Starting Friday, Noel Murray and I will be blogging our way through the Toronto Film Festival for 10 glorious days (nine for Noel, the lightweight). What does this mean for us? Five films a day, writing sessions well into the early morning, and dangerously little sleep. What’s in it for you? Daily reports on what looks to be one of the strongest festival in years. Just some of the big names in play: David Cronenberg, Gus Van Sant, Ang Lee, the Coen Brothers, Noah Baumbach, Takeshi Kitano, Takashi Miike, Woody Allen, Todd Haynes, Brian De Palma, George Romero, Sidney Lumet, Francois Ozon, Werner Herzog, Bela Tarr, Peter Greenaway, Roy Andersson, Catherine Breillat… the list goes on and on. Plus those inevitable buzz items from not-yet-pedigreed auteurs that will have us frantically rearranging our schedules.
If you're looking for gossip about parties and celebrity sightings, you've come to the wrong place. (I've been going to the festival for eight years and I've never been to a single party—not that I'm anti-social necessarily, but there are 300+ movies to see and the two I'd skip to go could potentially be masterpieces. Plus, those parties are loud, overcrowded, and packed with trendy showbiz types who couldn't give a damn about film. Or at least, that's how I imagine them to be.) Noel and I may take note of some incidental occurances, but the only real local color and "festival atmosphere" come when we're hastily shoveling down noodles and corner sausages between shows. We're always humbled by the courtesy and hospitality of our Canadian friends, but for all intents and purposes, "Toronto" is a red-velvet-draped eight-plex with stadium seating. In our commitment to keep you updated daily with double-barreled blog posts about the festival, we're going to run with a simple format, lifted from our friend (and Cyprus Mail critic) Theo Panayides: A "Film Of The Day," followed by quicker hits on the other films we saw that day, and maybe some random notes about things that happened outside the darkened theater. Given Toronto's status as the biggest and most important festival in North America, our coverage should give you some idea of how the rest of the film year (and the year after) might play out.
Before the festival even started, a handful of official selections were screened here in Chicago, many of them coming out later in the month. I won't spend much time on them here, since a proper review is likely to run within the next few weeks, but for accounting sake, I'll get them out of the way. (Note: If the month of September—usually a time for studios to dump their embarrassments—is this good, I'm highly optimistic about the months ahead.) Here we go:
The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford (dir. Andrew Dominik): Every once in a while, the studio system breaks down and something truly artful and visionary accidentally sneaks out. Warner Brothers has spent the past year trying to figure out what to do with Andrew Dominik's poetic anti-Western, which has more in common with hazy '70s classics like McCabe And Mrs. Miller and The Hired Hand than the vulgar shoot 'em ups that usually pass for Westerns these days. The title (which I love) and the running time (which is earned) are both unwieldy, and the film lacks clear heroes and villains—Brad Pitt's Jesse James is an outlaw in repose, still a commanding presence, but aware that his legendary run is coming to an end; Casey Affleck's Robert Ford is, of course, considered a coward for shooting James in the back, but his mix of idolatry for the man and personal ambition makes him a thorny character, too. The film was apparently pulled from last year's release schedule due to poor test scores; for adventurous moviegoers, those scores should be considered a badge of honor. (A)