Toronto International Film Festival Tagged Articles at Cinematical

How many movies can you watch in a row before they all begin to blur into one? As I'm sure many happy yet weary attendees of the Toronto International Film Festival can testify, it's very tempting to cram as many movies as possible into every viewing period at a festival. Beyond the confines of festivals, movie fans in general want to see as many good movies as possible, and time is short.

I sat through Rainer Werner Fassbinder's epic 15 and 1/2 hour Berlin Alexanderplatz during a very long night and a morning at a theater and felt drained, both physically and emotionally; I've watched seven movies in a row at Fantastic Fest and loved every moment; I've sat through eight movies back to back to back on videocassette in one day while on vacation. Lately, though, I find I'm lucky if I can watch even two movies in a row without interruption. Even if I had more unbroken availability, after two or maybe three movies I feel like I need a break, especially if they were good flicks. I want time to absorb what I've seen and think about them. That's especially true if I plan to write about them; the experiences begin to blend together, fusing themselves into an unholy viewing memory that is sometimes difficult to separate into individual segments.

How about you? I'm not talking about movies playing in the background while you do other things, but films that you're actively engaged in watching, either at home or at a theater. What's the most that you've seen in a row? Are some movies better as part of a double -- or triple or quadruple or whatever -- feature? When do they start to blur?

It all started in Venice in 1932 – the world's first film festival. Then other festivals began popping up for a variety of reasons, some political, given the growingly fascist government in Italy: Cannes in 1946, Edinburgh in 1947, Berlin in 1951, and so on, until the present day, when a journalist can spend a decent portion of the year (and salary) covering Sundance, the Toronto Film Festival, Telluride, South by Southwest, Fantastic Fest, New York Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, CineVegas, and, more recently, San Diego Comic-Con, just to name as a few, as well as the aforementioned international festivals if they're really lucky.

As time has passed, the fests have become more than venues for movie buyers and sellers to haggle over movies or arbiters of taste in the finest of arthouse flicks. Along the way, critics and journalists have gotten into the festival circuit, which is a win-win for the movies and the writers; small films get the buzz that's sometimes a good push for them to get picked up by distributors, and the writers get access to films before they get hot, making them tastemakers and generally ahead of the curve when it comes to Oscar season, film trends, and insider-y scoops that can only occur when you find yourself sharing an elevator with a Weinstein. Festivals can be great litmus tests for movies that take forever to get picked up – you can pretty much guarantee they're gonna be a stinker by the time they arrive in theaters for a weekend and disappear after that.

You never know when you're going to get blindsided by a very good film, especially if you're fortunate enough to attend film festivals like Toronto, Sundance, and/or South By Southwest. Sometimes that "ultra-hot ticket" delivers a big fat dud of a film, and other times you just find yourself sitting in front of a film you know nothing about -- and it's just freakin' great. Such is most certainly the case with Aaron Schneider's Get Low, an excellent little dramatic piece that's awash in humanity, warmth, insight, and wit.

But I lied a little in that last paragraph: Prior to seeing Get Low, I was aware of one thing -- and that was the cast. Like most movie fans of a certain age and attitude, I'll see anything that Bill Murray shows up in. Anything. I also knew that Sissy Spacek and Lucas Black, two very fine actors, were also involved, and that just raised my interest a little more. But the reason I skipped over the Ellen Page roller-derby film and the new Ricky Gervais satire can be summed up in one name: Mr. Robert Duvall.

Former Cinematical chief, close personal friend, and actual superhero James Rocchi said this when I asked him what I should see at Toronto this year: "Dude," (pause for dramatic effect; his, not mine) "You must see a Greek film called Dogtooth. It won the Un Certain Regard Award at Cannes, it's unlike anything you've seen before, and it's amazingly twisted and weird." That was all I needed to hear. Well, that, and that the running time was 96 minutes. That's important when you're at a busy festival like Toronto.

So enthused was Sir Rocchi that he joined Kim Voynar and me for his second screening of Dogtooth -- on the very first day of the festival! (That's not something most film critics could (or would) do.) But I'm pleased to note that Mr. Rocchi's enthusiasm was well-founded and accurate: quite simply, I've never seen a film (anything at all) like Yorgros Lanthimos' Dogtooth.

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?

There are indie filmmakers who try to work in the realm of small character dramas and succeed only in making myopic films that feel inert and meaningless; there are those who attempt to stand out from the pack by writing scripts replete with quirky story lines and witty dialogue, only to end up with a mundane mess; and then there are a few who manage to achieve, through a combination of richly drawn, yet simple stories and excellent cinematography, a level of filmmaking that inspires without overwhelming, impresses without overreaching. Ramin Bahrani falls firmly in the latter camp, and with his latest film, Goodbye Solo, the director builds on the excellence of his previous work with a finely drawn tale of a cabdriver and the fare who changes his life.

Bahrani starts with an intriguing premise: Solo, a cab driver (Souléymane Sy Savané) picks up a routine fare, only to find his life turned upside down when the man he picks up asks him to take him to the remote mountaintop location of Blowing Rock in two weeks, where he plans to jump to his death. Solo's troubled by both the plans of his fare, William (Red West) to end his life, and the implications to himself of being a party to the man's suicide; he decides to befriend the older man in an attempt to persuade him to change his plans. This is the simple set-up for the film, and it's all Bahrani needs to make a thoughtful, compelling film that explores the relationship between these two vastly different men and the way they're changed by the friendship they form.

The Secret Life of Bees, adapted and directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood from the best-selling book by Sue Monk Kidd, weaves racism and the civil rights movement around the story of Lily (Dakota Fanning), a young white girl taken in by three African-American sisters when she runs away from her controlling, emotionless father. It's a role that's in some ways reminiscent of the character Fanning played in Hounddog, a film that was critically panned and rather controversial for having a scene in which Fanning's character was raped.

This time around, there's no such awkward controversy; The Secret Life of Bees is a sweet, mostly charming coming-of-age tale that, while it doesn't particularly break any new ground with regards to the filmmaking, does an able enough job of adapting a bestselling book of the "women's bookclub" variety for the screen. Here's the basic story: Lily is haunted by the death of her mother; now, on the eve of her fourteenth birthday, she's had enough of her father, T-Ray (Paul Bettany), and starts to fight back against him.

When their maid, Rosaleen (Jennifer Hudson), is accosted by a pack of angry white men on the way to registering to vote -- and ends up arrested herself for her trouble -- Lily decides that it's time for both her and Rosaleen to escape. She has a vague idea about where to go -- Tiburon, South Carolina -- based only on the name of a town written on one of the few possessions she has of her mother's, and a label from a honey jar.

There's a familiarity to Pride and Glory that, depending on your perspective, could be either horrendously tiresome or part of the charm. By all accounts it's a middling film, an overwrought and occasionally laughable corrupt cop drama that you've seen countless times. But for me, going back to this world of divided loyalties, broken oaths, outraged good guys, and "we protect our own" machismo was like settling into a comfortable recliner. An extremely comfortable one, actually: Pride and Glory is moody, attractive and well-acted. I think director Gavin O'Connor intended it to be grim and upsetting, but at best it's pulpy entertainment, a highly watchable series of well-worn, well-executed clichés.

The closest recent analogue to Pride and Glory is probably James Gray's far superior We Own the Night. There, too, father and son cops wrestle with their commitments to each other, their families, themselves, and the often abstract notion of being policemen. In O'Connor's film, these themes play out along thoroughly conventional lines. Edward Norton and Noah Emmerich play brothers; Emmerich's Francis is a respected commanding officer, while Norton's Ray, despite his talent and promise, has relegated himself to Missing Persons after an initially-unspecified Traumatic Incident some years back. Their Dad, Francis Sr. (Jon Voight), is an experienced careerist who has worked his way up through the ranks. When a failed drug bust results in the shooting death of four officers, Ray brings himself out of self-imposed semi-retirement to investigate – but his sleuthing leads him to a corrupt cabal that may include his brother and longtime family friend Jimmy Egan (Colin Farrell).

Award-winning screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga uses a convoluted narrative structure to tell a tale of love, betrayal and regret in The Burning Plain, his directorial debut. Arriaga opens the film with a shot of an old trailer in the middle of the desert burning to the ground, and he then proceeds to bounce around among several seemingly disparate characters, Babel-style, before finally bringing it all together in the film's final act.

The film stars Charlize Theron as Sylvia, a composed-but-icy manager of a fancy Portland, Oregon-area restaurant who spends her spare time having empty, emotionless sex with a wide array of men. Arriaga takes us back and forth from gray, rainy Portland, where Sylvia lives, to the New Mexico desert; early on we learn that the burning trailer, when it exploded into flames, was occupied by Gina (Kim Basinger), a white married housewife with four kids, and Nick (Joaquim De Almeida), a Mexican-American man, also married with kids.

Gina's daughter Mariana (Jennifer Lawrence) and Nick's son Santiago (J.D. Pardo) are drawn together as they struggle to deal with their parents' infidelity and death, much to the consternation of their respective families. Also tossed into the mix are a crop-duster pilot, his best friend, and his young daughter, whose lives are thrown into disarray when the pilot's plane crashes.

Here's a movie that deals with death and grief without hysterics, dramatic speeches or showy, Oscar-grubbing performances. Michael Winterbottom's Genova has a logline that sounds maudlin and turgid – after she inadvertently causes a car accident that kills her mother, a young girl starts seeing mom's ghost – but the movie turns out to be understated, down-to-earth, quietly sad. This is Winterbottom's most intimate film since 9 Songs, and one of the highlights of his career.

Genova has the wherewithal to show its characters dealing with loss in ways that aren't inherently cinematic. It would have been very striking, for example, to have the newly motherless children – the teenage Kelly (Willa Holland) and the preteen Mary (Perla Haney-Jardine) – scream, rage at the world, and slam doors in the face of their well-intentioned father Joe (Colin Firth) before concluding that Family Sticks Together. And in a film like this, I would have guessed that Joe would spiral into an alcoholic depression, or perhaps start a tumultuous, guilt-ridden affair with the old college friend (Catherine Keener) who comes back into his life.

Those are the arcs I would have expected to see. But though a couple doors do get slammed, Winterbottom's characters aren't here to amuse us or push our buttons. Their reactions to the tragedy and their ways of adjusting to a new life in the titular city all paint a much more nuanced picture – and the effect is more heartbreaking than any number of manipulative stunts could have achieved.