TIFF Originals

The Blur Of Indie Sales: TIFF ’11 Edition

with all the chatter about the 30+ sales at TIFF this year, there were a total of 6 buys by companies in those 20 that generate major dollars. Searchlight bought Shame, CBS bought Salmon Fishing in The Yemen (which seems to be the high sale of the year at $4 million), Lionsgate bought two films, one with Roadside (Friends With Kids) and the other on their own, You’re Next, The Hunter, and IFC grabbed Your Sister’s Sister and for their new IFC Midnight division, The Incident.

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DP/30: God Bless America, writer/director Bobcat Goldthwait

Earlier with Bob…. after the jump….

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TIFF ’11 Reviews: Last Roundup — Your Sister’s Sister, Chicken with Plums, Pink Ribbons, Inc. and Lucky

Your Sister’s Sister With her latest film, Your Sister’s Sister, writer-director Lynn Shelton again teams up with Mark Duplass, who plays Jack, an affable slacker caught between two sisters, Iris (Emily Blunt) and Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt) in this lightly drawn but well-executed tale. Shelton has a knack for putting average people into beyond-average situations, as…

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TIFF ’11 Reviews: Oslo, August 31 and Melancholia

Oslo, August 31 One of the last films I caught at TIFF this year, almost by accident, was Oslo, August 31, the sophomore effort of Reprise director Joachim Trier. Oslo, August 31 reunites Trier with Anders Danielsen Lie (who played Phillip, the troubled writer of Reprise) in this spare film about addiction, the choices that…

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DP/30 @ TIFF ’11: Your Sister’s Sister

Meet the family of My Sister’s Sister. Writer/director Lynn Shelton and co-stars Mark Duplass and Emily Blunt.

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TIFF ’11 Review: Alps

One of my strongest festival memories is of watching Giorgos Lanthimos’ third film, Dogtooth, at TIFF in 2009, and walking out of the theater with a mass of fellow dazed critics, filled with excitement at having just seen this bizarrely brilliant work by an artist who seemed to materialize out of nowhere with the rare…

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TIFF ’11 Review: Goodbye First Love

With her latest film, Goodbye First Love, Mia Hansen-Løve handles her subject matter of adolescent love in a way that’s remarkably free of pretense and condescension, even as her youthful characters occasionally make choices that make you want to throttle them. The story is pretty simple: 15-year-old Camille (Lola Créton) and 18-year-old Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky)…

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TIFF ’11 Dispatch: So Long, and Thanks for All the Films

This was a pretty fantastic year to be at TIFF. I saw many solid films, a fair number of fair-to-middling films, only one film bad enough to warrant a rare walkout, and even a few that were great. The area around the Lightbox and Scotiabank felt like a real live festival center this year, complete…

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Annnnd…. Scene!

It was the easiest, hardest, best, worst, perfectly imperfect TIFF ever… made more so by the fact that I am summing it up days before it even ends. Sony, first through Sony Classics and then through the only studio doing serious TIFF junketting this year, Columbia Pictures, dominated the festival in every way. Clooney and…

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TIFF ’11 Review: Take This Waltz

Take This Waltz completely slayed me. With her 2006 feature film debut, Away from Her, Sarah Polley examined the intricacies of a long-term relationship through a couple married for many decades, who were faced with one of them dealing with early-onset Alzheimer’s. In that film, she explored marriage, infidelity, and commitment with a deeply innate…

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Confessions of a Film Festival Junkie: Day 4

Glitch! Saturday morning’s early morning screening of The Descendents – Alexander Payne’s new film starring George Clooney – at the Toronto International Film Festival got into rather severe technical problems. Those of us standing in line were told at about 20 minute intervals that there was a problem but exactly what problem was kept vague….

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TIFF Dispatch #2: Catching Up

It’s been a very busy few days for me here at TIFF, as I’ve been aiming for four-five films a day this year and trying not to be hunched over a keyboard in the 15-20 minutes I have between screenings. So here’s a nice catch-up for you of some of the films I’ve been enjoying…

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TIFF ’11 Review: God Bless America

Think of God Bless America, directed by Bobcat Goldthwait, as kind of a mix of Falling Down and Super — but funnier than Falling Down, considerably more accurately satirical than Super, and relentlessly violent in a blackly comedic way, without being meaninglessly so.

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TIFF ’11 Review: A Dangerous Method

David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method stars Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud and Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung in a stagey drama about the professional relationship between two men whose ideas shaped the field of psychoanalysis, and their relationship with Sabine Spielrein (Keira Knightley), Jung’s patient-turned-protegee, who went on to become a psychoanalyst in her own…

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Confessions of a Film Festival Junkie: Toronto 2011 – Day II

Historically the festival has an almost unerring capacity for choosing the wrong opening night picture. This year was no exception with its selection of the U2 profile From the Sky Down. More rumination than concert film, it focuses on the group’s preparation for the 2011 Glastonbury festival, one of England’s most beloved musical events. They decide to revisit their seminal album Achtung Baby, recorded 20 years earlier in Berlin.

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TIFF ’11 Review: Pina

One of my favorite films of this year’s TIFF so far is Wim Wenders terrific 3-D documentary, Pina, a visually evocative, stunningly lovely tribute to legendary German choreographer Pina Bausch. If you are inclined to enjoy the language of dance, and you like to see terrific, creative choreography that utilizes all the subtleties of movement…

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TIFF ’11 Dispatch #1: Can You Say Party? I Knew You Could.

Another year, another Toronto International Film Festival. It doesn’t feel like a whole year since the last TIFF, but here we are, back in the land of ketchup chips and butter tarts, churning through four-five movies a day. The fest has a different feel to it this year, with most everything officially moved down to…

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CONFESSIONS OF FILM FESTIVAL JUNKIE: Toronto 2011

There are some festivals that pivot abruptly from being a film geek favorite to an industry whistle stop. Historians cite the 1989 screening of sex, lies, and videotape as just such a turning point for Sundance. It wasn’t simply a rabid audience response (it was crowned their favorite but failed to nab the jury award)…

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TIFF ’11 Preview: Real to Reel

There are 26 films in the Real to Reel section of TIFF this year, of which I’ll be able to catch maybe five or six. As always, it’s hard to tell by the catalog descriptions which films you’re going to love and which you aren’t; in 2009, I wouldn’t have necessarily had The Topp Twins…

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Two Doc Reviews – Crazy Horse & Paul Williams Still Alive

One is classic documentary form… no voice over… no director in the movie… beautifully shot and edited reality about an interesting subject. The premise of the other is that the director thought a star he once loved was dead and found out otherwise.

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“Just got back from Dark Shadows at the Lincoln Square IMAX (102′ wide screen, over 50 sears per row). I loved almost every second of it. What a shock. I can see why people under 49 hate it, and it’s not just because of its ’60s TV roots–it’s a very traditional, classic-style horror film: leisurely-paced, character-driven, beautifully designed (mostly real sets, not CGI), music used as a humorous or ironic underline, not particularly violent (there’s more blood in the 1970 version), perfectly cast with superb actors, and of course a nice sense of humor to balance the horror. No jump scenes, no teens sliced to pieces by some mask-wearing non-entity, just good old-fashioned story-telling. It’s more like Hugo than Hostel, and not just because it shares cast members and underperformed. And as for the much-derided third act: the complaints are horseshit. Everything that takes place in the climax is logically built up to in what precedes it. Yes, the werewolf is a surprise, but it shouldn’t be given the family history and that character’s behavior, and the explanation is eminently reasonable. In an era where Bridesmaids is considered award-worthy writing, it’s no surprise that many people have forgotten what a well-made script can be like. So fuck all the haters. Dark Shadows lived up to my expectations (no small feat), and should be seen by everyone who still appreciates quality, grown-up, Old Hollywood-style filmmaking. Cadavra has spoken.”
~ Cadavra on Dark Shadows

‘This grooming and styling thing? It’s fucking poodles. Human poodles. I feel sorry for a poodle because he’s a dog. You know, a dog is a fucking great creature. They would do anything for you. And the poodle gets a haircut. No one asks if the poodle wants his hair cut like that. Do they? They just fucking cut his hair like that. And he just walks around. And everyone is like, “Why is that poodle so snarky?” Fuck you. Style, I think, is panache. Who are you? What did you do today? And what are you worth to me? What do you have to offer the world? How did you spend your time today on this planet? How are you spending your time every second? What are you doing now? Are you alive, or are you somnambulant? If you are somnambulant, then you are a fucking prick. Style is your ability to be awake. But who the fuck am I to judge? I’m starting to get really arrogant.”
GQ: Whose tuxedo did you wear on the red carpet here in Cannes?
“J.Lindeberg. Because I really love his suits.”
~ Stylin’ Tom Hardy

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