It's hard to pinpoint when, exactly, the
documentary-style hand-held camera became a major stylistic force in
movie drama—Martin Scorsese certainly gave it an early jolt of artistry
in Mean Streets (1973)—but by now, we've all seen enough swervy,
jittery, bobbing-camera film fictions to have grown all but immune to
the technique. In 1992, when Woody Allen went hand-held in Husbands and
Wives, it seemed a trendy affectation (and one that made more than a
few people literally queasy). By the time the Dogma 95 movement came
about, hand-held movies tended to win praise from critics for their
radical austerity, though to me the rawness of the visual technique in,
say, The Celebration only highlighted the trumped-up fakery of what was
actually transpiring on screen. So when I tell you that Rachel Getting
Married, the new Jonathan Demme picture, is a family drama shot in
long, spontaneous takes with a hand-held camera that feels as jumpy and
brash as a home-video camcorder, you'd be perfectly justified if you
said, "Yawn! What else is new?"
But Rachel Getting Married is something new indeed.
It's not just Demme's images that are blistering and off-balance and
intimately alive. So is everything that happens to the Buchanans, a
prosperous Connecticut family who live on a beautiful leafy estate, and
who are marrying off their eldest daughter, Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt),
to Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe), who is some sort of hotshot in the music
business. He is also African-American, a fact that the movie
exquisitely ignores (though that doesn't mean it isn't central to the
dramatic texture).
Rachel's younger sister, Kym (Anne Hathaway, pictured), has
been an addict since she was a teenager. (Which drugs? How about all of
them.) For this special occasion, she is being let out of rehab for the
weekend. Getting cast as a compulsively self-loathing, frayed-nerves
drug casualty is certainly a stretch for an actress as lovely and
red-carpet fresh as Anne Hathaway, yet from the moment she shows up,
her eyes peering out with a junkie's paranoid radar from beneath her
Louise Brooks-helmet-slashed-with-a-straight-razor hair, the actress
wires you into her rage and awareness. Kym is a walking disaster, but a
disaster with feelers, and the effect she has on the other members of
her family is to electrify them with the dreaded truths she calls up.
Hathaway is a revelation: She shoots far beyond giving a damn about her
"likability" in a performance as scalding as it is controlled. She
makes toxic narcissism magnetic.
I'm not sure I've ever seen a wedding movie that made
me feel, the way Rachel Getting Married does, as if I wasn't just
crashing the event but was part of the family.
It never fails, PopWatchers — at every film festival I've covered of late, I've always managed to miss catching the flicks that hit the big buzz bulls-eye, which, in the case of the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival, were easily The Wrestler, Rachel Getting Married and Slumdog Millionaire. I'm not too worried, though: Since the first and third were acquired by Fox Searchlight either during or right before the fest, and the second came to Canada with Sony Pictures Classics at its arm, I'm sure I'll get to see all of 'em in short order.
And I certainly had plenty to take in around that bulls-eye's periphery, even during the festival's waning days — and I do mean waning, what with so many festival-goers including most of my colleagues, skipping town well before me. EW.com video mastermind Jason Averett was among them, which is why I'm can't pop in the embed code for my latest vlog discussing aforementioned Toronto activities — Averett took the webcam with him. So it's back the ole reliable written word for me; if you jump-cut your way past the jump with me (get it?!), I'll unspool a montage of my final three days at the fest, including why the makers of The Hurt Locker would prefer I not conflate it with 2007's failed Iraq war films, why the star and director of Pride & Glory think spending a year on the shelf was a good thing, and how Adrien Brody made a lemon wedge disappear before my very eyes.
Film festival confession: Sometimes, five or six or seven minutes into a screening, I know that I’ve made a terrible mistake. It’s not so much that the movie is definitively bad — who can tell after five or six or seven minutes? But something (the typeface of the credits? The music? The way the camera pans to an actor with a flourish that screams precious!) is giving me an allergic reaction, at least at that hour, at that point in my movie-going marathon. And the best thing I can do, both for myself and in fairness to the filmmaker who did the hard work, is to scram. Leave. Get some fresh air, get a coffee refill, choose another adventure in another screening room.
That was me and Lovely, Still. Ooh, bad choice. Martin Landau plays a lonely old man, and Ellen Burstyn plays an old woman who sneaks glances at him with a dewiness that announces, old-folks romance ahead! At least I’m guessing an old-folks romance was ahead. I sat through Landau’s very slow pantomime of a senior citizen getting out of bed, washing up, and shuffling off to work as a supermarket lackey — and then I bolted.
Here, after the jump, are three festival highlights — films that kept me glued to my seat:
Bill Maher, with his wryly contemptuous hyper-confident gleam, doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who loses sleep about a lot of things, but I've sometimes wondered if it bothers him that he isn't fawned over by the media the way that Jon Stewart is. They're our two reigning genius dissecters of the American political circus (Stephen Colbert is something else--a postmodern satirist), but Maher, unlike Stewart, puts his personal idiosyncrasies right out there, and his prejudices, too--about sex (which he appears to value more than love), marriage (he's not a fan), and religion (he's really not a fan). Maher is more than happy to be the skunk at the garden party, and a gloriously un-P.C. one at that, and that's one of the reasons that some people can't stand him. (I know: A number of them work at EW.)
To me, though, Maher's merciless honesty, not just about politics but about who he really is, is what makes him such a singular and exciting comic artist. He's a bombs-away confessional truth-teller, and in Religulous, his winkingly blasphemous detonation of all things holy and scriptural, he's like Lenny Bruce with an inquiring mind and a video camera.
In this documentary collaboration with Larry Charles, who also directed Borat, Maher travels all over America, and also to Jerusalem and the Vatican, grilling people about their religious faith. He talks to ministers, rabbis, clerics, Middle American true believers, his own mother (who is Jewish--though Maher was raised Catholic), a guy who helps gay men get in touch with their inner straight Christians, and a fellow who plays Jesus at an evangelical theme park.
Walking up a major Toronto street around 11pm the other night after a late dinner, I passed an empty parking lot hemmed by a looming wall of fire. Flames leapt like — well, like some fake conflagration out of a movie set, an artfully sculpted blaze. I saw no bystanders or fire trucks for a good long while before the wah-wah of sirens confirmed that what I was witnessing was not performance art.
The fact is, film festivals make zombies of us all. So you can understand, maybe, why one of my favorite films at this year’s well-mannered Canadian festival of international cinema too-muchness has been a crazy-cool, low-budget, under-the-radar brainy Canadian horror flick called Pontypool, after the provincial town in which it’s set. This is, yes, a zombie movie, complete with infected souls who attack a radio station on a snowstormy Valentine's Day, and Stephen McHattie as a splendidly cantankerous radio talk show personality who fights back. (The disease is spread person to person through...tainted language!) But coming from the born-to-be-wild Ontario auteur Bruce McDonald (he made The Tracy Fragments in 2007), Pontypool suggests 28 Days Later -- written by linguist Noam Chomsky.
The movie is witty, economically gory, and altogether a find, the more so for hiding in plain sight amid attention-grabbing titles with publicists attached. Here’s one: The Brothers Bloom, a picaresque tale of fraternal con men (played by Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody), their funky, nearly silent Japanese sidekick (Babel’s Rinko Kikuchi, pictured, bottom), and a madcap heiress (Rachel Weisz, pictured, top) who disturbs the equanimity of the sibling bond. (Although the brothers grab the title, Weisz and Kikuchi steal the show.) Writer-director Rian Johnson has clearly been influenced by the life’s-a-carnival worldview and art-direction aesthetics of Wes Anderson, and this follow-up to his 2005 debut, Brick, is crowded, and sometimes cluttered with romping interludes for the sake of romping; the movie itself is something of a cheery con, with one or two too many plot fake-outs. But I’m willing to hang on for the detours from such an interesting filmmaker in the process of finding his best, most authentic voice.
After the jump, sneak previews of Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, Michael Winterbottom's Genova, and more!
The Toronto film festival may be chronologically half way over, PopWatchers, but if we're counting by the sheer numbers of screenings, stars, roughed-up rock stars and autograph seekers, this year's Canadian shindig is well into its final turn down the home stretch. Whereas Sunday was a whirlwind of screenings, parties, interviews and fancy dinners, with so many skipping town at the end of the weekend, Monday was all with the low-key -- aside from preparing for our upcoming News & Notes festival report in Friday's magazine, I only took in two screenings: Uncertainty with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and The Hurt Locker with Jeremy Renner (28 Weeks Later) and Guy Pearce. Which means I finally have time in today's Toronto vlog to talk about something I've wanted to discuss since the first day: The difference between the press screenings and the public ones.
Before you click below, though, a quick disclaimer: You may notice at the end I promise one final video blog coming your way tomorrow. That, alas, is a lie. I hadn't realized our EW.com video mastermind/savant/genius/wunderkind/savior Jason Averett (who knows how to teach these vlogs the language of the interwebs) was heading home tomorrow morning. So instead on Wednesday I'll be back to the good ole written word for my final reports from the fest. Forthwith, my last vlog -- at least, from the wilds of Canadia.
Earlier this week, I was lucky enough to chat with Ralph Fiennes, who popped into town to promote The Duchess, in which he plays the Duke of Devonshire, an ice-cold 18th-century aristocrat who breaks his young wife’s (Keira Knightley) heart when he takes her best friend as his live-in mistress. Ouch. Fiennes is really quite wonderful in the part, bringing emotional layers to a character a lesser actor might have portrayed as a two-dimensional villain. (’Twould be great to see Fiennes get an Oscar nom for it; speaking of which, be sure to check out Dave Karger's Oscar Watch interview with Fiennes, embedded after the jump!) “I would argue that [his] is a cruelty born of a certain emotional malfunction,” Fiennes explained of the Duke. “It’s not a sadism. It’s not a willful evilness.”
All that talk of not-so-nice guys got me thinking about He Who Shall Not Be Named — and how Fiennes wraps his head around playing pure, unadulterated b-a-d in the Harry Potter films. “That’s actually the hardest to do because you have to personify evil, and there’s such a history of clichés and villains and monsters,” he said. “You’ve got to struggle not to play all the obvious notes. And with such extreme makeup, such an extreme look — that’s the challenge. Also, the style of the movies is so strong. The movie itself is its own machine, and you’ve got to fulfill a function of a bigger machine. It would be good to keep the sense of some kind of real psychology going on, even in all the special effects and everything.” That is, assuming that Fiennes reprises his role as Lord Voldie for the final movies, which he has every intention of doing. “I’m not officially contracted to the last ones, but I think that’s in the cards,” he said. “I want to do it. It’s just that they haven’t got a script yet, so the deal side of it isn't in place. But the indications are that it'll happen.” Watch for the Dark Mark in the sky.
It's official: The Toronto Film Festival and the Academy Awards have broken up. Or, at least, they're engaging in a trial separation. From this critic's perspective, that's a good thing. The establishment of Toronto as the official launch pad of the Oscar season started back in 1999, whey they wheeled out the klieg lights for the red-carpet premiere of American Beauty. That campaign proved so successful that Academy Awards mania then descended on Toronto as a kind of annual autumn PR/media blitz. Yet you hardly need to be down on the Oscars to feel that the domination of Toronto by a handful of awards-bait studio (or specialty division) titles somehow violated what had always been the festival's defining feature: Its vibrantly eclectic, democratic mix.
The trend reached its nadir last year, when I can recall being informed that Atonement was an "Oscar lock" before it had even had its premiere showing. By the time the screening was over, the Oscar possibilities were all that anyone was talking about; the "buzz" seemed to be not so much deafening as a preordained fact. (By the time the movie actually opened, its journey to likely Oscar contender status seemed to have been going on for longer than the presidential campaign.)
But that was then. This year, with the exception of The Duchess, the studios have mostly pulled back on previewing their prestige hopefuls -- movies like, say, Baz Luhrman's Australia or Oliver Stone's W. And the reason for that is revealing. At a moment when specialty divisions are folding (Warner Independent) or in shrinkage and/or limbo (Paramount Vantage), and when even the most high-powered films for adults have become officially recognized as hard sells (just check out the modest grosses for last year's acclaimed big-shot releases like Michael Clayton -- which premiered in Toronto -- and There Will Be Blood), Hollywood, in a strange way, no longer entirely wants the association with a film festival. Instead of building titles up, it can make them look "small," idiosyncratic, and (gulp) artistic.
Over the last decade in Toronto, I admit I always got jazzed to see those big Oscar titles. I have festival-defining memories of going to the electrically anticipated premieres of movies like Ray and 8 Mile.
But this year, even though the awards buzz-meter is still in operation, working like a geiger counter to pick up on the possible tick-tick-tick emanating from movies like Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married, the volume is lower. Which means that we may all hear a few more unexpected things.
After the jump, the scoop on Mickey Rourke (pictured)'s triumphant reinvention in The Wrestler...
My voice is still a bit shaky, PopWatchers, and my sleep schedule remains all kinds of wackadoodle, but at least the remnants of Gustav have finally (hopefully) pushed beyond the Ontario borders. That's right, the sun is shining bright on the Toronto International Film Festival, which means I can at long last vlog outdoors! (Ooo. That just sounds vaguely untoward, huh? It's not, I promise.) So click on to hear more about why I had to walk out of Fifty Dead Men Walking (starring Ben Kingsley and 21's Jim Sturgess), what surprised Kevin Smith the most about Toronto, what may be an advance look at a Religulous DVD extra courtesy Bill Maher, and what some native Torontonians had to say about the film festival that's called their city home for over 30 years.
Holy hot spots, PopWatchers! It's day four of the Toronto film festival and I finally have access to the Internets! Since landing up here in Canadia last Thursday, I've had little to report except for my ongoing battles with the gods of high-speed connectivity in my room at the Sutton Place Hotel. (I'll refrain from using my not-so-nice nickname for said establishment.) So I've resorted to hijacking the laptop of my video editor/producer/all-around EW.com Renaissance man Jason Averett and taking advantage of the uninterrupted connection at a swish lounge called Lobby, where my friend and colleague Dave Karger is getting ready to interview the lovely Julianne Moore. (Her movie, Blindness, had its North American debut here last night.)
Before coming up here, the best movie I'd seen was Jonathan Demme's family-drama indie Rachel Getting Married, and I was eager to see if the buzz surrounding Anne Hathaway (pictured)'s performance would hold up here. In short: yes. Nearly every insider I've talked to about the film floats some version of, "Anne is amazing in it!" I had the pleasure of talking to Hathaway yesterday morning, and she struck me as a lovely, gracious, smart young woman...who just might be on the verge of her first Oscar nomination.
More Toronto coverage, including chocolate with Viggo and a chat with the adorable Michael Cera, after the jump...
