Ahoy, squirts! Quint here to present Anton Sirius' list of goodies he's looking at covering for us during the upcoming Toronto Film Fest. This year is incredible and if it wasn't for the QT Fest here in Austin I'd be up there. Below you'll find out when the films from some of the monst interesting directors will play... people like Lars Von Trier, Takashi Miike, Takeshi Kitano, Terry Gilliam, Sarah Silverman and Liam Lynch, Cameron Crowe, Roman Polanski, Tim Burton, Vincent Ward, Eli Roth, John Turturro, Atom Egoyan, Chanwook Park and many more... Goddamn they have a great line-up this year!
Greetings, starkinder! Anton Sirius here, with a quick look ahead at what’s coming at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival. This year’s lineup is LOADED – I’m sure I missed a couple dozen bits of brilliance in my first pass over the schedule, but that’s what line buzz is for.
Without further ado, here’s a day-by-day recap of what the rest of you should be envious about:
Thursday, September 8th – The first Thursday always features a short sked, but this year they decided to start the festival off with a bang. Actually, with a Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Shane Black’s glorious return. We also get a rare first Thursday Midnight Madness film, and it’s a doozy - the Sarah Silverman concert movie Jesus Is Magic.
Friday the 9th – Bow down to the master! Takeshi Kitano directs and stars in his take on the twins thing in Takeshis; we get a doc on Orson Welles and Spain, The Well; The Devil and Daniel Johnson explores yet another enigmatric minor rock genius; Tideland, the real Terry Gilliam film this year, plays at the glorious Elgin; Aaron Eckhart returns to his evil corporate roots with Thanks You For Smoking; Steve Martin meets a Shopgirl; the Brothers Quay give that live action thing another try in The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes; A/K/A Tommy Chong casts a shockingly cynical eye on the War on Some Drugs; and at Midnight Luc Besson’s production team mixes up a crazy martial arts take on Escape from New York (with a dash of The Warriors thrown in) in Banlieue 13.
Saturday the 10th – We get a treat today (if you want to call remorseless, soul-blackening films a treat) as the entire Pusher trilogy from Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn (Pusher, With Blood On My Hands: Pusher II, and I’m the Angel of Death: Pusher III) screens back to back to back; Philip Seymour Hoffman channels Capote; Sir Hannibal Lector (poor guy’s never gonna get out from under the shadow of that role, is he?) rides real fast in The World’s Fastest Indian; Aragorn (poor guy’s never gonna get out from under that role, is he?) can’t escape David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence; Neil Jordan returns to his crazy Butcher Boy territory with Breakfast on Pluto; Tim Burton has some damned thing about a dead woman who gets married; more LOTR alumni, as Legolas woos Kirsten Dunst in Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown; Brothers of the Head is a mockumentary (based on a Brian Aldiss novel) about siamese twin punk rockers; and the deceptively generically titled Evil Aliens drops in for Midnight Madness.
Sunday the 11th – Roman Polanski does Oliver Twist; Bryce Howard steps into Nicole Kidman’s shoes in Lars von Trier’s Manderlay; Certified Goddess Cate Blanchett takes on a tricky recovering junkie role in Little Fish; Tsui Hark draws Seven Swords; the Bride and Prejudice team (including Aishwarya Rai, well on her way to Certified Goddess status herself) return with Mistress of Spices; we get another doc about another enigmatic rock genius (this one a little more famous though), Leonard Cohen I’m Your Man; Abel Ferrara spits at Mel Gibson with Mary; and Midnight Madness brings us a biotech nightmare in Isolation.
Monday the 12th – Yawn. Another year, another great work from Michael Haneke. This year it’s Cache; John Hillcoat (director of the sadly obscure classic Ghosts... of the Civil Dead, being presented as part of the Dialogues program on Tuesday) reteams with Nick Cave for The Proposition; Richard E. Grant tries his hand behind the camera with Wah-Wah; Michael Gondry, of all people, directs Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, a film about his first efforts to blow his Comedy Central money; Liev Schreiber directs Everything Is Illuminated; Vincent Ward returns with another sumptuous flick, River Queen, starring Jack Bauer (poor guy’s never gonna... OK, I’ll give it a rest); and tonight’s Midnight Madness selection is the probably aptly-titled Bangkok Loco.
Tuesday the 13th – John Turturro rounds up some friends (including James Gandolfini and Kate Winslet) and directs his first film since Illuminata, a post-musical called Romance & Cigarettes; Joaquin Phoenix hopefully doesn’t bite off more than he can chew as he attempts to Walk The Line; Michael Winterbottom quits the porn business to take a pomo stab at another English lit classic in Tristam Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story; geez, how to describe this one? The Duelist is a South Korean distaff detective period piece with crazy-go-nuts anime-esque sword fights; Atom Egoyan knows Where The Truth Lies; and Midnight Madness attempts to break our brains with The District!, Hungary’s answer to Matt & Trey and Ralph Bakshi.
Wednesday the 14th – Today will mostly be “catch up on second screenings of stuff you missed” day, although there are a few new ones. Yeah, I know the trailers make In Her Shoes look gawd-awful, but it is Curtis Hanson... I can’t dismiss it sight unseen; Gretchen Mol, star of the unforgettable Girl’s Club, plays an icon in The Notorious Bettie Page; and this year’s obligatory Midnight Madness rock doc is Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey.
Thursday the 15th – Francois Ozon follows up 2000’s Sous le sable with Le Temps qui rests, starring the incomparable Jeanne Moreau; Thomas Vinterberg tackles a Lars von Trier script about gun culture with Dear Wendy; Park Chan-wook brings the pain in Sympathy for Lady Vengeance; Jackie Chan re-teams with Stanley Tong in The Myth; and Takashi Miike returns to Midnight Madness with one of the 382 films he’s made this year, a bit of genre-bending mayhem called The Great Yokai War.
Friday the 16th – FINALLY we get the film I’ve maybe been waiting for the most. Artist Matthew Barney (calling him a ‘filmmaker’ makes about as much sense as calling a sculptor an architect just because his latest work looks vaguely like a building) teams up with Bjork on Drawing Restraint 9, which will probably make her Gondry and Cunningham videos look like they were directed by Hype Williams; legendary British comedy duo Wallace & Gromit return with The Curse of the Were-Rabbit; and at Midnight Donnie Yen (!) takes on bad guy Sammo Hung (!!!) in Wilson Yip’s SPL.
Saturday the 17th – Finally, almost, the time for the sleeping is here. Before the pillow’s siren call takes me down, though, I’ll try to see Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (which should be an interesting companion piece to Greil Marcus’ Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads, published earlier this year); and the fest closes with the return of evil genius/friend to supermodels Eli Roth and his latest bit of grue, Hostel.
