Many luminaries from the film blogosphere attended the Toronto International Film Festival this week. (I would have gone, but I don’t speak Canadian.) Spoutblog chatted with Paris, Not France director Adria Petty to find out the story behind those cancelled screenings. “I’ll just tell you the truth,” she said. “The truth is that we just didn’t want the film pirated. There’s a lot of people involved in the film that own it or financed it. It was in a lot of different camps and different layers. And basically, at the end of the day, instead of having the whole thing canceled or pulled because of all these greedy or annoying people, Paris and I, who wanted the film to screen at Toronto and were honored by it, we were like, look let’s just do it once in one big theater. And then we put the night vision goggles in one time––because everybody is like, who pays for the night vision?”
In this Toronto dispatch, Green Cine Daily asks the musical question: “Does postmodernism have a future?...Without a doubt, this year's grand test case for the future viability of any form of large-scale political cinema, if not for outsized American auteur cinema in general, is Steven Soderbergh's Che. Divided into two full-length films, each slightly over two hours, Che could be the ultimate sinkhole for our day, a giant leftist vacuum into which someone's money vanished without a trace. How can this film even exist, and who is its presumed audience? To Soderbergh's credit, there seems to have been little consideration of this question. I would like to be able to weigh in passionately on the debate around Che, but the sad truth is, there's little onscreen to justify passions in either direction.”
At Scanners, Jim Emerson applauds our Canadian oppressors. “One difference between Canadians and Europeans: They are not into power-tripping you at the entrance to movie theaters. I arrived too late (about ten minutes before starting time) for the one and only press/industry screening of Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker yesterday…Then word came that no more seats could be found. Some of us (the Americans and Canadians) were saddened and disappointed and frustrated. Others (those with European accents, though it is possible they were Quebecois) were indignant. They waved their passes and accused the theater staff of ignoring them or cheating them in some way….Finally, a staffer had to explain: There. Were. No. More. Seats. She was not trying to cheat people out of seeing the Kathryn Bigelow movie. She was not attempting to wield arbitrary authority over a gaggle of eager festivalgoers in order to make herself feel powerful and important. She was doing her job and telling the truth: The theater was full.”
Slant supplies its own Canadian content with a look at Adoration. “A characteristically masterful welter of bad vibrations, Atom Egoyan's latest finds the director back in Canadian Traumaland after his Hollywood sojourn in Where the Truth Lies. Keyed to the characters' sense of lingering grief, the narrative unfurls as a time-hopping maze of action and consequence—its deftness and delicacy shame Arriaga's tawdry temporal gymnastics in The Burning Plain. A button-pushing essay by a high-schooler (Devon Bostick) gives the absence-riddled film its center: Turning an article about a failed terrorist plot into a faux-eulogy to his dead parents, the boy uncorks a reservoir of sorrow that brings together his uncle (a surprisingly excellent Scott Speedman), teacher (Egoyan axiom Arsinée Kanjian), and other members of the community… Moody, gliding filmmaking and ripples of quizzical humor save it from being a lugubrious game of therapeutic musical chairs.
And in List-o-Mania, PopMatters offers the Top Ten Things I Loved About TIFF 08, including the return of Debra Winger. “She was only in about four scenes of Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, but in her scant screen time, she conducted a master class in scene-stealing as the mother of the title character and Anne Hathaway’s noxious Kym. Yes, it may be the ‘mother’ role, but Winger is understatedly elegant, and rock-solid. Here’s to hoping this high-profile release gains her some traction on the awards circuit, in tandem with Hathaway. It’s a small, quietly fuming turn that should be lauded for its poetic simplicity.”
