for no reason, and one publicist forgetting to show up with a ticket is a pain in the ass. So rock on, David.

Checking in on Hollywood Elsewhere, Jeffrey Wells finally regrets not seeing Borat and mourns the deaths of Bobby, All the King's Men and The Fountain at TIFF. Wells claims to have actually liked The Fountain, which makes him perhaps one of three people at the festival who enjoyed Darren Aronofsky's disappointing mess of a film. More on The Fountain later.

Our friends over at indieWIRE have a nice summary of the fest's awards, which James, Martha and I were just talking about over breakfast. None of us even saw the Audience Award winner, Bella, directed by Alejandro Monteverde, and it certainly wasn't one of the films any of us had heard any buzz about, but I guess we weren't listening to the right bees. We were speculating on exactly how reliable the balloting and vote calculating is for these audience awards here anyhow. Do they weight by percentages at all? Does a film that gets 85% "4s" at the huge Elgin theater rate higher than a film with, say, less than a hundred votes total at a smaller venue? They don't have separate boxes for each film, you have to write the film title and then everything goes into these huge boxes. At more than one screening, I personally saw people filling out multiple ballots and stuffing them in the boxes. None of which is to say that Bella isn't a good film -- now I actually want to see it. But exactly how accurate the voting process is -- and what that means about the prestige of the award itself -- is another matter.

Also in the same piece, TIFF co-director Noah Cowan goes through the list of films expected to secure U.S. distrib thanks to the fest and bemoans Sony Classics not doing more buying this year.

Daily Green Cine has been doing some dispatches from TIFF. David D'Arcy takes a look at Bobby and Death of a President -- and the real-life double murder-suicide at the Delta Chelsea Hotel down the street from Cinematical's Toronto headquarters.