The Toronto Film Festival will wash the goalie right out of its hair
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The opening-night selection of the Toronto Film Festival doesn’t always match the quality of the rest of the festival slate, but for pure style points, you have to give the fest credit for this year’s choice.
Toronto has chosen “Score: A Hockey Musical” as its opening-night movie. Little was previously known about the indie picture, but the title tells you everything you need to know about the movie’s creative possibilities (maybe “And I’m telling you I’m not going” before a trip to the penalty box?), with Olivia Newton-John and Nellie Furtado two of the film’s more well-known actors.
The choice marks the fest’s return to a Canadian film after last year’s deviation to the British-made Charles Darwin biopic “Creation.” If nothing else, the choice of a musical hockey theme could unbutton the usually more formal opening-night festival crowd, and make both Canadians and interloping U.S. hockey-lovers like ourselves happy. (The yet-to-be-announced Toronto slate, incidentally, could have one or two knuckling wrist shots. More on that shortly.)
The logline for the whimsical “Score” reads as “a teen hockey player becomes a national sensation.” That doesn’t sound that whimsical at all -- in fact, it sounds like the story of Canada -- but anything that simultaneously evokes “Grease” and “Miracle” has to be worth a close look.
--Steven Zeitchik
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