..,.Gary
Dretzka
..,.Leonard
Klady
...David
Poland
...Doug
Pratt
...Ray
Pride
..Confessions Day Two ..Confessions Day One ..2007 Toronto Film Festival You’ve probably seen Tom McCarthy in a film or a television series. He plays a lot of best friends and neighbors. People that pop into a story to provide a plot detail and then gracefully bow out of the picture.
A couple of years ago McCarthy cobbled together the money to make The Station Agent, a difficult to describe tale of three eccentrics/misfits that somehow find each other and evolve into what some have described as a nuclear family. It won a prize at Sundance and was a success d’estime. McCarthy probably received offers to make dumbed down pictures with movie stars on the heels of The Station Agent and was either sufficiently shrewd to say “no” or fortunate that for whatever reason the deals fell through.
McCarthy’s second feature, The Visitor, is about as perfect a film for what it is - an intimate parlor piece about a character that suddenly finds circumstance has overtaken his life. In this instance it’s a recently widowed professor teaching in Connecticut who quite unexpectedly finds two people living in his Manhattan apartment when he returns to the city. They was scammed by somebody but the prof let’s them stay on for a bit and the two, a Lebanese musician and a Senegalese designer of jewelry, provide him with new meaning to his life.
One can kind of see where it’s heading in certain respects; and in other ways it’s quite surprising.
While I haven’t particularly been looking, the festival doesn’t appear to have a plethora certain stripe of movie one might describe as only suitable for a film festival. I’m told they’re mainly finding out in Toronto’s Discovery section and pointed out to a critic that the section isn’t called: Really Good First Films.
What are beginning to emerge are the really misconceived mainstream movies that have traditionally been a part of the event’s second half. Last year it was All the King’s Men and this year’s first colossal blunder appears to be Across the Universe, Julie Taymor’s musical set to the music of the Beatles. The critical response has been unintentional laughter at the literal minded interpretations and one wag likened the music to a Fab Four evening on American Idol.
The other misfire is Francois Girard’s Silk a melodrama about the Silk Road back in the 19th Century that has a Du Maupassant twist. However, the journey evolves as a rather plodding trek lushly rendered but ultimately hollow.
