Pick any random film that's opened in the last year, and odds are about 50/50 that Malin Åkerman starred in some capacity. OK, so I exaggerate, but let me put it this way: A week after interviewing Åkerman for her film The Romantics -- which opened last week in limited release -- the Swedish-Canadian actress is in Toronto for the world premiere of her latest effort The Bang-Bang Club. Busy!
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Che dramma! It's been a whirlwind of emotions for Hollywood scionette Sofia Coppola in the last few days. Her new film Somewhere underwhelmed the audiences at the Venice Film Fest -- Sad! But then she won the Golden Lion! -- Happy! And now her ex-boyfriend and jury president Quentin Tarantino has been accused of blatant favoritism by the Italian press -- Gasp!
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Here's my kind of funny story: When I was a post-collegiate punk with an afternoon to burn, I would often spend hours riding the single ticket I bought at the very cineplex where most of the TIFF screenings are taking place into and out of two or three different movies. It feels eerie to see many of my New York colleagues clamoring at the scene of the crime, and even stranger to hop from film to film not furtively but as festival workers smile and wave me in. I have to say: The thrill has been compromised.
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So the winged woman-meets-jazz trumpeter romantic fable Passion Play premiered Friday night here in Toronto, and say what you will about the headscrather of a story, the vision of Mickey Rourke in a love scene with Megan Fox -- with wings -- or Bill Murray's hairpiece-aided deadpan gangster cutthroat. But nearly two decades after screenwriter Mitch Glazer began developing his directing debut (inspired in part by his wife, actress Kelly Lynch), it's ultimate realization -- with this cast on this stage all at once -- prompts one to ask what's worth waiting 20 years for? I mean, even Avatar only took 12 or so. Glazer and Lynch met Movieline this weekend to discuss.
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If you've been living under a smallish, dislodged boulder for the past few months and want to be completely surprised by what happens in Danny Boyle's harrowing, uplifting, abusive, exhilarating, calculating and exceedingly clever 127 Hours, stop reading now. I mean it. Because you won't want to know that in 127 Hours James Franco, as real-life mountain climber Aron Ralston, cuts his own arm off with a -- OK, that I'm not going to tell you, because I just don't want to spoil the effect of seeing this unassuming if somewhat diabolical-looking implement for the first time.
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Andrew Garfield's lunch arrived before he did this afternoon in Toronto: a light salad with chicken and broccoli, vinaigrette on the side, and six slices of tomatoes. Digging into the greens, one of the journalists gathered to discuss Garfield's new film Never Let Me Go asked if this was actually the Spider-Man diet. "It's food that I'm eating," the actor replied. "So yes." And so continued the enduring push-pull between the 27-year-old's smoldering, carefully cultivated dramatic presence and his future as the Great White Blockbuster Hope.
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Seven years in the actual assembly and about 50 more in the making, The Illusionist is a labor of love that achieves an increasingly rare phenomenon in feature animation: timelessness. Eager to brand their efforts with some new shiny technology or unparalleled verisimilitude, animators often turn to of-the-moment developments, and their films mark that moment as a result. And yet a growing number have either stuck with or retreated to a kind of slow animation, trusting story and style to carry the day.
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Philip Seymour Hoffman is one of my favorite contemporary actors, and he's perfectly charming in Jack Goes Boating, which is also his debut as a film director. Hoffman plays a shy, awkward New York limo driver whose friends (John Ortiz and Daphne Rubin-Vega) try to help him get his life on-track by fixing him up with an equally shy, awkward young woman played by Amy Ryan.
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James Gunn's SUPER just concluded its Midnight Madness world premiere, and if there's any early favorite on that list of bidding-war candidates coming out of Toronto, this would probably be the one. I'll have more on this one later from the ground, but for now, some first -- i.e. lasting -- impressions of what promises to be the effed-up belle of the ball...
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Listen, I'm with you on the hype thing: There can never be too little, especially this early in what's generally accepted as the dawn of awards season, pretty much before anyone's seen anything and studio money talks. But you know what? Let me put it this way: Everything you've heard about Javier Bardem and Natalie Portman's extraordinary performances in Biutiful and Black Swan is true, and if festivalgoers see anything better this week in Toronto, then all of us are in for one hell of a bounty in the months ahead.
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Considering the dull thud with which last year's opening-night film Creation landed here, the Toronto Film Festival decided to go more traditional with tonight's fest opener. And while Score: A Hockey Musical is quite possibly the most distinctly Canadian product I've seen since, well, ever, there is no denying that this one also throws tradition under the Zamboni. It's more like a hockey opera -- and yes, that really is Theo Fleury doing his own singing.
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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.
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This year the European press has complained bitterly about the quality of the films chosen first for Berlin, then for Cannes: The sense seemed to be that the selection committees for these festivals had somehow failed to find the best films out there, though of course it's hard to know how much of the problem lies in programming and how much can be attributed to the quality of the raw goods out there. Festivals can make programming choices, but they can't pull great movies out of thin air.
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It's a chilly, overcast day in Venice, and as I walk along the Lido down Lungomare Guglielmo Marconi, peering over the tall hedges that separate the street from the sea, the water looks gray and foreboding. What a pretentious-sounding sentence that is! But then, I've just come from seeing artiste Vincent Gallo's Promises Written in Water, one of two pictures Gallo is presenting at the festival. The other is a short (The Agent), and Gallo also appears as an actor in another film in competition, Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski's Essential Killing.
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As much as I love going to film festivals, there's one reason I sometimes feel out of place: Whenever I find myself in a circle of colleagues waxing euphoric about, say, an exquisite Russian or Eastern European movie they've just seen that deals very poetically with the idea of mourning the lost customs of the old country, I always want to pipe up, "Yes, but didn't it remind you just a bit of the Schmenges?"
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