Is the Toronto International Film Festival upon us already? I still have poutine stains on my shirt from last time! Yes, the 2009 fest is less than three months away, and TIFF has just announced the first batch of films that will play. All 24 will be making their North American premieres, so unless you've been to the festivals at Cannes, Venice, or Berlin, it's unlikely that you've seen any of them. Exciting!

In the "Masters" category are films by three directors who qualify for that distinction. Portugal's Manoel de Oliveira -- who is 100 years old (!) and has made 50 films, most of them in the last two decades -- has a new one called Eccentricities of a Blond-Haired Girl, about a man enchanted by a woman he sees from his window. Alain Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad), the 87-year-old Frenchman who got a lifetime achievement at Cannes this year, has Les Herbes Folles (The Wild Grass), a romantic adventure that begins with a lost wallet. And Hirokazu Koreeda, a Japanese spring chicken at 48, will present Air Doll, about a sex doll that becomes a real person -- Lars and the Real Girl meets Pinocchio? Koreeda made the haunting Nobody Knows a few years ago, so I'm onboard for whatever this Air Doll thing is.

The other 21 films announced today are from filmmakers ranging from the old and venerable to the new and enthusiastic. They span, the globe, too, representing countries you expect to see at international film festivals (France, Germany, Italy, etc.) as well as some with much smaller film industries, including Kazakhstan, Colombia, Malaysia, and Uruguay. The complete list of films and their descriptions is in TIFF's press release, as is information about buying passes. The festival runs Sept. 10-19. We'll see you there, right?

Writer-director Rian Johnson burst onto the scene when his high school-set noir riff, Brick, took home the Originality of Vision prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. Now, after bouncing around Summit's release slate like the proverbial beach ball, his follow-up -- the romantic, romanticized con man caper, The Brothers Bloom -- is finally receiving a NY/LA bow this Friday before rolling out to more markets in the weeks to come.

Johnson obliged us to do a follow-up interview this week to complement our original chat from last November, and between the two, the filmmaker discusses everything from making the festival rounds and absorbing critical response to the glory of talking monkeys and just where he likes to stick his tea kettle...



Download Part 1 (31 mins.) by clicking here



Download Part 2 (12 mins.) by clicking here

-Score samples by Nathan Johnson, the film's composer and the director's cousin.-

When the guy who programs the Midnight Madness slate at the Toronto Film Festival gets excited about a new event, you can bet that it's going to be something pretty geek-tastic. So last night I got an email from Mr. Colin Geddes and here's what he was so psyched about: They gave writer / director / movie nerd Edgar Wright a chance to program a mini-festival of his very own, and the man delivered a week's full of evening screenings that any flick geek would have a ball with.

Of course the event (called The Wright Stuff) will open with the unbeatable double feature of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, but as the week goes on, attendees will be able to savor one-two punches like The Warriors and The Wanderers; Shaolin Soccer and Riki-Oh; and Drunken Master 2 with an as-yet-unannounced but undoubtedly ass-kickin' martial arts movie. (Plus, dang, they're showing The Brood on the big screen!) Oh, and one evening will offer a very nifty Spaced marathon. And if you're wondering what makes a guy like Edgar Wright qualified to program his own mini-festival, I suggest you sit in on those Spaced, Shaun, and Fuzz screenings -- because this is a filmmaker who bleeds flick love like nobody's business.

A full press release for the event is included after the jump, and our readers might like to know that our own Monika B. lives RIGHT NEAR that movie theater, so perhaps you should be nice and ask for a couch to crash upon. And hey, here's a report on a similar event that Mr. Wright hosted in L.A. a few years back. Heh, "Mr. Wright." Hear that, ladies?

(We're reposting our review of The Wrestler from the Toronto International Film Festival to coincide with the film's theatrical release.)

By James Rocchi

After winning top honors at the Venice Film Festival, Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler rapidly became the must-see of the Toronto International Film Festival, with huge lines at the press and industry screening this afternoon seemingly unaffected by the news that Fox Searchlight had purchased the film. After seeing The Wrestler for myself, I feel the need to extend a note of caution about the film, which sailed into Toronto buoyed by advance raves for Mickey Rourke's performance as Randy "The Ram" Robinson, a low-level professional wrestler -- and we soon see how really, both those words could be in quotation marks -- whose '80s glory days are long over, scraping by at low-level, low-paying matches until a heart attack forces him to leave the ring and look at his life in the shadow of death. Many have already written about the parallels between Mickey Rourke and the swaggering, scarred wrestler he plays -- early success, fame and notoriety, a series of mis-steps and mistakes taking it all away bit by bit as the years advanced -- and the charge Rourke's own rise and fall offers a filmmaker like Aaronofsky looking to explore ruin and redemption.

But don't believe the hype -- or, more importantly, look past it; if a complicated, messy personal life were all it took to deliver a great performance, Paris Hilton and O.J. Simpson would have more Oscars than Katharine Hepburn. Rourke's work as Randy is physical, invested, powerful and sprawling -- but it's also quiet, sad and hauntingly wounded, too. And The Wrestler offers viewers far more than just Rourke's performance -- which, it must be said, is excellent -- if they're willing to not flinch from what it has to say: The Wrestler is a fascinating, rich, unblinking look at the dark, hunched mean streak that lies curled and poisonous inside of so much American popular entertainment and of so much American life. It's early to say this, but The Wrestler is one of the most grimly exciting, magnetically repellent movies we've had in a long time; it's flat-out one of the best American movies of 2008.

This had been hush-hush for a mild while now, but it looks like Rian Johnson's The Brothers Bloom has been bumped back yet again to next May. Back in September, I had mentioned that the crime caper had moved from October to a NY/LA qualifying run next week and a wide release in January. The difference between that post and this one is that I was fortunate to see the film at Fantastic Fest a couple of months back, and it was good enough to make me equally anxious to just see the film again.

Writer-director Johnson confirmed the rumor on his message board, then joking that his own December birthday had been pushed back by Summit to May, when there are less of them to contend with. All kidding aside, Bloom is now scheduled to bow in limited release on May 15th -- opposite DaVinci Code sequel Angels & Demons and Borat follow-up Bruno -- and then wide on May 29th, up against Sam Raimi's return to horror Drag Me To Hell and Pixar's anticipated-by-default Up.

It's tough competition, to be sure, but believe me (and Eugene, and James) when we say that The Brothers Bloom will be well worth the wait.

There was no hotter ticket at the Toronto International Film Festival in September than The Wrestler, Darren Aronofsky's new drama about a washed-up professional body-slammer played by Mickey Rourke. I vividly recall the press screening, where every seat in the fest's largest theater was occupied by eager journalists, many of whom had sworn they'd miss whatever other films they had to as long as they could see this one.

It paid off, too -- the acclaim for the film was nearly universal. (Read Cinematical's James Rocchi's rave review here.) Now, in advance of the film's limited release on Dec. 31 (just in time to qualify for Rourke's inevitable Oscar nomination), Fox Searchlight has released the first trailer. Variety has it, and we've got it here, at the end of this post.

The trailer is good in the sense that it accurately conveys the tone of the film: moody, reflective, and only partially set in the wrestling ring. Bruce Springsteen's theme song is a nice touch. We get a few glimpses of Marisa Tomei, who plays Rourke's stripper friend (you'll catch more than a glimpse of her in the movie itself, if you know what I mean), and Evan Rachel Wood as Rourke's estranged daughter. Their performances are terrific, too, as is Aronofsky's direction -- man, I really hope this gets the Oscar attention that everyone thinks it will. It deserves it.

What do you think of the trailer? Does it make you more or less interested in the film? Let us know in the comments.

I'm not exactly sure where IMP Awards dug up this alternate poster for Kevin Smith's Zack and Miri Make a Porno, but for my money, it's an equally creative and eye-catching way to sell the stars compared to the current stick-figures-and-'Porno'-free campaign ... a campaign which, it should be said, hasn't stopped the flick from grossing $20 million by this past weekend, which is about on par with most of Smith's recent work and (again) not bad for an advertising angle that didn't push either his name or the faces of leads Elizabeth Banks and Seth Rogen.

Besides, I really don't think the bright colors and cute animals would have led anyone to believe that the (admittedly sweet) Zack and Miri falls in line with, say, Happy-Go-Lucky, but we'll honestly never know if swapping colors for controversy would've had the same effect. (Hey, I still think that the Canadian poster would've done just fine.)

Check out this new (cutesy?) poster after the jump ...

(from left to right) Sean Gullette in Pi, Ellen Burstyn in Requiem for a Dream, Hugh Jackman in The Fountain, and Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler

I had been writing a rambling introduction to this piece, but to make a long anecdote short, I decided to re-watch the works of writer-director Darren Aronofsky prior to seeing his new film, The Wrestler. Out of more happenstance than planning, I began his first film exactly a day to the minute before this one would end, and now I offer up my thoughts on his career to date. (Who knows what more could come following this: 24 Hours of Fincher? 36 Hours of Boyle? My Dinner with Andre Benjamin's Idlewild?)

Despite having previously established my feelings about this weekend's Quarantine, I must confess a new willingness to give it a fair shot later tonight. Regardless, this week's Cinematical Seven is all about first-person horror movies, with a couple of oh-so-subjective stipulations:

• We're leaving The Blair Witch Project (1999) out of this. It might not have been the first of these movies, but it was undeniably the most successful and influential. There are only seven slots here, and I feel like everyone has already made clear whether they find this scary or just stupid (I fall in the former grouping, though I say this having not seen the flick since my teens). If you still feel the need to take BWP to task, comment away.
• Also omitted will be The Last Broadcast (1998), which drew mild controversy at the time of its release for its similarity to Blair Witch. I'm only not writing about it because the copy of it sitting just over on my shelf here has remained unwatched. My bad.
• The previous film by the guys behind Quarantine is The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007), which -- being in the hands of the Weinsteins -- has not yet seen the light of day beyond a couple of festivals. Having not attended any of said festivals myself, I'll just sit here and guess that it'll get dumped to DVD (probably under the Dimension Extreme label), and not any earlier than next year at that.

Now, on with the list...

You'd think that being married to Madonna, Guy Ritchie would have picked up on the value of occasionally reinventing oneself. But no, he keeps making the same movie, the same ultra-cool exercises in British gangster violence and stylish criminal shenanigans, and RockNRolla is the latest entry. Then again, the one time he did try something different, the result was Swept Away, so maybe he's wise to stay in his comfort zone.

At any rate, RockNRolla inspires strong feelings of "meh" in me. It's not nearly as clever, funny, or stylish as Snatch or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, though the accents are a lot less indecipherable this time around, so that's nice. It's also not as good as Gangster No. 1 or Sexy Beast or many of the other gritty British gangster capers that have come around in the last several years. It feels like a rerun -- which isn't necessarily a bad thing, after all. People watch reruns all the time.

Our narrator is Archie (Mark Strong), who works as the calm, suave right-hand man to Lenny (Tom Wilkinson), the most powerful money-lender and underworld boss in London. Half the city's councilors, judges, and cops are in Lenny's pocket, and he has leveraged this influence into a massive fortune in real estate.

Lenny is not a figure to be messed with, but the Russians don't know that. A new mover and shaker named Uri (Karel Roden) has come to town to strike a deal with Lenny -- it involves paying Lenny to bribe city officials to get a construction project underway -- and he's a formidable figure himself. Lenny is old school; Uri is dangerously modern.