I should note that on my actual third day in Toronto, I saw two films that I’m not going to be able to write about on just one viewing: The Road and A Serious Man. If you follow my Twitter updates, you’ll know that I was blown away by the former and don’t know what to make of the latter. I know better than to try to waste words on first-blush reactions like that. I plan to catch up with both before their theatrical releases and will report back then.

So let’s skip straight to Sunday’s screenings. As mentioned previously, the “accidental” double feature is not an unusual phenomenon at TIFF, but I still didn’t wake up this morning expecting to see two one-note comedies about the odd symbiotic relationship between wealth accumulation, fabrication and faith. An even more surprising commonality between Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story and The Invention of Lying starring/co-written and directed by Ricky Gervais, is that both feel in a way like huge-scale home movies. They tackle grand concepts from an ironic remove, and yet still leave the impression that their most important statements are about their makers.

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We can apparently add Louie Psihoyos’s documentary The Cove to our list of Movies That Really Made a Difference. The secret-camera-employed expose on the slaughter of dolphins in Taiji, Japan, is getting credit, at least in part, with a stoppage of the dolphin killing, the season for which would have begun this week.

Dolphin activist and trainer Richard O’Barry, who appears in Psihoyos’ film, showed up to protest as usual accompanied by a group of international journalists and media crews, only to find the titular location void of fishermen.

He immediately reported his happy discovery to Take Part, writing, “it is a good day for the dolphins. And for me personally, as the police only wanted to talk with me, not arrest me!”

While this is certainly good news, it’s also not surprising that a documentary dealing with the killing of animals would be more successful in its goal than the countless films raising awareness of human genocides and poverty.

Of course, this is a sign that documentary as activism can make a difference, so I don’t mean to be cynical. I honestly hope that The Cove will be made an example and that other films inspire similar change.

Check out what other film bloggers are saying about The Cove’s success after the jump:

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The new trailer for Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story debuted yesterday on CNN.com, but obviously the world (including me) was too busy crapping on the Avatar trailer to notice. Even the Wolfman spot received more notice. For awhile last night I thought maybe people, even those on the left, were tired of Moore completely. But no, there has finally been some discussion of the thing today.

And the consensus appears to be that Moore isn’t making films any fresher or more groundbreaking than James Cameron is. In fact, Moore’s latest seems surprisingly dated. This is something we’ve expected, of course, given the ongoing story of the economic meltdown, but it is interesting to see so much Bush as well as a complete lack of footage that appears to have been shot since Obama was elected.

Worst of all, everyone agrees, is the use of M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” on the soundtrack. Even if that song hadn’t been used to death by Pineapple Express and Slumdog Millionaire ads, I would think I was watching a trailer from 2008. How about, given the current events, Moore just rereleases Sicko instead?

Check out what the rest of the film blogs are saying about the film/trailer after the jump:

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In the days leading up to Mike’s Surprise, the screening traditionally held on the last day of the Traverse City Film Festival of a film selected by Michael Moore kept secret before its unveiling to everyone but he and his closest staffers, the hope had been that the controversial documentarian was going to show his new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, which is slated to premiere at the Venice Film Festival at the end of August before opening in theaters at the end of September. Well aware of his packed crowd’s hopes and dreams, Moore wasted no time in bursting our collective bubble. Within moments of taking the stage at Traverse City’s State Theater, he said, “I’m not going to show you my new film.”

According to Moore, his expose of the collapse of the American financial system, which he and 52 staff members in a Traverse City office were scrambling to finish as the festival was underway, could find itself in legal limbo if some of its subjects get wind of some of its footage before its official premiere. “Certain things in this film must not be seen by the large banks and Wall Street before the movie comes out. The invention of YouTube and blogs make it way too risky to show these things [now] that I’m going to reveal in eight weeks.”

So instead of showing his latest film (and reportedly possibly maybe his last project definable as nonfiction), Moore showed his first film — and not Roger & Me, Moore’s breakout as a muckraker/comedian/documentary star and first official credit as a filmmaker (that he showed on Saturday night, in honor of the film’s 20th anniversary). Mike’s actual Surprise was a film about racists co-directed by a cousin of George W. Bush, which the director credited as sparking his career. “Roger & Me wouldn’t have happened if this hadn’t hadn’t happened,” Moore said after the screening. “I would not be a filmmaker if it wasn’t for the Bushes.”

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I spent the weekend at the Traverse City Film Festival, the fifth annual event presided over by Michael Moore in the waterfront town where the filmmaker lives and works in Northern Michigan. Though he and his staff were editing Capitalism: A Love Story across the street from the festival’s main venue around the clock all week, Moore himself introduced nearly every event I attended, including one where he unveiled both a trailer for the almost finished latest film and the entirety of the rarely seen film that gave Moore his first experience in front of a film camera (more on that later). At most of these events, he’d take the stage and talk at length to an entirely adoring crowd, casually making reference to his new film, his reputation and past career, and his future plans. A scoop from the later category: Moore said he’s planning to star in a one-man show on Broadway, presumably along the lines of his 2002 shows at the Roundabout Theater in London, “sometime in the next 24 months.”  He promised to give the show a tryout first at the film festival  — “because if you kill ‘em in Traverse City, you’ll kill ‘em anywhere.”

Outside of Moore’s shadow, Traverse City’s vibe as a festival is along the lines of Telluride and True/False — small town, secret screenings, celebrity/legendary filmmaker guests who blend in with the locals and lesser known attendees while giving each installment of the invent a specific character — but with a dedicated emphasis on comedy. In addition to the panel which I already reported on, in the three days I was in town TCFF hosted an afternoon course on the art of comedy, a preview of the long-anticipated upcoming season of Curb Your Enthusiasm hosted by festival board member Jeff Garlin, and Moore and the festival co-founders handed special prizes to the Funniest Fiction Film and Best Comedy Documentary (to In The Loop and Winnebago Man, respectively), and gave the “Stanley Kubrick Award for Bold and Innovative Filmmaking” to Bob Byington, who was the first director to have two films in the festival — both of them no-frills comedies. I’m not complaining, but one does wonder how Moore’s just-announced comedy festival will actually differ from the film festival in practice.

The full list of TCFF 2009 winners is after the jump.

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On the “Comedy, American Style” at his Traverse City Film Festival this morning, Michael Moore announced plans to launch a comedy festival in the waterfront town, beginning in 2010. Likely taking place the first week of March — “the deepest, darkest part of winter” in Michigan, Moore noted — The Traverse City Comedy Arts Festival will be a collaboration between Moore and comedian/actor Jeff Garlin, who participated in this morning’s panel with Moore, Larry Charles, TCFF 2009 Lifetime Achievement honoree Paul Mazursky, Wavy Gravy, and Austin-based filmmakers Bob Byington and Ben Steinbauer, whose three features (Byington’s Harmony & Me and Registered Sex Offender and Steinbauer’s Winnebago Man) are being screened here as the sole exemplars of “the new hotbed of American independent cinema.” As described by Garlin and Moore this morning, the comedy festival seems to be an attempt to spin-off  the experience of the comedy panel, which has become an annual tradition at the film festival, anchored by frequent guests Garlin and Charles, into its own thing. With that in mind, here are five things I learned from the assembled geniuses during today’s 90 minute session:

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The Road, the troubled adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel that was bumped from its original fall 2008 release date, has been announced as part of the lineup of the 2009 Venice Film Festival. It’ll screen alongside new films by (take a deep breath) Jacques Rivette, Abel Ferarra, Werner Herzog, Michael Moore, Claire Denis, fashion designer Tom Ford, Joe Dante, and Oliver Stone. The full lineup is here.

Now that Brüno is finished and in theaters, what is Sacha Baron Cohen to do next? Surely he can continue appearing in movies not his own, such as he did with Talladega Nights and Sweeney Todd, but will there ever be another shock-mockumentary in the style of Borat and Brüno? Even if he develops some new characters, people don’t believe he could make another one of these kinds of films stealthily enough to make it work.

Well, let’s hope that isn’t true, because we would love to see at least one more. And we think he’s enough of a chameleon that his increasing fame won’t get in the way. As Metromix recently pointed out, there are just so many people (live and dead) who still need to be interviewed and/or pranked by Baron Cohen. Also, there are so many more marginalized people out there who could use a Brüno of their own to challenge the stereotypes and expose the continuing prejudices of our country.

To help Baron Cohen come up with a new character and issue, we’ve selected five already existing scenarios — which should help garner funding since Hollywood is so into remakes — to inspire him.
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Barack Obama gave a speech to the American Medical Association yesterday in an attempt to get the organization’s members on board with his plans for healthcare reform. The president’s appearance alone may have been good for his cause, given that it was the first such address to the AMA in 26 years, but many doctors are apparently still skeptical of the government’s ideas and how they’ll actually work.

Meanwhile, the issue of healthcare reform continues to be a difficult topic in Congress, and the road to legislation is sure to be long and filled with much debate. So, to help Washington in the process, or at least to keep the politicians sane with a little entertainment, we’ve come up with a little healthcare movie marathon.

The ten films selected are admittedly more left-leaning in their potential influence, but that’s not necessarily a political move on our part. We simply chose titles we like, and maybe it just so happens that we like movies that show charity as good, greed as evil and healthcare as a right that all humans should be afforded.

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Despite focusing on Michael Moore a mere three days ago, I can’t help but ignore the buzz going on about the filmmaker’s marketing stunt over the weekend. Soon after we got our first look at an image from Moore’s new, untitled documentary about the financial crisis, a teaser trailer hit theaters and the web (as soon as it was online, I updated Friday’s post to include it). But in some theaters there was more to the ad than just an onscreen Jimmy Fund/Will Rogers Institute parody. In select cities the teaser was actually followed by Jimmy Fund-style pandhandling, in which ushers (or interns? volunteers?) wearing “Save Our CEOs” t-shirts walked down the aisles with donation cans.

Yes, people gave money, but apparently Moore is passing that cash and coin on to local food banks — though nobody in the select audiences seem to have been clued into this fact. If there were indeed moviegoers who simply dropped change in out of habit (thinking this was an actual charity or they confusedly thought they were at church for a moment), that wasn’t the only aspect of the marketing of this film that is going a little wrong. If Twitter is a good gauge of this sort of thing, too many people are coming away from watching the trailer and reading about the stunt believing that Moore’s new film is actually titled “Save Our CEOs” (or “Save the CEOs,” depending on the Tweet). I’m not sure if that is an appropriate thing to call the film, but now that it’s garnering buzz under that moniker, Overture Films might want to insist it be the official title anyway.

Check out what the film blogs are saying about the stunt after the jump:

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A few days after unveiling Mickey Rourke as “Whiplash” from Iron Man 2, USA Today brings us the first image from Michael Moore’s new documentary, which is still without a title. In a way, it corresponds well to the earlier photo premiere, because many people think of the liberal filmmaker as the true villain of his own movies. Others believe him to be the superhero, however, which would make Goldman Sachs the nemesis in this picture, in which Moore is once again met with police opposition, likely because he’s attempting to trespass on the financial institution’s property.

Apparently the trailer for the movie hits theaters this weekend, too, so hopefully someone will find a bootleg or copy of that somewhere on the web [update: I've embedded the Jimmy Fund-parodying teaser below]. My hope is it’s appropriately attached to The Taking of Pelham 123 due to that film’s involvement of a stock market scam. For now, though, let’s see what the film blogs are saying about this promotional photo:
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There’s usually not much to write in response to a release date announcement, but when the film in question is Michael Moore’s, any kind of news is good bait for the haters. The Fahrenheit 9/11 documentarian is back with an untitled film about the current financial crisis, which would seem to be a topic accessible to all kinds of moviegoers. Even the ones who are usually anti-Michael Moore. But when this new doc opens on October 2nd (notably 1 year and 1 day after the $700 billion Wall Street bailout), there will still be plenty of people against it.

Already, Moore has issued a statement in which he reveals the film to be a sort of jab at the rich, so obviously there will be few wealthy moviegoers driving up to the theater in their gold Mercedes in order to see how they’re to blame for the present economy. But will any poor conservatives show up? And what about those of us leftists who’ve grown tired of Moore’s tactics? All I can say is, hopefully this doc at least has as few onscreen Moore scenes as his last major effort, Sicko. But despite the fact that he’ll clearly be focusing somewhat on the auto industry, this still won’t be anywhere near as good as Roger & Me, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this fall.

Let’s see what the blogs and blog commenters have to say this far in advance about the next Michael Moore film:
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Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore spoke with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC yesterday, offering his take on the auto industry’s request for a bailout. At first, he seems to be defending the automakers, but that stance is just an excuse to be critical of Washington’s handling of the situation. He really has no sympathy for the big boys from Detroit at all, and he submits his own solution to Congress: give the Big Three their $38 billion, but tell them you own their ass and make them build hybrids and mass transit options instead of gas-guzzling SUVs.

As a onetime fan of Moore’s work, I have to admit this clip presents some of the smartest words to come out of the guy’s mouth in years. I’m not saying I agree with his proposal to Congress for basically nationalizing the automakers, but he definitely carries himself on Countdown quite intelligently. Obviously it’s a subject he’s very familiar with, having started his film career with the GM-criticizing Roger & Me. So, should Washington follow his advice?

Check out Moore’s appearance after the jump.

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Oprah Winfrey can certainly create a best seller when it comes to books, and her pick of the presidential candidates is on his way to the White House. But can she get behind a movie and contribute to its success? 20th Century Fox seems to hope so, because the studio apparently allowed the talk show host to screen an unfinished cut of Australia in preparation for her November 10 show, which featured the film’s stars, Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, as well as a live-via-Skype call-in from filmmaker Baz Luhrman. Fortunately for Fox, Oprah raved about the film, and now the media has latched on to the endorsement, creating some much-needed positive buzz for the Oscar-hopeful. Yet there’s a big problem with all the excitement: Oprah’s film recommendations have hardly been sure-fire champs in the past.

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