Greetings from Toronto! Movieline's Canadian HQ is up and running for this year's Toronto International Film Festival, that annual ritual of 300 films and just about as many brutally tough viewing decisions over the course of a week. (It helps that our fine, discriminating critics Stephanie Zacahrek and Michelle Orange are checking in soon as well.) But if festgoers have tough decisions, imagine being a distributor faced with dozens of buzzy titles and a checkbook to pick up only one or two. You've got to make it count -- and here's where they're likeliest to fight to the death to do so.
No offense to Robert Redford (The Conspirator), Mike Mills (Beginners), Keanu Reeves (Henry's Crime), Werner Herzog (the 3-D Cave of Forgotten Dreams), Errol Morris (Tabloid) and the gaggle of other talent with titles on the market, but from the looks of things, these five are shaping up as the films set to go first as the fest gets underway today.
[In alphabetical order]
· Everything Must Go
WHAT IT'S ABOUT: Fired sales manager and six-months sober Nick Porter (Will Ferrell) returns home one day to find his possessions -- and himself -- cast out of his house by his wife. An five-day yard sale, wagon-tumble and journey of self-discovery follows. Based on Raymond Carver's short story.
UPSIDE: Ferrell is on a roll, and there's that whole recession-era theme that should (or at least could) hit a nerve with his constituency. Did I mention Will Ferrell's in it? The guy's on Bill Murray's career path; he's gotta cross over at some point.
DOWNSIDE: Might alienate the Ferrell base, which didn't respond especially well to his last high-ish concept attempt at dramedy, Stranger Than Fiction. (Or the execrable indie Winter Passing before that.) First-time writer/director Dan Rush is an unproven commodity; can he make his megastar work for him? Will Ferrell do the actual press a film like this needs?
POTENTIAL BUYERS: Sony Pictures Classics, Focus Features, Anchor Bay (an underdog, but stranger things have happened)
HOW MUCH? Under $3 million
WHAT IT'S ABOUT: A down-on-his-luck jazz trumpeter (Mickey Rourke) is taken hostage after attempting to break into a car. He winds up at a circus (?) where he falls in love with a winged woman (Megan Fox); their budding relationship is threatened by a droll, deep-pocketed gangster named Happy Shannon (Bill Murray). I can't make this up, but writer-director Mitch Glazer apparently can.
UPSIDE: Megan Fox's slump aside, this cast in this film doing these things is pretty much the textbook definition of "irresistible." Unless...
DOWNSIDE: ...What if it sucks? Glazer has reportedly been attempting to make this film for the better part of two decades (he originally wrote it for his wife Kelly Lynch, who now appears in a supporting role); it was either ahead of its time or terrible, or some combination of both. But at its worst I can't see it being anything less than a mystifying failure whose cast sells itself.
POTENTIAL BUYERS: Fox Searchlight, Relativity Media, Summit Entertainment
HOW MUCH? Under $5 million
· Rabbit Hole
WHAT IT'S ABOUT: John Cameron Mitchell directs Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart in an adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire's Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a married couple recovering from the death of their young son in a hit-and-run accident.
UPSIDE: Again with the pedigree. This one's managed to corral quite a bit of behind-the-scenes momentum heading into the festival, with its obvious Oscar-readiness in question as it prepares to premiere next week.
DOWNSIDE: A total downer, and audiences are about as cool on Kidman as they've ever been. (At least the film should forever affirm or rebuke the critics who say her immobile face can't act.) We know Mitchell's bold, but can he pull off his biggest creative coup yet with material this heavy?
POTENTIAL BUYERS: The Weinstein Company, Sony Pictures Classics
HOW MUCH? Under $3 million
· SUPER
WHAT IT'S ABOUT: An all-around nobody (Rainn Wilson) adopts a superhero persona -- and the requisite sidekick (Ellen Page) -- after a drug dealer (Kevin Bacon) steals away his ex-addict wife (Liv Tyler).
UPSIDE: Director James Gunn (Slither) has just the right touch for this kind of absurd but humane genre material, and hey, superheroes are in!
DOWNSIDE: Does the world really need another Kick-Ass? I thought we'd already discussed this. Moreover, is the world ready for Rainn Wilson, leading man? You're either selling the suit or you're selling him, and in either case, you're selling to a pretty narrow viewership.
POTENTIAL BUYERS: Summit Entertainment, Rogue Pictures, Magnolia Pictures
HOW MUCH? Under $2 million
· What's Wrong With Virginia
WHAT IT'S ABOUT: Dustin Lance Black makes his directing debut with what sounds like a Sirk-meets-Lynch psycho-melodrama with Jennifer Connelly -- gone blonde! -- as the mentally ill title character, whose tormented son may be the illegitimate offspring of their community's righteous, politically mobile, fetish-sex craving Sheriff Tipton (Ed Harris).
UPSIDE: Yowza! Everybody's been waiting to see how Black would follow Milk -- or if he could follow it. This cast implies he's on to something, and assuming he can just keep the camera in focus, it's hard to imagine a whacked-out Jennifer Connelly and pervy Mormon Ed Harris really screwing this kind of thing up.
DOWNSIDE: Word has it Black might veer a little on-the-nose with his themes of mental illness and hypocrisy. And good as they potentially may be, Connelly and Harris will have to be really good to get the wider audience Black found with Milk.
POTENTIAL BUYERS: Focus Features, Fox Searchlight
HOW MUCH? Under $2 million
Stay tuned to Movieline in the week ahead for more about these films, their prognoses and the rest of Toronto 2010!