On the Scene: Toronto Film Festival
Sep 7, 2006, 12:55 PM | by Scott Brown
Categories: Film
Well, here I am, friends: in Canada -- America's backlot, as it's affectionately known. It's a great place to eat fries drenched in beef gravy, a great place to shoot trees, rain, and wet pavement, and a great place for film festivals -- this one in particular, the Toronto International Film Festival, where I'll be spending the next 10 days, watching flicks, filing dispatches, and, Eros willing, seducing flame-haired comic stylist Catherine O'Hara with nothing but Southern charm and series of lewd gestures.
Urgent news first: I have just learned that all Mars bars in Canada are now peanut-free. Canadian television has taught me this.
(See what else Scott is learning after the jump...)
But even Canadian television can’t guide me through the celluloid morass that is the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival. It’s a table set for giants -- giants with fly-like compound eyes capable of watching 16 films at once. I do not have these attributes. I am but a small, near-sighted man with a dream: to see some, if not all, of the following films, plus some other surprising “finds” and maybe, just maybe, a couple of real stinkers to carve up -- all for you, reader, all for you. Yes, A.O. Scott and I are up here, fending off wild, bloodthirsty Canadian moose, just so you can get a peek at your precious ’06 Oscar crop. I know, this is the job, I knew it when I signed on, but... sheesh, this is practically Deadliest Catch, people. I actually envy those crab guys. They get to wear those cool orange jumpers. They don’t have to mull the implications of the phrase "latest from Tarsem."
What am I looking forward to? I'll fight through the martyrdom and single out Sascha Baron Cohen’s heapingly pre-lauded Borat, for starters: Think I’m gonna have to hit that midnight screening tomorrow night. Gonna need a good laugh by the time Thursday’s through: I’m struggling between public screenings of Deliver Us from Evil (the only documentary about the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal made with the cooperation of an accused pedophile) and The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, Zacharias Kunuk’s long-awaited follow-up to Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner. Sex abuse or Inuit-Scandinavian culture clash? Cannes champ The Wind That Shakes the Barley is my runner-up. Whee! I can already feel my mood disorder shrieking. Or perhaps that’s just the “poutine.” Damn this exotic Canadian cuisine!
The weekend’s already filling up. We have on our hands not one but two British fantasias on the killing of a world leader: The already tiresomely controversial though intriguingly abbreviated D.O.A.P. (Death of a President) and The Prisoner, or How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair. (Ex-Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi is screaming at his agent right now, “Why doesn’t anyone make a movie about killing me?”) Rescue Dawn, the new Werner Herzog odyssey, is rubbing up against a screening of Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett’s Babel, the Iñárritu Cannes sensation. And somewhere in there, I’ve got to see Will Ferrell go all Pirandellian in Stranger Than Fiction, the first “Kaufmanesque” movie to be made without the involvement of Charlie Kaufman.
As for the buzz? Well, everyone seems inordinately (or perhaps just ordinately) stoked for For Your Consideration, the Christopher Guest gang’s take on the Oscar race. (Anchoring this one is the aforementioned Catherine O’Hara, one of the top comic performers of all time, as a washed-up actress.) The Korean horror flick The Host is coming in hot, emanating good buzz of uncertain provenance. I’m pretty thrilled for Away from Her, the directorial debut of actress Sarah Polley (pictured), based on the wonderful Alice Munro short story “The Bear Went Over the Mountain.” (Did I mention it stars Julie Christie as an Alzheimer’s afflictee?) And somewhere in there I’ve got to cram in John Cameron Mitchell’s experiment in art porn, Shortbus. (Note to self: Awesome wording!) Not to mention All the King's Men, which I promise I’ll see before noon on Monday. Hey, cut me some slack! I’ve got a Russell Crowe/Ridley Scott flick (A Good Year), Todd “In the Bedroom” Field’s exquisitely trailered Little Children and a contempo Macbeth by the maker of Romper Stomper to fit in there! Do you want my mind to explode, reader? Is that what you want? (I’ll give it to you, don’t tempt me! Come, sit in the “splash zone.”…)
Tell you one thing, I’m-a need some comedy to cleanse this drama-dried palate. Here’s hoping Michael Ian Black’s The Pleasure of Your Company and Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show. And there’s something here called Kurt Cobain: About a Son. Sounds like what the kids call a “laugh fest.”
My pick for an outside smash? Jindabyne, from the guy who made 2002’s Lantana, the movie that very quietly put Anthony LaPaglia back on the map. It’s based on the Raymond Carver short story “So Much Water, So Close to Home,” which got a sliver of Robert Altman’s cinematic attention in Short Cuts. No Huey Lewis this time, but what can you do? The addition of Huey Lewis to this festival would probably snap my fragile will. I’m still wrapping my mind around the words “Bobcat Goldthwait-directed dramedy”: That would be Sleeping Dogs Lie.
Chew on that. I gotta go fight a moose.
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