'Eastern Promises,' 'Juno' win Toronto's top prizes
"Eastern Promises," an international thriller directed by David Cronenberg, won the Toronto International Film Festival's
top prize on Saturday.
The festival's Cadillac People's Choice Award, voted by moviegoers, gave the hometown nod to fellow Canadian Cronenberg. The film stars Viggo Mortensen as a Russian mobster who tangles with a midwife, played by Naomi Watts.
Director Jason Reitman's "Juno," a festival darling about a pregnant teen, was the People's Choice first runner-up.
As the Toronto Film Festival comes to a close it is worth noting how it can be many things to many people. Sales floor, dream factory, star machine -- however you want it, it can be it.
It was refreshing to be immersed in an event so in thrall to the idea of international film culture, to get away from the microscopic media universe of tabloid life. To be at the other end of the telescope, looking at Belgian punk rockers, Japanese cowboys, pregnant Canadians and having the shenanigans of Britney Spears be just a faint echo -- and knowing that there are plenty of people (likely most people) in the opposite position -- is revitalizing. The push-pull, inside-outside simultaneity of trying to both experience the festival and keep on eye on how it was being received and discussed, particularly in the online world, was punishing. Ah, modernity.
It's a story you couldn't make up -- a vibrant young band, on the cusp of bigger things, is stopped in their tracks when the lead singer commits suicide. Such is the mythic story of Ian Curtis and Joy Division. Their tale is told in two films at Toronto, both the documentary "Joy Division" and the fictional feature "Control."
What is remarkable is that the two films do not cancel each other out. Where "Control," directed by photographer Anton Corbijn in silvery black-and-white, seems very much in the mood of the band, an extension of their music, "Joy Division" is about the band itself, providing context and filing in the blanks. Where "Control" features a re-enactment of the band's first television appearance, "Joy Division" features the actual footage of their original performance. Both are electrifying.
Besides having two film projects in the ether, Joy Division suddenly seems very now, much as The Velvet Underground once emerged from the shadows to gain wider recognition and popularity. Which begs the question -- why does Joy Division seem to speak so directly to 2007?
Harmony Korine is something like the Lost Boy of American filmmaking.
After bursting on the scene with his screenplay for "Kids," written while he was just a teenager, he went on to direct "Gummo" (1997) and "Julien Donkey-Boy" (1999), both cataclysmic distillations of cutting-edge hip.
Then he seemed to vanish, lost into a haze of rumors and uncertainty. He went to Paris and London, spent time fishing in Peru and is now 33, living in Nashville and recently married.
His newest film, "Mister Lonely" represents a rebirth for Korine both personally and as a filmmaker. The movie tracks two separate storylines -- one about a commune of celebrity impersonators, the other about skydiving nuns in the jungles of Panama -- to create a poetic meditation on identity and renewal.
Rather than the purposeful agitations of his earlier work, "Mister Lonely" is about healing and moving on. To that end Korine cast two of his own filmmaking heroes, Werner Herzog and Leos Carax, who themselves perhaps represent a lifeline to survival.
Besides his main cast of Diego Luna, Samantha Morton and Denis Lavant (as well as his wife as Little Red Riding Hood), Korine also cast Anita Pallenberg (as the Queen of England) and James Fox (as the Pope), slyly referencing "Performance," itself a magisterial and enigmatic look at persona and identity-construction. I talked with him in Toronto during the festival.
The documentary "Obscene" tells the story of Barney Rosset, the publisher who repeatedly fought to put out books (and movies) others tried to hide away.
The list of works Rosset put out is astonishing -- "Naked Lunch," "Lady Chatterley's Lover," "Waiting For Godot," "Tropic of Cancer," "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," "A Confederacy of Dunces" and many more -- and forms much of the central core of post-war American counter-culture.
Particularly at a film festival where so many of the films are likely doomed to future obscurity, the story of Rosset and his Grove Press imprint is downright heroic. It is inspiring to think of someone who worked so hard to get the word to the people.
Rosset was not entirely altruistic, of course, and he made (and
subsequently lost) multiple fortunes. As one period magazine article
puts it -- he was a study in how to put out "dirty books" for fun and
profit.
'Mister Lonely' and 'Diary of the Dead' -- sly surprises
The festival has brought two big surprises (to me at least) in "Mister Lonely," the unexpectedly moving and heartfelt return of onetime bad-boy director Harmony Korine(pictured, left), and "George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead," a smart, sharp and up-to-the-minute entry in the horror maestro's signature franchise.
Both are filmmakers about whom I have decidedly mixed feelings, so it was a relief to find myself swept up into their latest works.
Especially as the festival heads into its last few days, and one is prone to hit the wall, as it were, it is reassuring (and vital) that the films themselves make it all seem worthwhile.
The most immediate thing about "Mister Lonely" is how formally
conventional it is in relation to Korine's previous directing efforts,
"Julien Donkey-Boy" and "Gummo," both of which exhibited a severe
art-damaged sensibility.
"Mister Lonely" is downright elegant by comparison, and, working
with cinematographer Marcel Zyskind, Korine creates a number of images
that are breathtaking in their beauty.
Do not attempt to operate heavy machinery directly after seeing "I'm Not There."
A head-spinning take on the many personas presented by the work of Bob Dylan, the latest film from director Todd Haynes is a dense, dizzying, multifaceted way of approaching the life and meaning of an artist, and pretty great whether you're a dedicated Dylanologist or not.
While his glam-rock gloss "Velvet Goldmine" was undone by a heavy-handed conceptual nod to "Citizen Kane," here Haynes is able to (almost) always keep all the plates spinning. At first, as scenes shift from one actor to another portraying Dylan in his various guises, it seems perhaps a little too on-the-nose. (A little too "Across the Universe" might be more like it, but that's another story.)
Slowly -- especially as it crosses between the domestic dramas of Heath Ledger (think "Blood on the Tracks"), the speed-freak op-art hep-cat jive of Cate Blanchett (shades of "Blonde on Blonde" and the film "Don't Look Back") and Richard Gere's outlaw in exile (a la "The Basement Tapes" and Sam Peckinpah's "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid," for which Dylan did the music and appeared as a character notably named Alias) -- the film accumulates a strange, galloping momentum, moving faster and faster and drawing the audience along.
And that's leaving out the rambling troubadour and the born-again preacher.
Woody Allen's "Cassandra's Dream" is clearly one of the worst films the auteur has made in years.
The dialog is atrocious. Scene after scene feels like a bad "Saturday Night Live" skit. Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor must have been wondering what they were getting into after signing on to this one.
Luckily for the fortunes of the Weinstein Co., they screened a much better movie immediately after: Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There."
In this accomplished and fascinating look at the life of Bob Dylan -- as played by six different actors, including Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Cate Blanchett and Heath Ledger -- the best "Dylans," by far, are the two Aussies.
While the upcoming December releases "The Orphanage," "Juno" and "Atonement" have been the recipients of good buzz as the festival has progressed, another film is starting to generate strong word of mouth.
Coming in completely under the radar, "Boy A" is the sort of startling independent surprise you would more likely discover more at Sundance than Toronto.
Quickly picked up by the Weinstein Co., "Boy" follows a 24-year-old British man (a fantastic Andrew Garfield) who has just been released from prison after being convicted as a child, along with his best friend, of the brutal murder of a young girl.
Because of his tabloid notoriety, the government assists him in creating a new identity when he's released, but the shy and self-conscious new "Jack" struggles to adjust to his adopted identity.
American ethnographies: 'Chop Shop,' 'Margot at the Wedding'
It is sort of astounding to think that two films as diverse as "Chop Shop" and "Margot at the Wedding" might somehow fall under the same rubric of "American Independent Filmmaking," and yet for most people (and at most cinemas), they likely do. Each is, in its own way, singular, a unique example of the writer-directors behind them.
"Margot at the Wedding" is the latest effort from Noah Baumbach(pictured right), who seems determined to chronicle with microscopic precision the peccadilloes of American intelligentsia, the literary set.
"Chop Shop" comes from director Ramin Bahrini, who co-wrote the screenplay with Bahareh Azimi. Bahrini's previous film, "Man Push Cart," chronicled an immigrant in New York City who operated a coffee cart and "Chop Shop," about a boy scrambling to survive amid the auto shops of Queens, continues in the same vein of telling stories rarely seen on screen.
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