The Toronto International Film Festival 2008
Annual Showcase of Cinema At Its Best and Brightest
By: Mark Favermann - Sep 08, 2008
The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) now the biggest and arguably most prestigious publicly attended film festival in the world begins the Thursday after Labor Day (the first Monday in September, in Canada and the US) and lasts for ten days. Over 400 films from about 60 countries are screened at nearly 30 screens in and around downtown Toronto.
Although TIFF recently has begun to give more attention to mainstream Hollywood films, it maintains independent roots. It features retrospectives of national cinemas and individual directors, highlights of Canadian cinema, documentaries, experimental films and a variety of African, South American, Middle Eastern and Asian films as well.
Many great films have had their premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, including Chariots of Fire, The Big Chill, Husbands and Wives, Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, Downfall, American Beauty, Sideways, and Crash to name just a few.
There has been criticism with TIFF, as with the Sundance Film Festival, that Hollywood is having too much influence over the selection process. In recent years, both film festivals have been said to be way too big, slick, commercial, and even too mainstream. However, I say, let them eat popcorn. The mix of mainstream with the indies makes TIFF a more than average movie-lover's Nirvana. Everyone isn't an academic movie critic. And "buzz" is "buzz" from the thousands of viewers to the dozens of critics.
There is literally something there for everyone from entertainment to documentaries or small independent films and large studio pictures. Personally, I try to find both big and small films that tell a story. Others like to suffer from existential or post-modern presentations either in the form of experimental films or serious documentaries. Still others focus on particular thematic movies. I know a forensic psychiatrist who attends every year only to see the films pertaining to the very darkest side of the human condition.
Of course others are interested in only European films or South American films, while some viewers seek out new films by particular directors or want only documentaries. TIFF is a festival for all tastes on a variety of personal interests and sophistication levels, and this is what makes the event so wonderful.
One of the few negatives is the way tickets are distributed. There is a complicated lottery system that distributes requested tickets. The first year, I got five out of six of my choices; last year I managed four of six. This year, with some work and standing in satellite (a new TIFF addition) ticket tent lines, I was able to get seven for seven.
This year a new wrinkle was added: same day premiere or "gala" tickets available at an additional cost. This led to a number of tickets not being sold. The holding back of tickets caused a couple of venues to be less than full I observed. In addition, there is a great reluctance for the organizers to sell blocks of tickets. So, folks have to fight for tickets individually. The Toronto Harvard Club wanted to buy blocks of tickets for their members for Harvard Beats Yale 29 to 29. They were refused by TIFF, and the theatre was less than full.
As for the films, there are always several that have "buzz." A couple that I tried to see were just not available. One was Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married. Another was by Madonna's formerly creatively curtailed director-husband, British director Guy Richie's Rockandrolla. Apparently, Richie is back on track. I love his previous Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. I'll watch them anytime, anywhere, again and again. Unfortunately, Rockandrolla was not playing while I was in Toronto.
The newest Coen Brothers film, Burn After Reading, is being released in the next couple of weeks commercially, so I was not interested in seeing it. However, due to scheduling, I missed " The Wrestler," which just won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. It tells the story of an aging, down-on-his-luck professional wrestler superbly played by Mickey Rourke. Oscar buzz for Mickey has already started. I also missed a noteworthy film receiving a lot of buzz: What Doesn't Kill You with Ethan Hawke, Mark Ruffalo and Amanda Peet. Set in South Boston, it is hoodlum film with great authenticity, power and panache.
I also missed the winner of the m ost popular film. Slumdog Millionaire, a film directed by Danny Boyle, won the Cadillac People's Choice Award this year. Starring Dev Patel and Freida Pinto, it is the story of an orphan living in Mumbai who wins the Indian version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire." I actually traded in tickets to JCVD, a surprisingly good film about a custody fight, returning home a hasbeen and a bank robbery starring the over the hill Muscles from Brussels, Jean-Claude Van Damme. It sounded lame, but was apparently terrific. Who knew? I wish that I could have stayed longer.
Of the ones that I viewed, some I liked better than others. The most difficult one to appreciate was Tony Manero. In Director Pablo LarraÃn's raw rather twisted 1978 Chilean period piece about Pinochet's ruthless neo-fascist regime, Tony Manero (2008), Raúl (played by Alfredo Castro) is obsessed with John Travolta's Tony Manero character from Saturday Night Fever. Hoping to win a look-alike contest that is being held on a hokey television show, He and his non-girlfriend girlfriend Cony (Amparo Noguera), along with her daughter Pauli (Paola Lattus) and Pauli's effeminate boyfriend Goyo (Héctor Morales), practice a dance routine at a humble bar owned by Wilma (Elsa Poblete). Raúl becomes fixated on getting a floor that lights up like the one in Saturday Night Fever.
LarraÃn creates a microcosm of Chile under Pinochet. It is a sick, barren environment where people are willing to steal, turn against their own and even kill to get what they want. The director offers a distinctly metaphorical reflection of Pinochet's government. The easiest way to stop someone from speaking was to permanently silence him. The film communicates on many levels, mostly disgustingly ugly and often soullessly violent. Saturday Night Fever suggests American imperialism. This somehow implies that disco and dictatorship are strangely interchangeable. Due to its violent and scatological images, I doubt if this one gets much commercial play. In Spanish with English subtitles.
In Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, Director Kevin Rafferty takes us back to that seminal year 1968 via "The Game," the annual American collegiate football grudge match between two of America's most prestigious universities. It had a highly unexpected outcome. In this witty and insightful documentary, he interviews players of both teams, who also discuss the socio-political aspect of the time as well as the ethos and mores of Ivy League football.
Actor and former roommate of Al Gore, Tommy Lee Jones was an offensive guard for the Crimson. NFL Hall of Famer and Former Dallas Cowboy Calvin Hill played for Yale. Doonesbury comic strip character BD model was Yale's talented quarterback, Brian Dowling. One of George Bush's more pretentious former roommates played for Yale. The physically better and athletically more gifted Yale team was literally beating the crap out of Harvard for the first half. Harvard came back to tie the score in the last few seconds of the game and with no time on the clock. Yale team members to a man felt that they lost while Harvard's squad felt that they had won. It was summed up in the Harvard Crimson's fabulous headline the next day: Harvard Wins 29-29. A major review of this documentary will follow in a future article. In English with witty factoids and diagrams.
In the great American Western tradition of the late director John Ford, Appaloosa, directed by actor/director Ed Harris (Pollock), includes the grandeur of the scenic open spaces of New Mexico as a major character in the narrative. This along with humor and clever banter in the interaction of friends, as well as the relationship of men to each other and the complex domestication of the wild west by various types of women told the story. Harris plays Virgil Cole, the type of man who is so tough because he has no fear or remorse at consequences of his violent actions, yet he is touched in a deep way by the less than loyal Allison played by Rene Zellweger. Virgil's trusted rather learned assistant is Everett, a retired Calvary officer with an eight-gauged shotgun played by Viggo Mortenson. He minds Cole's back and front as well as assists him with phrasing.
Based on a novel by Robert B. Parker of Spencer fame, the story centers around a typical growing 1880's Western town located on a railroad line that is being terrorized by a vicious rancher, Mr. Bragg, played evilly by Jeremy Irons. Bragg recognizes no law but his own and kills the former town marshal and his deputies. Cole writes a contract with the town, Appaloosa, assumes the marshal job and hires Everett as his deputy. Bragg is arrested and tried. Then all hell breaks loose. In the middle of this, Harris as the director skillfully urges the narrative on by underscoring the complicated relationships between the men and the women. This is a Western with a different perspective: it is at once traditional as well as quite contemporary. In English.
Directed by Christophe Barratier, Faubourg 36 is a totally surprising and wonderful French musical comedy/drama that touches every emotion. Set in a quaint working class suburb of Paris in 1936, it is the story of a group of local entertainers who are trying to save a beloved theatre, their society and their own families. This happens during the Depression, the rise of French fascism and the efforts at worker unionization. It is all dramatized with passion, romance and political as well as social tension.
With its sad lonely stage manager Pigoil and his lost beautiful and talented young son Jojo, the beautiful young chanteuse Douce and the dangerous mob boss and his thugs, Christophe Barratier has crafted a special ensemble production of great beauty and musical grace. I predict that this film may become an international classic. A more in depth review will follow in the future. Opening in 2009. In French with English subtitles.
Australian director Steve Jacobs has taken J. M. Coetzee's Booker Prize-winning novel Disgrace and transformed its essence into a startling and provocative film. The story has been recognized as both a searing dissection of the failings of a self-entitled rather libidinous middle age man (John Malkovich ) and an unflinching view of the lingering demonic consequences of South Africa's apartheid. The story is an unforgiving cinematic rendering that addresses sensitively the tragedy and the humanity of Coetzee's original novel.
This is the story of the unraveling life of a impervious university professor living in Cape Town. Divorced David Lurie destroys his university career through an almost entirely one-sided affair with one of his students. He then flees the city to spend some time with his daughter, Lucy (Jessica Haines) on her isolated farm. Soon after his arrival, his worst fears are realized when father and daughter are savagely attacked by three black youths. After the initial horror begins to pass, David is confounded by additional disbelief and impotence when he learns that one of them is a close relative of Lucy's trusted worker Petrus (Eriq Ebouaney). Though, this dignified older black man and young intelligent white woman have somehow secured a fragile coexistence in the South African bush, there is a clear mysterious and rather unreasonable tension between them.
Like the Mexican film, Amores Perros, Disgrace develops a series of symbolic relationships between protagonists and dogs. John Malkovitch does a star turn here, perhaps worthy of an Academy Award. Not simply a tale about the loss of hope, but instead Jacobs's Disgrace is an exploration of the different paths people take seeking some sort of grace. In English.
Director Claire Denis is a wonderful filmmaker who was born in Paris and grew up primarily in Africa. She has a unique approach to her craft often using the visually mundane to push along narrative in often poetic ways. 35 Rhums traces a whole community of characters from France's working class, but at its core is a superb father-daughter relationship. Lionel (Ales Descas) drives a commuter train and his daughter Jo (Mati Diop) is a university student who works at a Virgin Records store. Her father is a widower. Jo is devoted to her father. Nothing gives her greater pleasure than to care for their immaculate suburban Paris apartment and spend time with him.
Small moments are a delicate part of this director's style, drinking in bars, meeting up with friends, going to concerts and sharing dinner at home. Denis is a master at framing her characters in such a way as to define their aspirations yet limit their lives. The various character's own feelings may be less apparent to themselves than they are when observed by the filmmaker and consequently by the audience. When the film starts to move, literally and figuratively, the addition of the seemingly small details begins narratively to pay off.
35 Rhums is a uniquely observant film. The mundane expresses the simple acts and actions that define most lives. Denis has created a rare quietly eloquent film. From a Western European perspective, this is an almost singular film about blacks and other people of color that does not include, violence, racial disparity, prejudice or even anger. It is a lovely film of relationships, families of all kinds and especially father-daughter bonding. In French with English subtitles.
Any film with Peter O'Toole is worth seeing. Dean Spanley is perhaps a career capping performance by him. Set just after the Boer War in London, this is a cinematic fantasy of fine wine, canines and highly eccentric behaviour. Dean Spanley is a pleasure to be savored like a rare wine-at least for me. Based on a book by Lord Dunsany, the film magically transports us to Edwardian England on the verge of modernity with a strong echo of the traditional past. There are elegant homes, extravagant rooms, lavish costumes and odd characters. Strangely, there is also a surprising tolerance for the peculiar.
Young Fisk (Jeremy Northam) is controlled by his oddly behaved and curmudgeonly father, Fisk Senior (O'Toole). He visits him every Thursday usually to his disappointment. To entertain the old man, Fisk Junior takes his elderly father to a lecture about reincarnation by a visiting swami. At the lecture, and then twice again during the same day, Young Fisk sees the district's new clergyman, Dean Spanley (Sam Neill). Introduced at his father's club, he becomes intrigued, first by the Dean's surprisingly open-minded views on reincarnation, then by his weakness for certain peculiar sensations. Imperial Hungarian Tokay, a rare wine of tsars and emperors, produces the most remarkable trembles of pleasure in the Dean. It also sets him off into the strangest of personal reveries.
With help from his resourceful new friend the colonial conveyancer Wrather (Bryan Brown), Young Fisk is able to procure a large quantity of the finest Tokay. The two men wine and dine the progressively stranger Dean to observe his weird behavior. As the scent and taste of the wine take their effect, the Dean begins to reveal memories of his previous life as a dog. He recalls the keen thrill of communicating with other dogs, his utter disdain for cats and the unparalleled joy of serving his master. His nickname at university was Wag.
New Zealand Director Toa Fraser has assembled a first class cast. Neill treads with grace between comic fantasy and reality, while ernest Northam brings a groundedness to a pivotal role. O'Toole emerges as the troubled soul of the film. He finds precisely the right tone of knowing, hard-won wit and pathos. This will be a film not to everyone's taste, but like Imperial Tokay, those who have a taste for it will more than appreciate its strong bouquet, layered nuances and delicate subtleties. Peter O'Toole should be nominated for a Best Supporting role at the Oscars. In English.
A good kind of tired results from attending a film festival. It is a little like going to a cinematic olympics: one has to be in good shape to endure these events, at least mentally, visually and especially culturally. Once again, the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival underscores the notion that watching great films is the second best thing you can do in the dark.
I am ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.
Rosebud.
I'll make him an offer that he can't refuse.
Here's looking at you, Kid.
Round up the usual suspects.
I am king of the world, Ma.
Just play it.
I could have been a contender.
This is the beginning of a great friendship.