The Rocchi Report »

I grew up near here, but at the time it wasn't near at all; Toronto was just stations on the TV, voices on the radio, where the Sunday paper came from. It was an hour-and-a-half drive, or a well-planned afternoon on a terrific transit system, and it was a world away. Coming to Toronto for the Film Festival is, for me, always a bit disconcerting -- I remember how awestruck I felt at age 14 seeing the inside of Toronto's retail landmark Eaton Centre for the first time. Bear in mind, the Eaton Centre is a mall with one thing going for it: It is enclosed during winter. But I was easily impressed. In many ways, I still am, and grateful for it.

And Toronto never leaves my mind. How could it? I watch the trailers for movies I wouldn't watch in a thousand years and, yes, there's Milla Jovovitch running down Toronto 's City Hall building, as it explodes about her. Or I perk up during a dull action film for two things: Brian Cox and the moment Chow-Yun Fat strides by a Toronto Sun box. Or the music of Broken Social Scene playing counterpoint to Ryan Gosling's imploding life in Half Nelson. These things crop up everywhere.

Or they do if you look for them, and all Canadians are cultural critics at heart -- early on you're told That culture is not you. It's not you because it's American, French-Canadian, English-Canadian; spinning the TV dial was an act of cultural roulette. And you went to the movies at a big movie palace, The Tivoli, and for a few dizzy Star Wars-Indiana-Jones-Aliens years, you would be part of a line that stretched down the block past the funeral parlor.

You arrived on the 15th. It's the 25th. Ten days and ten nights, a nice round number. Round because it's rolling over you, and you feel that weight. How is the cat doing? What about the mail? How are the plants? You left all these things in the hands of friends, but you still worry. You'd like to go take care of them yourself. Because then you'd be home. You still need to get thank-you gifts for the custodians of your keys, the cat, the plants. You've seen 24 films. You needed to go back through the press screening schedule to arrive at that number. Consult your notes, scrawled in a clumsy hand in the dark of the various theaters. Last night, you ran into a film critic for a weekly magazine you've gotten to know. He was leaving a film you were about to see. How was it, you ask. He offers a sentence and shrug. I've run out of opinions, he says. You know the feeling.

But opinions is what you're here for. You're a machine in this job -- you turn a movie into a thousand words, five hundred words, two hundred words, a paragraph. A sentence. A well-polished phrase for broadcast or another journalist. You want to be clever and insightful, because those things got you here. That and a plane. Now and then, a film doesn't work for you and you get up, get out. You step on feet. Pardonnez moi, Pardonnez moi. Apology is a universal language. You don't write about a film if you walk out of it. You have something like ethics, or maybe it's just standards. You're in it to win it, opening title to final credit. And if you walk out of something, maybe you can get to something else. The endless pursuit of the next experience. I heard this one was good. That one has no buzz. I don't know a thing about that film, but it's in competition. All your research has been used up. Now you follow the timing of the press guide, as if all of cinema was a bus line; you'll take whatever comes along next.

First of all, everything you imagine about a film festival like Cannes is wrong, wrong, wrong. You don't rub elbows with stars; you don't go to fabulous parties. You wake up, you see three or four movies, you write -- a lot -- and try to come to grips with the fact that for every movie you're seeing there are four, five, six more that you're missing. You try to not think about it, because you'd go mad -- but you do think about it, and you do go a little mad.

The thing you also need to know about Cannes is that it's essentially a big, shiny façade -- the reality of it is nothing like you see in the media. Cannes is a festival, but it's also a market -- a place where films are bought, sold and crafted. I remember my first year here, two years ago, seeing posters for 16 Blocks and thinking "Bruce Willis? Mos Def? Why haven't I heard about this film?" Then, sitting down with a coffee and reading the trades, I realized that the reason I hadn't heard of 16 Blocks before that morning was because before that morning it didn't exist -- the deal had been signed that night, foreign financing and markets brought on board and ensuring the film would happen.

I went to a café without wireless to write this column, because I'm finding that the communications options offered by the internet have turned my attention span into a twitching, wretched thing. And I wanted to think. This column is going to be all about what I've learned in two months as Cinematical's Editor-in-Chief, and one of the things I've learned is that my column turned out to be bi-weekly. It's verging on tri-weekly. And I try, weakly, to get it in on a regular basis, but who knows and/or cares if that's going to happen? So I retreat to a lead-lined café in a part of the city I don't get to that often before the press screening of Poseidon, trying to run through what I laughingly call my thought process about this job so far. And here are some things I've learned.

1) "Feed Me, Krelborn! Feed Me Now!"

Anyone who runs a blog of any kind will tell you that frequency of updates translates into traffic, visits and comments. And yet, this has taken a while to sink in with me. But the ravenous hunger of the blog essentially devours all sense -- watching update after update come from our news gatherers and commentators, posted to the site by Kim or Martha or rarely myself. I frankly don't know how a reader keeps up with it. But when you slow it down, you see the effect ... and that's, to quote Michael Franti, "as real as rent." So you step back; you look hard, and you start by kicking you own ass to make more news posts, more reviews, more columns, while recognizing that you are but one part of a much larger, spread-out network of busy, busy people, each of whom you owe about eight e-mails. And meanwhile the hunger of the blog -- what ink-and-print people call 'the news hole" -- demands feeding.

I don't often sit around thinking about the artistic and financial fate of major media conglomerates (no more than two, three times a day, anyhow), but between The Wild's release last Friday and last weekend's scathing TV Funhouse mockery of all things mouse on SNL, I've been thinking about Disney Animation, their merger with Pixar, and where they're going.

First off, I don't know if The Wild is the last film to come out of Disney Animation before Pixar takes over, but regardless, it's a great demonstration of why that deal seems so necessary. The Wild was, perhaps, the most tired animated film I've seen in a long time; boring, bland, re-hashed and recycled, with a tag-team script that had been bounced between writing pairs for so long that you could see the bruises. Wow, break-dancing lions! Ooh, inter-species romance! Carmen Miranda jokes that no one under the age of 60 is going to get! What's worse than the script is the look of the film -- clumsy, inelegant, bumbling; we're getting to the point where computer-animated films essentially look as cheaply-made and dull as cut-scenes from videogames, and not like works of art.

So, something had to happen to change Disney Animation-- I guess the question is if the Pixar deal is going to be enough to do it. I keep thinking of Hong Kong's transfer to China -- when a solid, inertia-bound object takes on a small, new motor, which gets affected more? Making a change at a movie studio normally is like trying to turn an aircraft carrier by dangling your hand in the water behind it as a rudder; I can't even imagine what it's like at Disney, where the normal long-term development pipeline of a studio is lengthened by the work required to craft animation … and stretched even longer by the years of tradition in the company's past.

I look to the coming summer movie season much as ancient cavemen must have looked toward the huge thunderstorms that swept across the blasted plain; with terror, and fear, and a little bit of awe. It was not just the first day of spring that made me think of summer, nor was it the call of the sparrow as she returns from the sunnier climes in the South where she has rested for the past months; it was the frickin' fact that X-Men: The Last Stand is playing at Cannes. There's a New Yorker cartoon by BEK, that master of block-drawn, rushing, stout-legged figures. In it, two people stride out from a movie theater and one asks (and I'm paraphrasing) "When did the movies get stupid year-round?" Well, you can update it: "When did the movies get stupid world-wide?"

There are summer movies I'm looking forward to unabashedly. Part of me wants to see Phillip Seymour Hoffman as nerd Goldfinger, despite all my misgivings about building an action franchise on the gleaming foundation of Tom Cruise's grin.  Part of me wants to see a Pirates of the Caribbean sequel, even if subsequent viewings of the first have made it abundantly clear that the movie's third act is as slack and unspooled as a mains'l in the doldrums. (That's a shout-out to all y'all Patrick O'Brien fans! Yeah!)

But I'm not looking forward to X:3, despite liking the first two. Or the other big summer movie debuting at Cannes, The Da Vinci Code. When told that Ron Howard was going to be directing the film of The Da Vinci Code, I was actually glad -- it combined two things I had no interest in (Catholic-cryptography boring best-sellers and Ron Howard's next project) into one package.