Lacking the glitzy pretentiousness of Cannes, the deep freeze and isolation of Sundance or the cutesy underdog appeal of South by Southwest, the Toronto International Film Festival still manages this unequivocally distinctive trait: It’s fucking huge. With 352 films from 55 countries flickering across fewer than 2 dozen screens in 9 days, viewers wrapped up in the experience are lucky to escape with their persistence of vision intact.
It’s virtually impossible to parse every cobwebbed corner of the festival program (believe me, I’ve tried) to find an even playing field for small, unheralded discoveries and big budget fare that can play together on a balanced stage. With rampant clamoring over the obscurity of little indies that get downgraded to the unostentatious fate of straight-to-video release, many audiences may be wondering if any of the stuff coming out of festivals is worth their time.
Fortunately for the non-art house crowd, Toronto’s program offered promising peaks at impressive mainstream fall releases. Star power is in fine form these days: George Clooney has never been better as the dashing legal “fixer” in Michael Clayton, the directorial debut of Bourne franchise screenwriter Tony Gilroy. In Toronto, Clooney bumped elbows with perennial colleague Brad Pitt, promoting his acclaimed outlaw performance alongside Casey Affleck in the dreary, evocative period piece The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. And, for devotees of all things cute and quirky, there was Juno, a follow-up to Jason Reitman’s scathingly satiric debut Thank You For Smoking, that relies on a surprising level of sincerity as it explores the rollicking experiences of a teenager (Ellen Page) whose accidental pregnancy launches a series of comedic encounters.
Straightforward entertainment had plenty of room to breathe: George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead was a big hit in the festival’s midnight section, alongside renowned collaborator Dario Argento’s campy gore-fest Mother of Tears. The festival also offered some nifty foreign discoveries in the arena of genre filmmaking, including the quasi-animated mockumentary Dai Nipponjin and the French thriller Inside, which might be the first abortion horror film—at least until Tony Kaye’s unsettling documentary Lake of Fire (which played at Toronto in 2006) opens later this year.
There were certain movies destined to embark on a rickety path to theatrical distribution, but they’ll make it at some point. The Babysitters, a naughty teenage sex drama that suggests Cruel Intentions by way of Risky Business, stars John Leguizamo as a disgruntled husband whose affair with a local babysitter (Katherine Waterston, daughter of Sam) leads her to start a profitable sitter operation that functions as a front for prostitution. Although a bit too dedicated to its subversive premise, the movie has a liberating sense of danger about blossoming sexuality.
Hardly mischievous but certainly unconventional, veteran filmmaker John Sayles’ Honeydripper gives us an endearing, utterly modest look at an African-American community in Alabama. Set in 1950—before Elvis stole the blues—the movie features fantastic performances that take place at the eponymous music joint run by a jaded pianist (Danny Glover, rarely better). The story is an ode to struggles long past, but it retains an adorable sense of innocence about its characters.
A more stylized trip down nostalgia lane, Guy Maddin’s semi-autobiographical documentary essay My Winnipeg is shot in black and white, features the directors somewhat embellished memories of his youth, and careens from heartfelt memories to the brink of sanity in its exploration of transience (not unlike Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World). If there was a more literal parallel to that theme at the festival, it would have to be Werner Herzog’s brilliant nature documentary Encounters at the End of the World, which finds the German New Wave pioneer traveling through Antarctica and studying both the disparate wild life and the esoteric personalities dedicating their time to living there.
The sense of authorship among prominent filmmakers (the genuine auteurs, if you will) certainly prevailed at TIFF this year, a fact demonstrated by many of the aforementioned titles—and many, many others, including new works from the Coen Brothers and Todd Haynes, but let’s keep those revelations on a local scale: The New York Film Festival is just around the corner.
It’s virtually impossible to parse every cobwebbed corner of the festival program (believe me, I’ve tried) to find an even playing field for small, unheralded discoveries and big budget fare that can play together on a balanced stage. With rampant clamoring over the obscurity of little indies that get downgraded to the unostentatious fate of straight-to-video release, many audiences may be wondering if any of the stuff coming out of festivals is worth their time.
Fortunately for the non-art house crowd, Toronto’s program offered promising peaks at impressive mainstream fall releases. Star power is in fine form these days: George Clooney has never been better as the dashing legal “fixer” in Michael Clayton, the directorial debut of Bourne franchise screenwriter Tony Gilroy. In Toronto, Clooney bumped elbows with perennial colleague Brad Pitt, promoting his acclaimed outlaw performance alongside Casey Affleck in the dreary, evocative period piece The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. And, for devotees of all things cute and quirky, there was Juno, a follow-up to Jason Reitman’s scathingly satiric debut Thank You For Smoking, that relies on a surprising level of sincerity as it explores the rollicking experiences of a teenager (Ellen Page) whose accidental pregnancy launches a series of comedic encounters.
Straightforward entertainment had plenty of room to breathe: George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead was a big hit in the festival’s midnight section, alongside renowned collaborator Dario Argento’s campy gore-fest Mother of Tears. The festival also offered some nifty foreign discoveries in the arena of genre filmmaking, including the quasi-animated mockumentary Dai Nipponjin and the French thriller Inside, which might be the first abortion horror film—at least until Tony Kaye’s unsettling documentary Lake of Fire (which played at Toronto in 2006) opens later this year.
There were certain movies destined to embark on a rickety path to theatrical distribution, but they’ll make it at some point. The Babysitters, a naughty teenage sex drama that suggests Cruel Intentions by way of Risky Business, stars John Leguizamo as a disgruntled husband whose affair with a local babysitter (Katherine Waterston, daughter of Sam) leads her to start a profitable sitter operation that functions as a front for prostitution. Although a bit too dedicated to its subversive premise, the movie has a liberating sense of danger about blossoming sexuality.
Hardly mischievous but certainly unconventional, veteran filmmaker John Sayles’ Honeydripper gives us an endearing, utterly modest look at an African-American community in Alabama. Set in 1950—before Elvis stole the blues—the movie features fantastic performances that take place at the eponymous music joint run by a jaded pianist (Danny Glover, rarely better). The story is an ode to struggles long past, but it retains an adorable sense of innocence about its characters.
A more stylized trip down nostalgia lane, Guy Maddin’s semi-autobiographical documentary essay My Winnipeg is shot in black and white, features the directors somewhat embellished memories of his youth, and careens from heartfelt memories to the brink of sanity in its exploration of transience (not unlike Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World). If there was a more literal parallel to that theme at the festival, it would have to be Werner Herzog’s brilliant nature documentary Encounters at the End of the World, which finds the German New Wave pioneer traveling through Antarctica and studying both the disparate wild life and the esoteric personalities dedicating their time to living there.
The sense of authorship among prominent filmmakers (the genuine auteurs, if you will) certainly prevailed at TIFF this year, a fact demonstrated by many of the aforementioned titles—and many, many others, including new works from the Coen Brothers and Todd Haynes, but let’s keep those revelations on a local scale: The New York Film Festival is just around the corner.
