The last day of a festival stay is always a time of reckoning. You may have seen a lot. But how much did you miss? Running alongside the slate of pictures you actually caught is another festival, a phantom festival, consisting of all the movies you might have seen, things you tried to get to and just couldn't manage, or things recommended by other people after you'd missed all the possible screenings.
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Behold the paradox of Robert Redford: Lauded as one of the most innovative, influential filmmaking advocates around, as a filmmaker he has acquired a reputation as a snooze and a scold. In turn, over the last decade especially, I have acquired a reciprocal Redford Reflex: When I heard that his as-yet-unacquired historical drama The Conspirator was screening at TIFF, I felt my eyelids droop ever so slightly, and my throat begin to dry. An independent project with a rich vein of history running through it could be double trouble or a revelation. Either way the Redford Reflex was in full effect; I knew my morning screening would require something large and violently caffeinated.
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Despite the most spirited endorsement of yours truly, Dustin Lance Black's directorial debut What's Wrong With Virginia hasn't found the warmest reaction this week at the Toronto Film Festival. This has been a bit confounding to Black, whose follow-up to his Oscar-winning screenplay for Milk tells the wild tale of mentally ill Virginia (Jennifer Connelly), her teenage son (Harrison Gilbertson), her Mormon sheriff/Senate candidate paramour Dick Tipton (Ed Harris), and the small-town cauldron of love, sex, longing, desperation and hypocrisy from which each attempts to climb on the way to a bigger, better life. Whatever that is -- each has a different conception, as does Black himself, who today spoke with Movieline about the Canadian cold front and what isn't as wrong with Virginia as some might think.
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I don't know where these rumors start, but no sooner had Rabbit Hole concluded its Toronto Film Festival premiere Monday night than the talk had begun: Is John Cameron Mitchell's adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire's Pulitzer Prize-winning play -- featuring Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart as an affluent married couple grappling with the accidental death of their 4-year-old son -- worth adding to the 2010 Oscar shortlist? Honestly, I think it has more immediate concerns. A quick survey of first impressions follows the jump.
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The problem with covering film festivals is that the things you have to see so often conflict with the things you want to see; bits of the latter have to be stuffed into the corners of the usual crazed festival going. There's also the problem of making choices: The other day a new acquaintance tempted me, like a cartoon devil on my shoulder, to check out a Mexican film, Leap Year, that supposedly had, she said, "Lots of explicit sex." Count me in! But after checking my schedule, I realized that if I went to see that, I'd miss the Alex Gibney documentary on Eliot Spitzer, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, which I was extremely curious about.
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It's often said -- and most often by people in relationships themselves -- that no one can ever really know what happens between two people in love, or even those marking time in a marriage. And yet, in the case of a child or some otherwise invested third party, it is possible to be molded against a relationship so tightly that, once peeled away, one is left with a pretty good impression of its contours. In Beginners, Mike Mills's loose, feeling, evidently highly personal portrait of grief's ritual excavation of memory, Oliver (Ewan McGregor) is reevaluating the impression he formed of his parents' marriage, and the shape he's in as a result.
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Oh, Vincent Gallo! There's no escaping you. You follow me from continent to continent, from festival to festival. Last week, in Venice, I saw your strange little picture Promises Written in Water (also playing here in Toronto), and while I wasn't wowed, I couldn't quite dismiss it, either. But while in Venice, I missed Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski's Essential Killing, which netted you the Best Actor award there -- in fact, you've got pretty much the only role, aside from Emmanuelle Seigner, who appears very late in the picture. So today in Toronto, I decided to check out Essential Killing. I needed to see for myself if you really deserved that award, you scalawag, you.
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James Gunn just spent one of the most successful weekends of his life in Toronto, premiering his new superhero-splatter-comedy SUPER to Midnight Madness raves before selling it off to IFC Films in the festival's first distribution deal. In the end, though, Gunn's biggest triumph may have come in writing and directing the film he wanted to make exactly how he wanted to make it, with Rainn Wilson's nobody Frank adopting the crimefighting persona the Crimson Bolt after his wife (Liv Tyler) is all but kidnapped by a local drug baron (Kevin Bacon). It's a lot harder than it sounds in an age of indie-market turbulence, comic-book genre saturation, and even Gunn's own creative apprehensions following his 2006 debut Slither. He spoke to Movieline about these and other subjects -- from Joe Strummer to God -- over the weekend.
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Another year of TIFF almost always means another year featuring Michael Sheen, and 2010 is no different. Though the subject most definitely is: The Welsh stage and screen veteran arrives this week with the world premiere of Beautiful Boy, featuring Sheen opposite Maria Bello as a dissolving married couple who must relearn how to live with each other after their son goes on a mass murder-suicide gun rampage at his college. Writer-director Shawn Ku's debut feature goes a few places you might expect and a lot more you probably wouldn't; Sheen spoke about the film, his role, his diligence at character "fusion," and intriguing news about his future (or possible lack thereof) with the Twilight franchise.
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In one of his sidelong memoirs, Graham Greene suggested that not only was the bullying he suffered as an English schoolboy the main reason that he became a writer, but that the character of Pinkie Brown, the anti-hero of his early novel Brighton Rock, was based on the scruffy ringleader who sent him running for the typewriter in the first place. Perhaps it's a testament to just how much Greene loathed the punk he was modeled on that Pinkie is perhaps the least redeemed character in the author's canon.
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The second big deal of the Toronto Film Festival occurred today when the Weinstein Company acquired the road-trip flick Dirty Girl for a reported $3 million. Uh, wow. Abe Sylvia directed the '80s-set film, starring Juno Temple as the title character who flees her high school (and possibly her bad reputation) with a gay classmate. Dwight Yoakam, Milla Jovovich and Willam H. Macy co-star; the purchase includes a theatrical-release guarantee, so save the shelf jokes for at least another six months if you don't mind. [Deadline]
Writing Milk earned him an Oscar, but naturally, what Dustin Lance Black really wanted to do was direct. And thus we have What's Wrong With Virginia, the behind-the-camera debut of the most celebrated gay ex-Mormon working in cinema today -- which might seem irrelevant until you see the wild pastiche of themes and tones he's whipped up here. As per festival custom, a few first impressions follow the jump.
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A few days back, after a festival day that began with two-hours-plus of French people talking incessantly while hiding their secrets from one another (Guillaume Canet's snoozy Little White Lies), progressed to a moody meditation on the agonies of preteen vampirism (Matt Reeves' bracing Let Me In), and was rounded off, just before dinner time, with a trapped James Franco sawing his arm off with a teensy knife (thank you, Danny Boyle), I wandered listlessly around the excessively dazzling and noisy Scotiabank screening complex. I wanted one more movie to finish the day, but what? A nice little Macedonian film, perhaps? Maybe I could find some three-hour Japanese thing with nice scenery.
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When it was announced a few years back that a U.S. remake of the Swedish preteen-vampire film (and indie hit) Let the Right One In was in the works, fans of the original let out a collective groan. Leave it to stupid Americans to refuse to read subtitles! The remake -- to be made by Matt Reeves, director of the 2008 Cloverfield, as well as several episodes of Felicity -- would certainly trample on the delicacy of this small Swedish gem.
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As predicted after its raucous, well-received Toronto premiere, James Gunn's SUPER emerged from a bidding war this weekend with a new distributor. Not quite as predicted, that buyer was IFC Films, which will release the twisted, Rainn Wilson-starring, hero-with-a-wrench splatter-comedy via its new IFC Midnight banner. It's the first sale of a film this year during the festival proper, with more expected to follow in the days ahead. Stay tuned here for details as events warrant... [IFC Films]
