John Malkovich enjoyed a particularly high spike in popularity and geek credit when he appeared in Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich, but he’s been in more than 20 films since then and he hasn’t managed to have that lightning strike twice.

He was excellent as the poseur art teacher in the otherwise disappointing Art School Confidential, and while he turns in a great performance in Burn After Reading, neither one stands above anything else he’s done. Maybe he should actually try playing a jewel thief to see what he can do with that role. Find out what he thought about working with the Coens and dropping the f-bomb a lot in the interview after the break.

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At last year’s Toronto International FIlm Festival they had guys dressed up in the running outfit that Michael Cera wore in Juno jogging around town, handing out orange Tic Tacs. So, it’s only fitting that this year the only viral marketing we’ve spotted around town is from another Michael Cera film. Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist has a phantom band in it that is central to the plot, and we’ve spotted advertisements for this band stenciled onto sidewalks and plastered on streetlights.

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On Monday, I’m flying to Denver to spend a couple of days hanging around the Democratic National Convention before heading up to Telluride on Thursday. If I was reading that sentence unawares, two questions would inevitably come to mind. First: “Why, Karina, are you going to a political event when you have a movie blog to write?”

Answer: there actually are two major film events happening over the three days that I’ll be in town. The first, the Denver Film Society production Cinemocracy (previously mentioned here), will screen ten finalists in a short film competition that’s been winnowing down submissions online for months. You can watch the films and vote for your favorites here.

The second event is the Impact Film Festival. Founded this year by Jody Arlington, Jamie Shor and Kimball Stroud, IFF will screen “socially-themed documentary and dramatic films” every day at both the DNC and RNC. Films on the program include Battle in Seattle, I.O.U.S.A., and Flow. Check out the Bside page for info on the full lineup.

The second question is a bit trickier.

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• With the number of indie-arm buyers depleted since Sundance by something like 1700%, Anne Thompson looks at the options remaining for films looking to get bought as Toronto.
• Further info on Quantum of Solace’s move to a November 14 release: the goal is to repeat the success of Casino Royale, which opened on November 17 and “still was playing in about 1,100 theaters between the following Christmas and New Year’s.”
• Will The House Bunny match the take of tween sensation The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2? Or will those hurting from “the lousy economy and high gas prices” prefer to see criminals crash cars in Death Race?

It’s late August. Our brains have been fried by lust for Nastia Liukin Olympic spirit. We’re ten days away from the start of fall festival season/Oscar frenzy proper. For these reasons and probably loads more, we woke up this morning desperately in need of something to obsess over that would involve no brain power whatsoever.

And Thom Powers, in his infinite wisdom as documentary programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival, provided, by programming Paris, Not France, a documentary which purports to offer an exploration of “the businesswoman and the human being behind the public persona that is Paris Hilton…Modelled [sic] after the 1960s “it”-girl film Darling.” We’ve thus spent half the day digging up as much info on the film as we can find. Here’s what we know as of 2:04 PM, August 19, 2008:

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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.

Also of note:

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Mike Jones has two sets of additions to the Toronto International Film Festival lineup at The Circuit. The first, detailing nine Gala and Special Presentations, informs us of the existence of a documentary about A Chorus Line, as well as the news (I *think* it’s news–I haven’t been following TIFF updates closely enough to remember what’s just been rumor and what’s been officially confirmed) that the festival will world premiere the Larry Charles/Bill Maher doc Religulous, and host the North American premieres of Guy Ritchie’s RockNRolla and Waltz with Bashir. Meanwhile, the other release tells us to look forward to the continental premieres of Delta (the incest-tinged Adam and Eve story from Cannes) and Tokyo Sonata, as well as a number of world premieres from Scandinavia, and much more. Click forth for the details.

• Nailed, that David O. Russell film that keeps having to halt production because of THINKFilm’s financial troubles, has shut down for the fourth time. Meanwhile, yesterday THINK closed its Toronto office, which housed 25 employees as recently as the end of 2007. Randy Manis, VP of acquisitions and a co-founder of the company, is one Toronto-based exec cutting ties with the company;”It has not been the easiest time in the company with so many people we worked with wanting things,” he told Variety.
• The apparent unwatchability of Hancock is a big topic of conversation here in Los Angeles this week. Todd McCarthy at Variety is the first to go public with his distaste; he warns, “Although it will inevitably open very large, this odd and perplexing aspiring tentpole will provide a real test of Smith’s box office invincibility.”
• 96 countries have been sent entry forms for the Best Foreign Language Oscar nomination.
• X Files creator Chris Carter is apparently directing a secret movie starring David Cassidy’s daughter and rapper Xzibit. It may be secret for a reason.

• 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.
• David Gordon Green’s The Pineapple Express will screen at the Just For Laughs Film Festival on July 19, three weeks before Sony opens the stoner comedy wide.
• Passchendaele, a Canadian WWI drama about the famous muddy battle, will open the Toronto Film Festival.
  
• 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.

Jeff Wells notes that Juno, which came in at the third spot at the box office over the weekend, is now besting both I Am Legend and the National Treasure sequel to sell more tickets than any other film during the week. At the rate it’s going, it looks certain to cross the $100 million mark by the end of awards season. To put it mildly, this strikes Wells as something of a surprise:

That’s a mindblower. I never would have called that in a million years. This is just a sweet and sharp little film. I wasn’t levitating after I first saw it in Toronto. I knew that I liked it because it was well-written and well-acted. I still know that. But for me, this makes two head-scratchers in a single night.

Really, Jeff? A teen sex comedy hipped up enough to attract 20-somethings, feminized just enough to attract tween girls, but not so girly that it turns off the Apatow crowd. Advertised EVERYWHERE. Plus, it’s probably the most crowd-pleasing movie to have played a festival in 2007. And you’re surprised that it’s making a lot of money? Seriously?

You would have had to have been stupid to have seen Juno with an audience at Telluride or Toronto and NOT imagined it performing at least as well as Superbad. Jeff Wells is not stupid. Is actively selling the fiction that this is a “surprise”/”crossover” hit a condition of accepting Juno skyscrapers on your site?

I swear to god, I want to stop talking about this, but they keep pulling me back in …

Movies are a great way to explore the risk we never took. INTO THE WILD opens tonight, Sean Penn shares the story of first reading the book from an interview in Telluride. We also look at THE MOSQUITO COAST (1986, Peter Weir), starring Harrison Ford, and what these films tell us about breaking from civilization and doing the unthinkable. Karina interviews the makers of HEAVY METAL IN BAGHDAD and it becomes clear why she wrote “I don’t care how tired of Iraq documentaries you think you are–you need to see Heavy Metal in Baghdad.”

FilmCouch #38

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Into the Wild, The Mosquito Coast, Heavy Metal in Baghdad

• 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]

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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