Anyway, he's already doing a bang-up job and has a comprehensive look at what to expect from the fest this year. I'm sure there'll be surprises along the way, there always are at Fests and those discoveries are what make film festivals worth going to. Enjoy Mr. Sirius!
Greetings starkinder! I have a very good feeling about this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Whether that’s due to the snowballing trend of ‘genre’ pictures and directors escaping their Midnight Madness ghetto-ization and infecting the main program, or the sheer depth of talent on display this year, or the fact that John Malkovich seems to be in every other movie, I’m not entirely sure. But I’m more juiced about this fest than I have been in a while.
Here’s a brief, far-too-incomplete list of some of the movies that have caught my eye.
Thursday Sept 4: Soul Power brings us the incredible mega-concert that preceded Ali-Foreman; $9.99 gives us stop-motion animation for grown-ups; and Midnight Madness kicks off, literally, as the Muscles From Brussels spoofs himself big-time in JCVD
Friday Sept 5: An unheralded brother duo guide a no-name cast through some sort of sad-sack spy-themed caper comedy called Burn After Reading; Takeshi Kitano breaks away from his recent fetish for slavish self-reflection (or does he?) in Achilles and the Tortoise; Calvaire director Fabrice Du Welz drags Rufus Sewell through a Burmese heart of darkness in Vinyan; Plato’s Retreat gets the nostalgic doc treatment in American Swing; Ghost in the Shell’s Mamoru Oshii brings his latest, the Sky Crawlers; Viggo Mortensen reunites with Ed Harris for a new-timey western, Appaloosa; and manga comes to (very loud) life in Detroit Metal City
Saturday Sept 6: City of God and Constant Gardner director Fernando Meirelles gets a little sci-fi-y in Blindness; Bill Maher and Larry Charles get Religulous; Michael Cera continues his ascent to awkward superstardom in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist; Youssou N’Dour: I Bring What I Love explores the controversy surrounding his Egypt album; Chris Walken plays an aging small-time con man in $5 a Day; Laila’s Birthday finds the funny side of the Palestinian occupation; Richard Linklater examines life in the shadow of a young giant in Me and Orson Welles; and things get perverted and weird at Midnight in Deadgirl
Sunday Sept 7: Spike Lee continues his new career path with the WWII film Miracle at St. Anna; Malkovich creeps the hell out of some poor French guy in Afterwards; Darren Aranofsky tag teams with Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler; drunken Irish layabouts try to one-up Withnail in A Film With Me In It; Michelle Williams loses her dog, the poor dear, in Wendy and Lucy; Is There Anybody There?, from Boy A director John Crowley, stars Michael Caine as an aging magician; Daily Show power couple Sason Jobee… err, Samantha Bee and Jason Jones star in yet another dysfunctional family Christmas flick, Cooper’s Camera; and the Midnight doc this year examines the golden age of Aussie gerne films in Not Quite Hollywood
Monday Sept 8: Wong Kar Wai restores and refurbishes his classic, gorgeous riff on wuxia with Ashes of Time Redux; Dogma alum Kristian Levring looks at the downside of guinea pigging in Fear Me Not; Witch Hunt examines the Bakersfield Satanic cult/child molestation hysteria from a few years back; Sugar dramatizes the life of a young Dominican ballplayer trying to live the American Dream; and Midnight brings the gritty Aussie revenge flick Acolytes
Tuesday Sept 9: Zack and Miri Make a Porno; Brick director Rian Johnson dares to tackle the road movie with his latest, the Brothers Bloom; Zooey Deschanel stars in a film that borrows its title from a Pixies song (really, do you even need to know what it’s about to be interested?), Gigantic; Bruce McDonald directs an oddly linguistic zombie film, Pontypool; Kiyoshi Kurosawa tones down the explicit horror in Tokyo Sonata; youngsters get instructed in the dark arts in Krabat; the Daily Show’s Wyatt Cenac stars in Medicine for Melancholy; and Tremors meets the Searchers in the Burrowers
Wednesday Sept 10: Viggo gets corrupted by Nazis in Good; Tim Robbins, Rachel McAdams and Michael Pena return from their tour of Iraq to find chaos at home in The Lucky Ones; Blind Loves explores the depth of emotion without sight; Killing Kasztner explores the assassination of a very un-Schindler-like WWII life saver; and Midnight brings more deliciously intense French horror with Martyrs
Thursday Sept 11: The Heart of Jenin finds hope for peace in Israel through one incredible act of humanity; Charlie Kaufman gets weird(er) in his directorial debut Synecdoche, New York; if I fail my saving throw I’ll probably end up seeing The Dungeon Masters, a doc about… well, you know; in a touching tribute to the memory of 9/11, the world’s leading famous-just-for-being-famous celebrity gets personal in Paris, Not France; and at Midnight we get French dystopian sci-fi in Eden Log
Friday Sept 12: Sam Neill plays a loopy vicar in Dean Spanley, based on a tale by Lord Dunsany; Anti-whaling zealots cruise the Antarctic in the doc At the End of the World; Foul King (the best wrestling movie you’ve never seen) and Tale of Two Sisters director Kim Jee-woon takes on Leone with the Good, the Bad and the Weird; and we meet the world’s most stylish murderer in Sexykiller
Saturday Sept 13: Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White compare notes (ahem) in the electric guitar doc It Might Get Loud; Yes Madam Sir explores the career of India’s first female cop; we get Danny Boyle’s latest, Slumdog Millionaire; A Time to Stir examines the 1968 Columbia university student uprising; what looks to be a rather wacky doc explores The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World; and the festival wraps at Midnight as Ong Bak director Prachya Pinkaew brings his latest, the distaff ass-kicker Chocolate.
If you want to shoot me any questions, or just keep up to date on what (and who) I’m seeing, email me at anton.sirius.reviews@gmail.com, or just add me on Facebook – I’m in the Toronto network.
