Before I go forth with reports from my first 19 hours in Toronto — over the course of which I’ve seen three films, attended one party where waitresses were literally physically branded with the name of the skincare conglomerate sponsor, spent a morning at the Canadian Broadcast Center doing a radio segment about the festival (listen online here) and finally figured out how the Toronto subway system works — I should note that my internet access up here is not constant and my writing time is minimal, so blog posts may be irregular. Check out my Twitter feed for short updates; I should have my first longer dispatch up on the blog this afternoon.
Film blogs are sure to be a buzz-influencing force at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, which opens tonight and runs through the 19th. And they better be, especially after the apparent runaround bloggers — including Spout’s own Karina Longworth — were getting from the TIFF press office last month regarding credentials. Alex Billington of FirstShowing even arrived in T.O. only to find that the festival had still not decided if he should be given a badge (he was eventually granted credentials).
Anyway, Karina will be reporting through the fest’s run, but I want to first share what some other bloggers are writing as the fest begins. Check it all out after the jump:
Peter Knegt points to 45 seconds of Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers, which debuts at TIFF this week and then comes to NYFF in about a month. It’s sort of a trailer, and it’s everything you could hope for from a teaser for a shot-on-circa-80s-VHS portrait of Korinean freaks at play. That green analog noise fadeout at the end is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen … well, today, at least.
indieWIRE has news of dozens additions to the lineup for the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival. Most interesting to me: the world premiere of Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime (guess that rumor that it had been retitled Forgiveness was bunk) and Hipsters, the Russian musical whose Cannes market guide summary famously promised to “never leave the audience indifferent.” Oh, and they’re also showing movies that people think are legitimately good, like A Prophet and An Education. More at the link.
The selections for this year’s Toronto Film Festival’s Midnight Madness genre film section has just been announced via Twitter. The lineup will close with a gala presentation of Jennifer’s Body, the hotly anticipated second feature scripted by Diablo Cody, directed by Karyn Kusama and starring Megan Fox. Other highlights: Cannes stop-motion animation hit A Town Called Panic; “a post-modern, thinking man’s throwback to the ‘B’ Movie/Exploitation films of the 1950s/70s as well as a loving, sly parody of the same” called Bitch Slap!; Symbol, Hitoshi Matsumoto’s follow-up to Big Man Japan, of which Todd Brown said based on the trailer, “Either Matsumoto has cooked up yet another slice of unorthodox genius or he has completely lost his grip and made something totally abstract and self indulgent”; and George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead. The full lineup is also on the TIFF website.
Today’s news that Summit Entertainment has already chosen a release date for Eclipse, the third entry in theTwilight series, suggests the studio is in a hurry. With New Moon, the second entry in the series, currently in a production surge under the direction of Chris Weitz for a November 20 release date, Summit’s latest decision raises the bar even higher, by placing Eclipse right in the heat of summer 2010’s blockbuster season. What’s the rush?
Former New Line marketing chief Russell Schwartz, whose resume includes a steadily successful franchise about hobbits and rings, offers one piece of advice for the newbies at Summit: Slow down.
This review originally appeared during the Toronto Film Festival. Rachel Getting Married opens in select cities today.
Jonathan Demme’s first fiction film since his 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidatee (and only his second non-documentary in ten years), Rachel Getting Married is orchestrated like an extraordinarily intimate work of direct cinema. Working from a script by Jenny Lumet (daughter of Sidney), Demme shot the dysfunctional family drama on a combination of grainy, handheld 35mm and consumer video––without rehearsal, with a huge ensemble cast made up of actors and musicians, with a soundtrack consisting entirely of diegetic music performed either on or just off camera by the likes of Robyn Hitchcock, New Orleans jazz saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr, TV On The Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe (who also plays the key role of the man Rachel is getting married to) and sometime American Idol Tamyra Grey. For a film featuring not only said reality competition castoff but a tour de force performance from a two-time Teen Choice Award nominee, it’s almost unfathomably dark and emotionally tough. It’s essentially a Dogme 95 film directed by Robert Altman, which will be a frightening proposition for some, and something akin to cinematic ecstasy for others. It’s the latter for me.
Though Religulous, like other anticipated fall films, has been screening for critics in New York (and, I assume, in LA) in advance of its official premiere in two weeks at the Toronto Film Festival, major outlets have thus far stuck to the presumed pre-festival embargo. But when your big Toronto premiere is screening for the public in (well, near) two major cities, how do you enforce an embargo on outlets with a mandate to run every commercial release through the critical mill?
In this case, I doubt Lionsgate put much effort into surpressing Variety’s early review of the Larry Charles/Bill Maher documentary, since it’s pretty much a flat-out rave. “[T]he particular intensity and seriousness of Maher’s project are nearly unprecedented,” Robert Koehler writes. “Indeed, its arrival shortly after the death of George Carlin — a profound influence on Maher’s standup act and politics — suggests the kind of film Carlin might have made in his prime.” More here.
Yes, there’s a new Eric Rohmer movie, and yes, it’s premiering in New York tonight. How come you didn’t know about it? I don’t know, but I barely knew about it (or at least, about its scheduled premiere), so don’t feel too bad. The Romance of Astree and Celadonscreened last year at the Toronto and New York Film Festivals, and then sat on the shelf for awhile until Koch Lorber picked it up; its one-week run at Anthology Film Archives is probably a run up to an impending release on DVD. But as all signs point to this being the 88 year-old French master’s final film, you’ll probably want to take your final chance to see a new Rohmer film on a big screen.
A number of big name titles have been added to the line-up of enxt months’ Toronto Film Festival. There’s going to be some overlap with the just-announced NYFF, including Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, and Che, which the festival’s Cameron Bailey says will be shown “the first time as two separate films on two separate nights. People also will get to see it as one back-to-back epic with a 15- minute intermission. You can choose your Che.” One of the few Cannes holdovers passed over by NYFF, Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, will also screen at TIFF.
Spike Lee has spent his own money to acquire Time Traveler, “a memoir by Ronald Mallett, one of the nation’s first African-Americans to earn a Ph.D in theoretical physics.” He’ll co-adapt and direct.
Universal will release the second Da Ali G Show theatrical spin-off, Bruno, on May 15, 2009, a date already occupied by the sequel to The Da Vinci Code.
ThinkFilm has announced their acquisition of Azazel Jacobs’ Momma’s Man, for theatrical release after its New York premiere at New Directors/New Films next month. We reviewed the film (which I love) when it premiered at Sundance, and also interviewed Azazel.
Joan Cusack is playing Isla Fisher’s mom in a romantic comedy about a New York magazine journalist with a lot of credit card debt (ah, romance). Before you ask, “Wait, does that even make mathematical sense?”––yes, it does. If Joan gave birth when she was 14. Eight years before playing a teenager in Sixteen Candles.
Speaking of fuzzy math, I don’t understand these figures at all. Turner Broadcasting (TBS, TNT, etc) has picked up broadcast rights to a number of films that will theoretically be released by New Line and Picturehouse later this year. Variety says, “The coin involved in Turner’s purchase…[comes] in at a high end of about 11% of the eventual domestic box office gross of the four New Line pictures.” How do you calculate eventual gross on films that have not only not opened, but which lie in limbo because their ostensible distributor no longer really exists? According to this story, Warners execs have just started screening films on New Line’s leftovers, and questions like “What pictures will ultimately make it to the slate, and when will they be released?” have yet to be answered. Isn’t the eventual gross of, say, The Women remake heavily dependent on whether or not Warner Brothers gives it the full push as if it were one of its own, or, conversely, dumps it in September when all their “real” fall films are opening at Toronto?
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.”
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.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Film blogs are sure to be a buzz-influencing force at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, which opens tonight and runs through the 19th. And they better be, especially after the apparent runaround bloggers — including Spout’s own Karina Longworth — were getting from the TIFF press office last month regarding credentials. Alex Billington of FirstShowing even arrived in T.O. only to find that the festival had still not decided if he should be given a badge (he was eventually granted credentials).
The selections for this year’s Toronto Film Festival’s Midnight Madness genre film section has just been announced via 
Though 
A number of big name titles have been added to the line-up of enxt months’ Toronto Film Festival. There’s going to be some overlap with the just-announced NYFF, including Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, and Che, which the festival’s Cameron Bailey says will be shown “
Spike Lee has spent his own money
ThinkFilm has announced 
