Update

click for Chart

*update includes Canada First!, Canada Open Vault, and miscellaneous Canada Galas and Special Presentations announced on 8/4/09.

So, the 2009 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival is just over a month away now. Over 130 films have been announced, and that number is likely to grow to over 300 by the time every film is announced in mid-August.

With so many films, most of which by filmmakers that nobody has heard of, but many by best-of-the-best auteurs, I wanted to make a semi-objective system for deciding what I would be seeing. I have 9 student day-passes, one for each day of the festival (not counting the first day which is just the opening night and a few other films) which allow me to see as many films as I possibly can fit into each day, which will more than likely be 4, maybe 5 if I catch some shorties like Manoel de Oliveira’s new one (about an hour long), per day. So, I’ll just say 40 films is my goal.

So I made a chart that gives points for different categories that I think are good standards for picking films in the festival. Last year I made the mistake of catching films like The Wrestler and Synecdoche, NY, two films I loved but could have waited a few months for, but I am so grateful for the chance to have seen Birdsong, Dernier Maquis, and 35 Rhums, which haven’t seen any sign of distribution in Toronto in the year since I saw them. So this year, films that already have distribution are out, including films I’m dying to see like Broken Embraces, A Serious Man, and likely to be announced films like The White Ribbon, Antichrist, and Where the Wild Things Are.

I’ve only done skimming research on most of the ‘unknown’ films listed below, so any recommendations, for or against a film, are welcome. This is a key for all of the categories:

Premiere: World Premiere = 4 pts.; International Premiere = 3; North American Premiere = 2; Canadian Premiere = 1; Films already available, either through download, youtube, or DVD = 0 (this applies to City of Life and Death, which recently showed up in its entirety on youtube).
Critics: the general reaction from critics that I respect on the film. I’ve estimated the scores here, so it gets close to 10 if it screened at a festival (Cannes, for instance) and picked up awards and good word-of-mouth, closer to 0 if it was panned. Films that have never been reviewed I give 5, just so the film isn’t penalized for not premiering already. As Venice plays out, many of the films in the Toronto line-up will screen, and I will adjust their scores in this category accordingly.
Desirable: My subjective anticipation for each title, based on the filmmaker, reviews, images, stills, trailers, critical reaction, synopsis, et al.
Theatrical Dist.: The likelihood that each film will get a US and Canadian theatrical run, based on the filmmakers’ past works getting distribution or not, the film’s country’s rep for distribution, and my personal hunch.
Director: Where I feel the director’s past works ranks in Contemporary World Cinema, on a scale of 0-5. Filmmakers making their debuts, or if they are just not familiar to me, receive 0 in this category, unfortunately.
DVD: The likelihood that the film will be distributed on DVD, which similar criteria that I use for the ‘TheatricalDist.’ category.
Country: Films made in North America or the UK receive 0, and all other countries receive 1 point here.

And now the chart, with films ranked by their total points. Again, suggestions welcome and will be strongly considered.

Chart

Out for Summer.

Will be back for Toronto International Film Festival 2009 coverage.

Best,

Blake

-I always focus on the bizarre casting decisions more than I ought to when I’m watching Thin Red Line. Something about the big names clashes with the film’s poetics, like they’re pop-up ads for their celebrity. I realize that Malick probably had a gazillion miles of film that probably would have provided feature-lengths for any one of a dozen moneymen, but, as is, showing up intermittently among ‘nobody’ soldiers, seeing faces like Clooney’s, Harrelson’s, and Leto’s is an engagement in ‘what doesn’t belong in this picture.’ I like to think that Malick is making a connection between the  ignorance that pop culture creates, exploiting it by putting men in war zones – men for whom it seems like it would be illegal for them to actually be put in that kind of danger.

– In Toronto’s Images Festival last April, there was an event called Videodrome that was a video-mixing VJ dance party, and the opener, which lasted around half an hour, heavily sampled the voiceover from Thin Red Line. There were serious, anti-war tones in that ‘piece,’ but the dialogue came across as laughable and tacky. I was worried that that impression would stay with me any time I saw the film in the future, but Malick has a way a washing away the cynicism that really should be seeping through in every scene, having his characters naively ramble and inquire about nature and love and feeling, pondering where they come from and where they’re headed. He is genuine about it, and the artistry of his editing saves all of this from itself, and evokes these same questions, after a while, in the viewer. After the opening shot of the alligator, I could have believed anything that came out of anyone’s mouth.

– This is a disappointing precursor to Lessons of Darkness, showing that sometimes more concise treks through barren wasteland are more profound than artfully distant and meandering ones. Fata Morgana is all over the place, sometimes to exhilaratingly so, but more often to my frustration. The opening third (following the mesmerizing prologue consisting of an endless stream of landing airplanes) is King Jamesian nonsense, read aloud by a sterile female voice, the reaches for grandeur that Herzog somewhat ironically utilizes in most of his films, usually from his use of opera, feels pretentious and empty in this segment. The imagery is stunning, but the jerky camera pans through the desolate landscape only became another example of the stilted attempts at poetry.

– The middle segments is more playful, a relief, but Leonard Cohen? His songs are out of time and place here. Herzog takes over in the voiceover department, reading more new-agey material than the previous woman that is an improvement because I now know that Herzog isn’t taking this project as seriously as I thought he was.

– There is a very nice final act. The attention to the ‘band’ is apocalyptically depressing in a very classy way. I can’t remember much from this segment, but I remember being baffled.

– Nothing comes together in Fata Morgana in the psychotic way that Lessons of Darkness does, or in the cynical ‘whatever’ of Herzog’s closing statement in Encounters at the End of the World. It just fizzles in and fizzles out of a point.  There are more ideas in the opening plane shots than the entire rest of the film.

– In terms of cinema’s role as an investigation, the only genre more well-fitted to this than a criminal procedural is a courtroom procedural. Characters are given roles that have thick, black lines for perimeters, and are akin to chess pieces that follow the exact route to reach the mate. Character X can contribute to a, b, and c; Character Y can develop b and introduce d; and Character Z nixes a and c, and solves b. The courtroom drama is the ideal format in cinema for studying the power of truth – the most balanced and fair representation of reality possible. It is no wonder why Anatomy of a Murder is so successful, because it is one of the most thorough examinations of morals, timelines, and truth that I have seen.

– I do have trouble with the ending, though: a verdict. For the sake of ambiguity, and the avoidance of didacticism, courtroom dramas should remain without a verdict. The viewer has just spent 2+ hours hearing the arguments, getting to know the defendant, the plaintiff, the judge, the lawyers, the witnesses, and, in some cases, though not Anatomy, the jury. Hearing all of the arguments and seeing all of the evidence, one knows that these are all interpretations of a truth, and are also all, in some way, dishonest, because nobody can have all of the facts with a case this sprawling. Just like the judge and the jury, the viewer is left to pick out what is important and leave the extraneous; reveal the truth and bury the lies, blanket the outcome with a tinge of one’s own morals and sense of what is ‘right.’ This is the nature of cinema itself, no? The filmmaker interprets reality to his liking, and the viewer filters it to exhume a truth that is satisfactory. Saying the verdict at the end of a courtroom drama is equivalent to a filmmaker walking in front of the lens to deliver his message verbally after the plot plays out (see The Holy Mountain as an example of how this might work, though). Sure, the viewer can take or leave the jury’s/judge’s ruling just as any fragment or element of a film can be avoided for the sake of retaining how the film speaks to me. But, it’s an easy, cop-out ending strategy that is never satisfying, and almost always a reason to stop caring. How much longer would Anatomy of a Murder have lingered in my head if I didn’t know if the verdict would be guilty or not guilty? Quite a bit.

I’m not sure if Pixar’s latest two films have been so disappointing because of the unrealistically high reputation they had developed and earned with Ratatouille (their best film in my opinion), or if their quality is actually diminishing; but Up, following Wall-E, makes for two, overly sentimental, juvenile films in a row.

– The film could have at least adhered to some sort of realism or rules, but it just gradually became more and more of a fantasy film to the point where it just seems to be making up whatever it wants in order to reach an ending.  I can suspend my disbelief of a house that drifts down to South America via a mass accumulation of helium balloons; it was hinted at in the beginning, and established in the first act. But this is more of an exaggeration of reality than fantasy. No problem. Then the ‘talking’ dogs show up. Aside from the fact that personified house pets is, and always has been, lame, it introduces all kinds of obvious flaws. Ok, though, at least they’re trying to be scientific about it – they’re wearing collars that translate their thoughts to whatever language you need. And then they’re flying airplanes shooting at the good guys; this crosses the line into idiocy.

– Why is it some kind of ultimate compliment when people say “It’s so amazing, those folks at Pixar, because they make movies that adults and kids can like,” or “I brought my kid, and it was a grown-up story about a grown-up dealing with grown-up issues, and my kid was completely transfixed!” Last I checked, this is a sign that the filmmakers are dumbing down their content. It’s much less surprising that the kid is loving it than the adult, who should know better than to think of it as anything more than a decently-made family film, not a masterpiece of filmmaking, or even an interesting one. Animate a story instead of shooting it with a camera, and your audience’s expectations and standards are cut in half.

– The film isn’t sad, and the opening ten minutes that everyone keeps talking of backstory are mediocre. The only sadness evidenced here is the established notion that growing old and watching your loved ones die is devastating. Up shows this happening, and is only a reminder of sadness; it never actually evokes its own pathos. I can ask anyone around the age of 80 to tell me their memories of their parents and I have no doubts that it would be more affecting than any moment in this film. The problem is, again, accessibility. This is a children’s film, and its address of its themes is juvenile and simplistic.

– This is Pixar’s ugliest film. After Wall-E, their most gorgeous film, I was stunned at the drop-off. The humans are more synthetic and the landscape more Hallmark-card than ever. With a more ridiculous plot comes a less realistic animation scheme to lower our expectations, I suppose. It could come off as flexibility to adapt to certain mode of storytelling, but instead it’s a cop-out that allows other cop-outs. Being colorful does not make something beautiful.

Over the next month I’ll be attending roughly a dozen films in the Cinematheque Ontario retrospective for Mr. Preminger, a man with whom I’ve been unacquainted for far too long. Well, I’m impressed. This is such a nice, tight police procedural. I’d known that the film was notoriously homaged in Twin Peaks, naming the series’ late beauty after the deceased subject of this film. Fortunately, it is a slight nod rather than a full-blown reproduction, and nothing in this film is spoiled by Lynch’s opus.

The film, save for obvious territory such as necrophilia, doppelgangers, and investigation, boils down to a somewhat Buñuelian critique of societal norms. Laura is/was on her way to a life with a much older man, Waldo, at least acted by a homosexual, Clifton Webb, if not one himself, perhaps desperate to adapt to the hetero-normativity of his friends and colleagues. A bourgeois social gathering presents a climatic meet-and-greet of Laura‘s players and puzzle pieces with enough subtle snootiness and backstabbing in the air to be noteworthy. No burning kitchens, wandering cows, or prolonged stays (save for one), but I had the feeling that Preminger couldn’t stand every character in this film.

I needed to let this film settle for a while, even after watching it on two consecutive days, so that I could get a firm grasp on how I felt about it. It’s one of the most frustrating relationships I’ve had with a film in a long time because it is so evenly divided into things it nails and things it bombs; and both are extreme cases: when it’s good, it is a masterpiece like nothing I thought this cast and crew were capable of; and when it’s bad, it’s filthy, formulaic, Hollywood-grade mediocrity and stupidity. First of all, before all else, this is essentially a nice, long vehicle for Swinton to show off (much like There Will Be Blood (or any movie?) is for Daniel Day-Lewis), and she gives easily the best performance by an actress in 2008. She undergoes a similar ‘uglification’ that Charlize Theron did for Monster. Both are prim and proper, elegant, classy women who we think we have pinned down in terms of what they are capable of, and then they go off and shed their make-up and their manners, evolving into despicable white trash. But more than their aesthetic transformations, they were able to be convincing in their looks. I could easily be convinced – or convince myself – that Swinton was completely shit-faced during the filming of the scenes that take place in the film’s first quarter. She’s a raging, selfish, slutty lunatic that is impossibly pathetic, yet still sympathetic. There is not a moment in the film’s final half where I wasn’t cheering for the situation to pan out in Julia’s favor, as morally reprehensible as that situation is. Criticisms of the film question why the viewer should care about such a “hateful” woman, and the answer is that all of her motives are genuine and human, and can be linked to every person’s innate pursuit of success.

The problem, though, is that only some of the completely idiotic decisions and shortsightedness that Julia exhibits has any credence, while most are glaring plot contrivances. Forgetting to wear a mask at all times in front of the boy, leaving Tom alone in the desert, and sleeping with a sketchy man the night before she is home free for her payoff make up just a small fraction of the poor decisions that serve, primarily, to lengthen the film (which is not necessarily too long, but could have been filled with more worthy developments). It only deadens the significant tension that the film has earned when we watch Julia drive around looking for Tom in the desert for a few minutes; we know she will find him, and it doesn’t progress any element of the plot. The initial suspension of disbelief that the viewer is asked to partake in when Julia accepts Elena’s offer is useful, but often a crutch for these latter moves. The worst things is that these decisions don’t read as Julia’s, but as Zonca’s.

Despite Swinton’s tour de force, the film’s most astonishing scene belongs to Kate del Castillo’s Elena. Bitch wants her baby.

I’m all for zeitgeist films, as well as low-budget realist experiments, and The Girlfriend Experience just ekes into ‘excess’ territory for both of these to the point where it is no longer believable or real at all. Almost immediately after the credits play out, Soderbergh dives head first into real world topicality, showing a group of 30-something year-old business men debating an Obama/McCain debate which most likely just happened a day or two before this scene was shot. We see this group of men intermittently throughout the film (one of them is the boyfriend of Sasha Grey’s Chelsea), and all of their scenes involve discussions of either the looming election, the tanking economy, or pedestrian relationship observations. Of those three, the economic crisis is the most ubiquitous in the film, as its presence is felt in every escort, shopping spree, personal training session, and business gathering. The problem I had with the economical doom and gloom wasn’t its topicality, though, but that it just doesn’t feel natural. Rather, it seems like both a cop out, and an obligation.

The film, like all of the multi-platform projects that Soderbergh will make in this contract, is a quickie. The haste brings positives with the negatives, of course. As bad as Sasha Grey’s performance often is, I still love that she was in the film; choosing her to play an upscale New York escort who has a commitment crisis with her long-term boyfriend is instantly layered based solely on the inspired casting. A drawn out casting session, I believe, would have resulted in picking a safer, blander choice, although the acting would have been much better, too. But, having so much real world, current-events banter comes off as grasping at straws; an easy way out. You don’t have to write dialogue when you can read off front page headlines.

A number of significant events detailed in the film are dissected and mixed around to make the rather cliche narrative arc feel more ‘fresh’, but its a phony tactic that frustrates more than intrigues. I became annoyed when characters were speaking about an event that I was unaware of, how X was feeling after Y happened, not knowing who X is or what caused Y until 10+ minutes later, only to back-track and explain what was already said, but less confusingly this time. It is a gimmick that has no role in the strengthening the film’s point other than concealing that there probably isn’t one. That said, that last shot, however empty, is pretty grotesquely perfect. Sasha Grey’s stilted line-delivery didn’t erase the natural aura that she has which makes her completely watchable. I don’t believe that a single word that she says when she is analyzing Man on Wire would actually come out of her mouth, but that’s not to say that I don’t believe that she means it. Her brash sense of escaping her life with a married man is both childishly naive and surprising in the maturity she exudes in these scenes. I was often embarrassed for all involved with this film while watching it, but I was never bored or indifferent to the events that play out. These two Soderbergh quickies, the other being Bubble, are my two favorite Soderbergh films.