• With The Brave One’s $14 million, first-place opening weekend, we learn that audiences would rather see Jodie Foster as a mother than as a vigilante. Meanwhile, both Eastern Promises and Across the Universe managed smashing per-screen averages in limited release.
• David Cronenberg’s Russian mob movie was a hit with Toronto audiences, too: it picked up the audience prize for best film at the Toronto Film Festival over the weekend, edging out runners-up Juno and Body of War.
• In Toronto acquisitions news, IFC picked up Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, and in what is being billed as the Festival’s biggest sale, First Look Studios purchased the Aaron Eckhart/Jessica Alba comedy Bill for at least $3 million.
• Southland Tales and Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly is launching Darko Entertainment, a production company designed “to back modestly budgeted, director-driven films.” Their first venture will be Dirty Girl, a co-production with Christine Vachon’s Killer Films.
• MTV Films and Old School director Todd Phillips are producing a feature around YouTube sensation Million Dollar Strong (aka Mike O’Connell and Ken Jeong). O’Connell is writing the screenplay with Peter Kline.

You can expect one more Toronto-related segment on next week’s FilmCouch, but until then, our coverage of the 2007 Toronto Film Festival is complete. Here’s a round-up of our reviews; all were contributed by Karina, except where otherwise noted.

Across the Universe: “The tween and teen girls fueling the success of High School Musical and Hairspray, who willingly ingest those god-awful Ford music videos on American Idol without understanding the relationship between content and commerce–they’re not going to care that Universe is “too literal”, and they’re definitely not going to shun it for being pretentious.”
Atonement:  “There are no direct parallels to contemporary conflicts in Atonement, only the very general nod to the ways in which large-scale wars fundamentally alter lives…by making a sweeping, war-torn love story that refuses to directly comment on contemporary events, in a roundabout way Joe Wright draws attention to the impossibility of wringing romantic propaganda out of Iraq.”

Operation Filmmaker: “Whether her subject is serious about the movie business or not, Davenport gives Muthana’s plight extra resonance by cross-cutting between footage of real, blood violence in Iraq, and scenes of Muthana on the fake blood-soaked set of Doom. Can you blame the guy for pulling out all the stops to stay in the realm where the piles of corpses are only make-believe?”

Nightwatching: “I absolutely loved the first 15 minutes of the film, in which Greenaway introduces us to Rembrandt, his somewhat fantastic home life, and his unconventional but deeply touching bond with his wife Saskia”

Control: “Anton Corbijn’s film smashes the music biopic mold by portraying the star at its center not as a mythological creature, but as a real-life, fucked-up kid in over his head.”

Heavy Metal in Baghdad: “It’s a film in which the people that we went over there ostensibly to liberate show and tell details that demonstrate the complete lack of freedom of a life lived “in between the terrorists and the troops.” It’s not just that the members of Acrassicauda have suffered a severe quality-of-life downgrade; it’s that their lives have become so brutal that they’ve resigned themselves to not caring whether or not they live or die.”

The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford: “It’s likely the most “difficult” film produced with Hollywood money and starring an A-list star since Eyes Wide Shut. It demands repeat viewings, and as such, it’ll either be a massive commercial failure, or it’ll touch off a new wave of American cinephilia.”

Elizabeth: The Golden Age: “The film hits its absolute peak of absurdist pleasure with Elizabeth on that horse, and the rest plays out like the last 20 minutes of a Busby Berkeley film: with narrative and emotional stakes obliterated, we’re treated to a meaningless parade of CGI explosions and really, really cool headdresses.”

Juno: “Juno’s one truly revelatory element stems from screenwriter Diablo Cody’s apparent intention to have her title character serve, at least in part, as a device through which to examine the sexual desires of teenage girls.” [reviewed at Telluride]

I’m Not There: “I’ll admit, I’m a sucker for concept films (Memento: OMG, it’s backwards!), but this went way beyond that. Every scene is a delicious layer cake of cultural references and multiple meanings.” [reviewed by Kevin at Telluride]

The Savages: “It was a good decision on Jenkins’ part to not spend any time in flashbacks or expository dialogue about back story. She stays in the present and let’s the past way on Linney and Hoffman’s faces as they try to reconcile their guilt over caring for a father they’d rather just be dead.” [reviewed by Paul at Telluride]

Encounters at the End of the World: “He’s a funny narrator, not nearly so severe as in Grizzly Man. But it is Werner Herzog. So, although he’s funny, he’s constantly reminding us we’re all doomed.” [reviewed by Paul at Telluride]

Do edgy American filmmakers of yesteryear go soft after living in Hollywood for a few decades? We look at Neil Jordan’s new film The Brave One, starring Jodie Foster, and ask how it measures up to her grittier predecessor, Taxi Driver. Also, Karina shares her picks from the Toronto Film Festival, including the much-buzzed western, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Anton Corbijn’s Joy Division biopic Control, and two fresh Iraq-umentaries, Heavy Metal in Baghdad and Operation Filmmaker.

 

 FilmCouch #37 [23:36m]: Play Now | Download

FilmCouch #37

The Brave One, Heavy Metal in Baghdad, Operation Filmmaker

Last weekend at the Toronto Film Festival, I sat down for a longish interview with Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti, directors of the excellent documentary Heavy Metal in Baghdad. We’ll have a lot more from that interview in an upcoming installment of FilmCouch, but below you’ll find a preview. Acrassicauda, the band depicted in the film, are currently living in exile (and in extreme poverty) in Syria, and are in danger of being deported back to Iraq. In this clip, Alvi and Moretti explain what the filmmakers are doing to help Acrassicauda escape their current situation and live out their heavy metal dreams.

As a portrait of post-Sadaam Iraqi youth, Operation Filmmaker doesn’t have the “wow!” factor of that other Toronto movie about Iraqi kids looking for refuge in American popular culture. But although I have some issues with director Nina Davenport’s treatment of her subject, for a film that began life as a vanity project designed to document an act of kindness on the part of a Hollywood star, it’s a surprisingly evocative examination of privileged, well-intentioned ignorance.

In 2004, an MTV documentary featured a nine-minute segment on Muthana Mohmed, a twenty-something Iraqi with a passion for Hollywood film. MTV’s cameras followed Muthana as he toured a giant street market, searching in vain for cinema books; they captured a pile of bombed-out bricks, which Muthana said was once the site of a school in which he was studying film. Actor Liev Schreiber saw this documentary as he was preparing to travel to Prague to shoot his first film as a director, an adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Holocaust-memories-as-cultural-bridge novel, Everything is Illuminated. Schreiber decided to contact Muthana and invite him to come to Prague and work on the set of the film as an intern. Undoubtedly wanting a document of his own cross-cultural generosity for the Illuminated DVD, Schreiber hired filmmaker Davenport to trail Muthana and document his experiences on set.

Schreiber and his producer Peter Saraf undoubtedly went into the Muthana endeavor with the best intentions, but their cultural naivete is apparent from the outset. Schreiber says he wants to encourage Muthana’s filmmaking ambitions because “Baghdad needs artists”; Davenport lets the obvious follow-up question of, “Yeah, but don’t they need, like, safety, running water and electricity first?” hang in the air unsaid. When Muthana chooses an evening of clubbing over working on an editing assignment, Saraf begins to doubt Muthana’s true ambitions. The producer notes that if he really wants a Hollywood career, he should be making himself “invaluable” on the set by making sure the actors never lack for coffee. But Muthana, who has never spent a night outside of Iraq or away from his childhood home, has no concept of the Hollywood ladder and has a hard time seeing how fetching snacks is going to improve his art. The conflict is compounded by politics: both Schreiber and Saraf are self-professed “left-wing American Jews,” and both are visibly distressed with Muthana’s insistence that he “loves George Bush.”

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Peter Greenaway’s Nightwatching turns the making of Rembrandt’s The Night Watcher into an epic tale about marriage, color, the secret lives of paintings, the nature of looking, and the impossibility of a peaceful relationship between commerce, politics and artistic genius. It’s pretentious and stagey, both visually decadent and over-talky, and, from what I saw of it, kind of wonderful. My biggest regret of the 2007 Toronto Film Festival is that, in the middle of the press screening, with a hot cup of coffee in my hand, I fell asleep.

I really don’t think it was Greenaway’s fault. I do understand that his highly-theatrical tableau and inflated speeches of philosophical exposition can turn viewers off, and this film, like his best works, has an implacable rhythm to it that could be misconstrued as monotony. But I’m a reluctant sucker for Greenaway’s style, so I can’t really blame my unfortunate press screening narcolepsy on the director. I absolutely loved the first 15 minutes of the film, in which Greenaway introduces us to Rembrandt, his somewhat fantastic home life, and his unconventional but deeply touching bond with his wife Saskia. I could probably write a full-length review of a single early scene, in which Rembrandt, played by Martin Freeman of the UK version of The Office, addresses the camera with the story of how he and Saskia got together, but I feel like I really *shouldn’t* write anything more without seeing the full film. Since Nightwatching doesn’t yet have U.S. distribution, I’m not sure when that will be.

So, while I curse my brain for failing me in the clutch, across the jump you’ll find a look at what other people are saying about it.

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It’s the final installment of Reeler TV from Toronto, and I’m terribly jealous that Stu got to interview Peter Bogdanovich. But, I got over my grudge just in time to talk about some of the final films that I caught at the festival, including Across the Universe.

Previous episodes:

Episode 1: Neil Jordan & Terrance Howard on The Brave One; Juno

Episode 2: Scott Hicks; Love Songs; Heavy Metal in Baghdad

Episode 3: Anton Corbijn/Control 

Episode 4: Phil Donahue/Body of War; Operation Filmmaker

Big, classy, Oscar-bait World War II dramas don’t really get much better than Atonement, Joe Wright’s swooning adaptation of Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel. If the last half hour or so seems to drag to a bit of an anti-climax, it’s only because the first forty minutes are so exhiliaratingly jam-packed with style, plot and character nuance, that the rest of the film is necessarily spent with both characters and viewers struggling to comprehend the full weight of what came before. Atonement swells to an early high and then glides down to earth, and it’s only at the deceptively low end that the film’s massive emotional arc becomes apparent.

It’s in this early section that Wright perfects an almost seamless method of time-shifting, in order to display events several times from the point of view of different players–a brilliant cinematic interpretation of an extremely novelistic device. The action begins on a languid summer day in 1935, on the impossibly grande English country estate of the Tallis family. Precocious, play-writing 13 year-old Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan) watches from an upstairs window as her older sister Cecelia (Keira Knightley) has an ambiguous, compromising altercation at an outdoor fountain with Robbie (James McAvoy), a servant’s son whose Cambridge education has been paid for by Cecelia and Briony’s father. Briony slams the window and we cut back in time, to Ceclia flouncing out of the mansion and onto the grounds, where she meets up with Robbie and strolls with him out to the fountain. The incident looks very different from the ground, and it soon becomes clear that Robbie and Cecilia are dancing around their mutual but unspoken love.

Over the course of the evening, Briony will witness three additional incidents, two directly involving Ceclia and Robbie and another open to interpretation, and she will drastically misinterpret all. Out of some mix of jealousy and younger-sister frustration, Briony carelessly manipulates these misunderstandings, until the sisters can only watch––Cecelia, without recourse; Briony, it seems, without guilt––as Robbie is removed from their lives for the foreseeable future.

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In this second-to-last installment of ReelerTV from Toronto, Stu sits down with the legendary Phil Donahue, who is in town promoting his first documentary effort, Body of War. The film tracks the recovery of Tomas Young, a young American soldier paralyzed from the waist down after serving just days in Iraq. And Karina takes a look at Operation Filmmaker, Nina Davenport’s portrait of a young Iraqi wannabe-filmmaker who takes advantage of liberal Hollywood guilt to get his foot in the proverbial door.

• The film will unspool in the States uncut and with an NC-17 rating, but Ang Lee has agreed to slash 30 minutes from Lust, Caution for its Chinese release. “The spirit of the film remains despite the cutting and the fluency will not be affected…for a viewer who has not watched the full version, the short version remains reasonable,” the director told Variety.
• Variety reports that the crush of serious issue films at the festival has led to a dearth of sales, and with so many films about Iraq, immigration and terrorism in the mix, lighter diversions such as Juno are hogging all the good buzz with audiences. “The question of audience fatigue is rearing its head before any of these pix have actually bowed in theaters,” write Ali Jaafar and Dade Hayes.  The Visitor, one of the films cited in that story as having “no movement,” did eventually sell last night to Overture Films.
  
• Other sales: Helen Hunt’s directorial debut Then She Found Me sold to ThinkFilm; IFC picked up the Icelandic procedural Jar City; and The Weinstein Company bought Boy A.
• IFC and B-Side are working together to acquire overlooked festival films for TV and online distribution. IFC’s Evan Shapiro says B-Side’s online community of festivalgoers is “like the world’s largest focus group”; B-Side’s Chris Hyams says the IFC partnership is aimed at combating a certain “perversity in the traditional upfront payment model.”

Julie Taymor’s long-awaited Beatles-fueled musical seems to have split critics neatly into two camps. There are people like Aaron Dobbs and Anne Thompson, who give Taymor’s spin art 60s pastiche an A for effort, but ultimately concede that the film could, at the very least, stand to have some rainbow-hued fat cut. Then there are the full-on haters, like the journalist I spoke to immediately after yesterday’s press screening, who used the phrase “literally retarded,” and Glenn Kenny, who compares the “mortifyingly soft-headed” experience to “watching Sesame Street.”

They’re all right, and they’re all wrong. The first hour of Across the Universe was nowhere near as bad as I feared it would be; the remaining hour+ was worse. It’s not an experience I would recommend for any obsessive Beatles fan (you’d never be able to stand the fast-food commercial instrumentation), and Taymor’s refusal to deal with the dissolution of the counterculture will infuriate hippie cynics.

But I’m absolutely positive that a shorter cut, stripped of some of the forced multiculturalism and contemporary political references, would play like gangbusters in middle schools.

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ReelerTV is back with another episode from Toronto. This time around, Stu talks to Anton Corbijn, director of the amazing Control, and Karina offers up her thoughts on the film.Previous installments:

Episode 2: Scott Hicks, Love Songs and Heavy Metal in Baghdad

Episode 1: Neil Jordan and Terrance Howard talk The Brave One; Karina on Juno and Margot and the Wedding

What a strange hybrid The Golden Age is: a sequel, a costume fantasy, a romantic melodrama, a CGI war spectacular, a puzzling celebration of beauty over substance. It’s sort of an historical epic, although it doesn’t seem to care much about historical accuracy. If anything, it recasts the Anglo-Spanish War as a battle between superheroes (ie: British Protestants) and villains (ie: Catholics, particularly of the Spanish variety), with the former’s only impediment to success the pesky distractions of romantic rejection.

The meat of the film is the mutual but unequal admiration shared by Queen Elizabeth I (Cate Blanchett, reprising her Oscar-nominated role from 1998 film Elizabeth) and explorer/pirate/raconteur Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen). (As far as I can tell, there’s no evidence that a personal relationship between Raleigh and the Queen ever developed, although Elizabeth did regularly sponsor his adventures.) In the film’s opening scenes, the Queen’s handlers tell her she’ll be less susceptible to threats to the throne (coming primarily from her imprisoned cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, who is not-so-secretly conspiring with the king of Spain) if she gets herself a husband and a baby. Raleigh shows up at the palace one day to present the Queen with tobacco from the newly-christened Virginia, and coincidentally walks right into an ensuing parade of suitors. He is the only man who earns a return invitation.

The unshaven Raleigh leaves his pirate boots on when he comes calling on the Queen, and as this rare specimen of man swaggers through the cavernous palace halls, bodices rip open on their own. Though conscious of the fact that the glorified pirate is not exactly marriage material, Elizabeth is smitten–so much so, that she allows herself to mistake Raleigh’s interest in her pocketbook for a romantic interest in her person. Raleigh humors Elizabeth in public, but privately betrays her affections. Though advisers keep warning that the situation with Spain is coming to a head, Elizabeth is increasingly, blindly focused on her all-consuming crush. The idea that the most powerful woman in the Western world could make it to her early 50s with her virginity proudly intact, only to become so besotted with a man that she lets crucial matters of international relations fall by the way side, is the first of the film’s many leaps of faith.

Another is, well, the question of faith.

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The two films that have hit me the hardest here in Toronto are Control, which I wrote about here, and The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford. Both films, based on real-life characters and incidents, are simultaneously technically superlative and heartbreaking. With one day left to go in my Toronto 2007 tenure, I find myself nursing heartache for two, studio-backed movies which I’ll soon be able to pay $11 American to see again at will. And sitting here in my hotel room, listening to Joy Division and New Order and thinking about Sam Riley’s performance in Control and Brad Pitt and Paul Schneider’s in Jesse James, there is no such thing as soon enough.

Two weeks ago, The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford was the film Warner Brothers had “no idea what to do with.” As of this writing, it’s the most gushed-over title at the Toronto Film Festival, and word has hit the wires that star Brad Pitt has won the Best Actor prize at the Venice Film Festival. If the folks at WB still havn’t figured out what to do with Andrew Dominik’s masterful, Malickean tragedy of celebrity envy, they probably don’t deserve to have their name on it.

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