“I don’t know whether I liked the film because it’s a good film, or because I think I’m that guy,” a colleague said to me the other night here in Toronto about Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air and its lead character, George Clooney’s smooth-talking, frequent flying, no-attachments corporate road warrior. (In actuality, my colleague is nearly 20 years shy of being able to call himself “that guy.”) Or, he continued, “Maybe it’s just that the film is such a perfect fit for a film festival,” a thought that had occurred to me too. As film festival attendees, we fly […]
The first 2009 Wavelengths Program (or Programme, as the Canadians say) was held at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO). It’s a sophisticated building, one that spent years shrouded in mystery and scaffolding, and has only just revealed its new Gehry glory. Organized this year by talented film programmer Andréa Picard, Wavelengths is an annual extensive program of avant-garde cinema that is screened in six parts during the course of the Toronto International Film Festival. The Festival’s first installment, titled Titans, was an artful collection of films that that varied widely in technique, from an architectural piece by Heinz Emigholz […]
Even big time festivals goof up sometimes, Steven Soderbergh has finished his documentary on Spalding Gray and buzz builds for Tom Ford’s A Single Man.
Over at our Toronto page, check out interviews with Bright Star‘s Jane Campion and Jennifer’s Body‘s Karyn Kusama. Both films are currently screening at the festival and will be out in theaters next week.
Chaste is not a word often associated with the films of Jane Campion. From the boudoirs of The Portrait of a Lady to the rough frontier bedrooms of The Piano (1993), Campion is known for her steamy, sultry visions of intimacy. But in her latest film, Bright Star, the only female filmmaker to win the Palme d’Or puts the gloves on, telling the tale of British poet John Keats and his love, Fanny Brawne, with modesty and restraint. Keats died at the age of 25, before he could find the critical and financial success to wed his beloved. Yet Brawne, […]
indieWIRE has compiled a list of 145 titles that will be for sale at Toronto. Some of them with big name talent attached — Don Roos’ Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, with Natalie Portman, Atom Egoyan’s Liam Neeson-Julianne Moore thriller Chloe and Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime. TIFF ’09 has the makings of a buying bonanza. We’ll be on the scene if anything goes down. Head over to our dedicated page throughout the fest.
Howard Feinstein will be covering Toronto for Filmmaker this year. Below, he jots down a few of the things he’s looking forward to. Question: How to group the films at Toronto I am most eager to see, by section or by geographical programming (a major plus for the festival)? Answer: Both. Here goes, but frankly, the titles are hardly exhaustive. “Visions,” with only 12 titles, could turn out to be the hot strand. I’m eager to see Trash Humpers (above left), by the poet of the most ignored among the marginalized, Harmony Korine. Ditto To Die Like a Man, by […]
This has been a festival of surprises, beginning with higher attendance than anticipated in view of the world-wide economic crisis, and the emergence of unexpected stars: how about Michael Moore and President Hugo Chavez as media darlings? Moore, who apparently is better known in Europe than one would imagine, brought Capitalism: A Love Story (right), drawing an overflow crowd to his press conference and enthusiastic audiences to the screenings. Moore’s is one of the six U.S. films competing for the Golden Lion. The real coup, however, was an international stage for Chavez in Oliver Stone’s South of the Border, signing […]
Here’s the way it used to be. You made an edgy, well-received independent film, one that showed your facility to tell a story and work with actors, and the smart Hollywood scripts — quality writing that required the touch of someone outside the system — would arrive in those expensively-printed agency binders. And that’s the way it seemed to be playing out for Karyn Kusama, who made an excellent debut with her gritty, low-budget Girlfight, a female boxing movie that launched the movie career of Michelle Rodriguez. But then a couple of things happened. First, her follow-up, Aeon Flux, was […]
Sometimes people ask me how I went from living in Los Angeles, writing a studio film like 40 Days & 40 Nights, to living in Minneapolis, directing an independent comedy like nobody. It’s a fair question but it seems there’s a subtext here, too. Many people think independent film is a step down from the studio system. And I’m sure it is — for some people. But let’s go back. 40 Days & 40 Nights is about a guy who gives up sex for lent and then meets the perfect girl. The short version of how it was made goes […]