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.
On the Toronto International Film Festival’s official Doc Blog, TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers has been asking various film fest and doc professionals (including Matt Dentler, Agnes Varnum, and David Nugent) to name the nonfiction films that they’re most excited to see at this year’s TIFF.
No one’s asked me what I think, so of course I’m going to chime in anyway: the film on the Real to Reel program that I’m most looking forward to is probably Obscene, Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor’s portrait of publisher Barney Rosset, who fought obscenity trials over works like Tropic of Cancer and I Am Curious … Yellow. I’m also interested in Operation Filmmaker, which made a few of the Doc Blog lists. Directed by Nina Davenport, it’s the story of an Iraqi film school student who, after the bombing of Baghdad in 2003, gets a job on the set of Liev Schreiber’s Everything is Illuminated. One blogger, reviewing the film at the Sydney Film Festival, called it “an often gauling example of the naive simplifications that those on the Left, for all that they may mean well, often make.” He didn’t mean that as a compliment, but it’s piqued my interest nonetheless.
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In an apparent bid to play every villain that, as a child, I found weirdly sympathetic (after the Grinch and, um, Andy Kaufmann), Jim Carrey will star as Scrooge in a Robert Zemeckis adaptation of The Christmas Carol. Zemeckis, who has spent the past few years mired in his soon-to-be-released motion-capture adaptation of Beowulf, is setting upCarol as another CG/motion-capture/3D stereoscopic extravaganza.
Todd McCarthy assesses Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. “Pottermania will reach a peak in July with the nearly simultaneous release of the fifth film and the seventh and final book, and only commercial concern for Warner Bros. may be that, after the second or third week, curiosity about the concluding tome could overshadow interest in the film.”
Is Phil Donahue the next Al Gore? The Man Who Fell To Oprah is shopping around a documentary, which he co-directed, called Body of War, described by Variety as “an unashamedly partisan film arguing the folly of the Iraq campaign.” The pic apparently paints most Democrats as ineffectual yes-men, while trumpeting Senator Robert Byrd as the lone maverick who dared to go against the pack.
