" ... and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragments huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place."

-- Horace Smith, Ozymandias

WALL-E, from Pixar studios, shows us a ruined city, centuries from now, where a single (and singular) robot toils to cube trash and, it seems, will never lack for work. WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter (Earth-Class)), a two-treaded solitary worker robot, spends his days cubing trash and his nights shut in safe from the cataclysmic garbage-gales that sweep the planet, inside a repair truck he's filled with things that have fascinated him; garden gnomes, butane lighters, a copy of Hello, Dolly! And in WALL-E's nearly-silent opening minutes, we get a sense of the world he lives in. Everything is ruined; there are no signs of life but for cockroaches; the only voices you hear come when the motion-activated Buy 'n' Large holo-billboards go off. WALL-E strips his broken-down brethren for parts and recharges by the sun's rays and stacks trash-cubes to imitate the skyscrapers decaying all around him, garbage as a pale reflection of glory.

Strange Wilderness is a new comedy starring Steve Zahn as the host of a wilderness television show with plummeting ratings. To increase viewership, he assembles a motley crew and sets out on an expedition to find Bigfoot. The cast includes Jonah Hill, Justin Long, Ashley Scott, Peter Dante, Jeff Garlin, and -- believe it or not -- Ernest Borgnine! The red band trailer for Wilderness just hit the internet. (Need a little incentive to check it out? There's nudity. You're welcome.) Cinematical spoke with two of the film's stars -- Kevin Heffernan (of Broken Lizard fame) and Allen Covert (pretty much every Adam Sandler movie, Grandma's Boy) -- about this film and their careers. First up is Kevin Heffernan...

Cinematical: Who do you play in the film?

Kevin Heffernan: I play a character named Whitaker. When they go out on this trip, they need to hire an animal wrangler. I'm a car mechanic and I have no animal wrangling experience. Basically, I'm just looking for a job. So I go and interview with them and I win the job but I have no knowledge of animals. I don't even like them that much really! It's got this great ensemble cast and some great cameos...

Cinematical: It does have such a great comedy cast, was improvisation encouraged on the set?

KH: Yeah man. The script was so good, I mean it was written by Fred Wolf and Peter Gaulke who have a lot of comedy writing experience, but it was just one of those kind of movies where there's always like six or seven people on the screen. And they left it free for us to do the improv stuff that we all love to do. So there were a lot of people going off, and they had to kind of pull you back to the script a little bit.

Industry attention is still focused on the Toronto festival, but most moviegoers just wanted something good to watch this weekend. Of the four new indie films released in limited engagements, Jeff Garlin's I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With topped the chart, earning $14,000 at its single screen, according to estimates by Box Office Mojo. Garlin is best known for his role as Larry David's long-suffering manager in the HBO improv series Curb Your Enthusiasm (which returned for a new season Sunday night). Karina Longworth interviewed him at Tribeca last year. He wrote, directed and stars in Cheese, "based on his one-man show on being a fat, gig-less, and lonely actor in search of someone to love," according to Ella Taylor's review in Village Voice. The film scored an 80% approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes.

The other three new releases were not far behind, each averaging about $10,000 per screen. Again taking a look at the Rotten Tomatoes approval ratings, In the Shadow of the Moon did best, at 91% positive (Cinematical's James Rocchi liked it too), with The Hunting Party and Fierce People trailing badly, at 41% and 33% positive, respectively. Shadow of the Moon is a doc about the surviving NASA astronauts, Hunting Pary features Richard Gere and Terence Howard as TV journalists chasing stories in war zones and Fierce People is Griffin Dunne's coming of age story, with Diane Lane and Donald Sutherland.

Among holdovers, Death at a Funeral ($2,183 average on 316 screens in its fourth week) and The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters ($1,717 per screen at 39 locations, also in its fourth week) continued to perform nicely. But everyone's favorite underdog, musical drama Once, is the real indie star of the summer. In its 17th week, Once made $1,595 per screen at 141 locations. Go, Once!

You'd think that since folks often get more excited for a trailer than the actual film, there would be some sort of awards show dedicated solely to trailers. Heck, folks shell out awards for pretty much everything else; why not reward the best of those two to three minute clip shows that actually convince people to empty their wallets at the local cineplex? Well, in case you weren't aware, there is such a show -- the Golden Trailer Awards. The 8th annual (yup, this thing has been going for a whole eight years now) Golden Trailer Awards have just announced their list of 74 nominees for the best movie trailers of the year. You can head on over to their official website now, while the actual ceremony (hosted by comedian Jeff Garlin) will take place on May 31 in New York City.

Divided into a variety of categories ( I counted 16!), the trailers range from a number of 2006 hits to some of this year's most anticipated films. For example, in the best comedy section we have Blades of Glory, Borat, Knocked Up, Stranger Than Fiction and Talk to Me. In the trashiest trailer category (my personal favorite), we have Another Gay Movie, Black Sheep, Black Snake Moan and Clerks II. Not surprisingly, some of my favorite trailers from the past year (check out my top ten list from 2006 here) show up a number of times; including 300, Casino Royale, Superman Returns and Smokin' Aces. Tickets for the ceremony (which, I take it, will feature a ton of trailers) went on sale Thursday, and you can vote for your favorites over on the Golden Trailer Awards website. Check out the list and let us know if there were any trailers that should've made the list (so far I count one: World Trade Center).

Elements of the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival lineup are slowly dribbling out ahead of the full slate's announcement on August 22. Most recently, it was the 22 documentaries that make up the Festival's Real to Reel segment that were announced, a lineup that includes The U.S. vs. John Lennon, Blindsight, about a group of blind teenagers climbing Everest, Jeff Garlin's This Filthy World, and Tony Kaye's Lake of Fire, an examination of the abortion debate in the US. In addition, Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing, Oscar-winner Barbara Kopple's film about the band in the wake of their words against President Bush after 9/11, will be the first doc ever to merit a Gala Presentation at the Festival.

(The full Real to Reel lineup probably can be found on the TIFF website, but I'll be damned if I can figure out where it is. Everyone who is smarter than I am and tracks it down, please post a link in the comments, and I'll add it to the post.)

Edit: And the readers come through again -- thanks, robruzic and Madeleine. An external program list can be found here (use the pulldown menu to sort), and the TIFF press releases are collected here.

I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With is the directorial debut of Jeff Garlin. Known to many as Larry David's manager/sidekick on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Garlin also wrote and starred in the film, which takes a bittersweet, episodic stroll through the work, woman and weight problems of a Chicago-based 30-something comedian (guess who). Cheese, which flirts with being a meta-remake of Paddy Chayefsky's Marty, is full of references to film, but in the hands of Garlin, a self-professed "fan of the classics," the pop culture allusions are sharp but never snarky. I sat down with Jeff at the Tribeca Grand this week -- here's the video evidence.

Format
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