Snoop Dogg unveiled a new name and a new film at last year's Toronto International Film Festival and now plans are firming up for its theatrical roll out. The documentary, Reincarnated, which follows the hip hop star's evolution to a reggae singer, will bow in select cities March 15th.
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Fans of Jared Leto's band Thirty Seconds to Mars like to refer to themselves as family, but 'apostles' might be a better term. Thanks to their fervent support, Artifact, the Leto-directed (under the pseudonym Bartholomew Cubbins) film about the band's lengthy legal battle with its record label EMI, is making some noise on the indie circuit. more »
Cannes, Sundance, Toronto, Berlin, San Sebastian, Hong Kong, New York, Telluride - and Pyongyang? The end of Summer brought on the annual big tentpole festivals in Venice and Toronto as well as industry and celeb-heavy Telluride, ushering in the annual awards race and many of this year's fall releases. But don't expect North Korea's international film festival, which opens Thursday to factor too deeply into Oscar. In fact, Americans are apparently banned. Held every two years, the Pyongyang International Film Festival is a chance for residents of the so-called Hermit Kingdom to view foreign films on the big screen.
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I keep coming back to The Place Beyond the Pines, but it was the movie that defined the Toronto International Film Festival for me. More than once, I heard the director Derek Cianfrance describe his ambitious and moving film as a movie about "legacy" and how "sometimes you're born into a world with all of these repercussions that people have made before you" and "have to fight and claw to get out of that." Judging from the features and documentaries I saw during my short stay in Toronto, these ideas of legacy and the sins of our fathers — whether they're our literal or institutional fathers — are weighing heavily on America's collective psyche. more »
It is certainly one of the most anticipated questions in recent casting memory. Who is going to play the role of Christian Grey in the film version of Fifty Shades of Grey. Two of the rumored top contenders for the scintillating part, Ryan Gosling and Alexander Skarsgård seemed a bit blindsided by the question at the recent Toronto International Film Festival, with Gosling giving a mostly noncommittal response, while Skarsgård gave a more thoughtful exchange on the red carpet of the TIFF premiere of What Maisie Knew. Fans can even be heard screaming out, "You have to play him!"
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David O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook took top honors at the Toronto International Film Festival, winning the Blackberry People's Choice Award Sunday. Unlike most of its top tier festival brethren, TIFF does not have a formal jury competition. Also taking an audience prize was Martin McDonagh's Seven Psychopaths, which won the prize in the Midnight Madness category. The audience winner for Best Documentary went to Artifact by Bartholomew Cubbins.
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Also in Friday afternoon's round-up of news briefs, two more Toronto International Film Festival titles head for theatrical runs. And Sparkle's Mara and Salim Akil eye some Abandonment Issues.
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Just a couple of days into the Toronto International Film Festival this year, a curious commonality was noticeable in a number of the documentaries that I screened - re-enactments. While I only managed to see just under half of the nearly 50 documentary features in the TIFF line-up, it was surprising to see the storytelling approach — where significant past events are recreated via actors and, sometimes, animation — relatively widely employed. While some notable non-fiction films have made effective use of the practice — such as The Imposter or The Thin Blue Line — re-enactments more often feel in line with television productions of the Unsolved Mysteries variety. They remain a controversial element of documentary making, potentially challenging a film's authenticity by introducing an outside, fictional element. more »
She has won a slew of awards around the worldwide festival circuit and an Indian Academy Award nomination for titles including Fire, Water and Bollywood/Hollywood, but Indian-born filmmaker Deepa Metha's latest Midnight's Children may never be available to Indian audiences because the current government's aversion to the film, which had its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival, has made the title unpalatable to distributors. The story, written by Salman Rushdie, who himself received a death Fatwa from the late Ayatollah Khomeini for another one of his novels, The Satanic Verses mirrors India's history told through the emotional coming-of-age of a young man.
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One of my favorite movies to screen at the Toronto International Film Festival was Seven Psychopaths, which was written and directed by Irish playwright-turned-filmmaker Martin McDonagh. Beginning in the mid-1990s, McDonagh caused quite a stir in New York's theater world with his funny, macabre plays, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, A Behanding in Spokane and The Pillowman. And in 2008, he turned heads in the film world with his debut feature, In Bruges, which he also wrote and directed. (If you haven't seen that film, you should before CBS Films releases Seven Psychopaths on Oct. 12. It's a dark comic gem with genuine emotional depth about two hit men who go on the lam when a job goes wrong. more »
Also in Wednesday morning's round-up of news briefs, American would-be filmmaker whose anti-Islam film sparked violence in Egypt and Libya reacts. And more Toronto titles head to theaters.
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The Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña starrer End Of Watch appears to have hooked audiences at the Toronto International Film Festival, where the police drama premiered. The fast-paced story of two LAPD officers who form a powerful bond as they patrol the mean streets of South Central Los Angeles required both actors to go through months of training and "ride-alongs" with L.A. and Inglewood police officers; the movie itself unfolds a liberal dose of gun fire, fights and some gruesome scenes. But on one patrol in the lead-up to the shoot, Jake Gyllenhaal experienced a true-life horror — a murder.
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Before Twilight and even before Kristen Stewart was first approached to be in On The Road by Brazilian-born director Walter Salles, the young actress read the Jack Kerouac novel for school. She told Movieline that she picked up the book because it was an assignment given, but her experience with the now American classic evolved. "I found the book fun," she said. But after reading and studying it more, it became much more compelling and taught her personal life lessons about growing up, making choices and dealing with inhibitions. She also emphasized that while she played the comparatively wild Marylou, she does not judge her uninhibited character.
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"Everything is connected," reads the tagline for Cloud Atlas. As it is with life and the history of time and humanity, so it is with film reviews; sharply divided reactions have been coming out of Toronto, where the ambitious, history-spanning epic had its world premiere. Seldom do movies garner such polarizing critical reads: Is Cloud Atlas a triumph of ambition or, as one critic spat, "a unique and totally unparalleled disaster?"
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As a movie title, The Place Beyond The Pines doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but that didn’t stop the latest project from Derek Cianfrance and his Blue Valentine star Ryan Gosling from being one of the most discussed films at the Toronto International Film Festival. The picture — which tells the tale of a bank-robbing motorcycle stunt driver (Gosling), a cop (Bradley Cooper) who fatefully crosses his path and their sons, did not have a distributor when it premiered at the festival on Friday night. That changed when Deadline reported on Sunday that Focus Features had acquired the film for release.
On Saturday, Gosling and Cianfrance met with the press to discuss the making of the film, its thematic exploration of legacy, and Gosling's fantasy about robbing banks on a motorcycle — an idea that figures into the plot of film. The Pines, Cianfrance explained, "is a place where you find your demons but also where you can find your destiny."
As for that title, it doesn't sound so cumbersome when you consider that it could have been called Schenectady. Read on for the explanation. more »
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