..,.Gary
Dretzka
..,.Leonard
Klady
...David
Poland
...Doug
Pratt
...Ray
Pride
..Confessions Day Six ..Confessions Day Five ..Confessions Day Two ..Confessions Day One ..2007 Toronto Film Festival Not with a bang ...
Have I complained about the Toronto International Film Festival's lack of physical concision? As the festival comes to a close this weekend I feel compelled to say at least once. "oh, my aching feet."
I'm sure my fellow travelers feel similarly when I say that I have my own personalized furrow in the six blocks between the Varsity where the brunt of press/industry screenings unspool and the Sutton Place where the festival has its offices along with the video library and other services. Since its inception the event has struggled to find a sufficient number of screens around Yonge and Bloor and years ago ceded galas and special projections to the Elgin and Roy Thompson Hall five subway stops south.
This year, perhaps more than ever, Toronto was simply big. I was recommending The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and The Assassination of Jesse James that I'd seen in advance and there was advance buzz related to movies that had screened in Cannes or were rippling across the Atlantic from Venice.
There was also anticipation for a number of premieres, particularly of films looking to make a sale during the festival. However, there were no splashy acquisitions and most of the majors and their affiliates weren't in much of a buying mood.
The news that Ang Lee's Lust, Caution … won the top prize in Venice and the Iraq War Redacted from Brian DePalma received second prize created a brief hiccup but not a lot of excitement. The latter film seemed to get lumped in with other features and documentaries about Iraq and by the time all had been seen the response was closer to shell shock than aesthetic appraisal.
To be quite honest I'd be hard pressed to say what the consensus - good, bad or indifferent - was on just about any film in the festival. I saw Julie Taymor's Beatle homage Across the Universe and segued to dinner with four other critics that agreed it was so bad it was bad. But in the following days I ran into scribes that liked it and that pretty much applied to everything from the taut drama The Visitor to the Bob Dylan inspired I'm Not There.
Toronto seemed to emerge as one giant photo op and while not begrudging the value of the international media spotlight, it just seems troubling that the event appears to have lost the traditional grapevine feature that in the past informed you about pictures that had to be seen. One can only hope that 2007 was an anomaly in that regard. If it's the future the festival will suffer.
About the only two films that everyone seemed to like were George Romero's Diary of the Dead and another low budget horror outing, Stuck by Stuart Gordon. Still, while both received thumbs up, no one was saying either had to be seen right away. On the contrary, people were generally voicing disappointment about films from Korea, Eastern Europe and South America with perhaps the small caveat that one or two films were worth catching. It was hardly a ring endorsement.
Somehow I managed to sidestep truly execrable fare but apart from a couple of stand outs including Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park from Cannes the majority of movies on my schedule were decidedly middle brow. There's nothing particular wrong for instance about Gilliam Armstrong's Death Defying Acts, a bit of puffery involving Harry Houdini and a mother-daughter confidence team. It's really the sort of picture one might expect to see in a film market rather than in the official selection and apart from Catherine Zeta-Jones's Kodak moment on the red carpet, doesn't linger in the mind.
By Tuesday one could truly feel the air seeping out of Toronto's balloon and it wasn't simply the result of buyers and sellers making a mass exodus. Yes, the high profile movies are too heavily concentrated in the opening weekend but in the past that's left the door wide open for discoveries.
I'm tired, my feet hurt and I'm ready to go home. It sounds like the essence of a cinematic axis of evil.
