Toronto invades! by MATTHEW HAYS To commemorate its 25th anniversary last year, the Toronto International Film Festival (née the Festival of Festivals) commissioned 10 of Canada's most prominent filmmakers to create short films celebrating the idea of cinema itself. The films, each no longer than about 10 minutes, screened before features showing at the fest in September. The names are indeed a who's-who of the Canuck film biz, including David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, Guy Maddin, Patricia Rozema, Michael Snow and Anne Wheeler, among others. Perhaps what's most intriguing about watching these Toronto Film Fest shorts in one sitting is how they all reflect the distinct personalities of each director. Given complete freedom, each is allowed to careen off into their own odd little tangent. The winners here are Camera, Cronenberg's hilarious absurdist comedy about some children making a movie, The Line, Egoyan's minimalist take on a fest queue and The Heart of the World, Maddin's visually enthralling bit of faux film history. The anthology, titled Preludes, begins a week-long run this Friday, May 18 at Cinéma du Parc. The latest Merchant-Ivory, oh-so-classy period film raises certain questions: are films like this still relevant, now that so many directors have experimented with the genre? Are these films, as crank Joe Queenan once suggested, tantamount to watching paint dry? Based on a Henry James novel, The Golden Bowl certainly boasts exquisite art direction and a sexy cast, including Uma Thurman, Jeremy Northam, Kate Beckinsale and Nick Nolte. But I was struck by the bowl which supplies the title of the film and its central symbol. There's one scene where the bowl, which looks stunning but has a small crack in it that constitutes its barely-visible flaw, is discussed at length, clearly intended to symbolize the ostensibly-perfect-yet-flawed marriages in the movie. This endless spelling out of the film's central metaphor went on for so long, for a moment I actually thought I was watching an SCTV spoof of a Merchant-Ivory movie, with Beckinsale and Northam morphing into Andrea Martin and John Candy. Still, despite this dragged out scene, Bowl will please English-lit grad students and Merchant-Ivory groupies. Bowl opens Friday, May 18. An odd cast (including Pascale Bussières and Kena Molina) populates Attila Bertalan's even odder feature, Between the Moon and Montevideo. Shot entirely in Havana, Cuba, the Canadian-produced film stars Bertalan himself as a scrap-metal dealer desperate to escape a rather dreary space colony and return to Earth. Bertalan's vision is unique, to say the least, but despite the best efforts of everyone involved, Moon and Montevideo left me very cold indeed. And I had to ponder the question: despite the obvious economic and logistical problems facing those who wish to shoot abroad--and especially in a place like Cuba--why was it necessary to make this thing there? Yes, the location adds a certain layer of surrealism, but I can't imagine the finished product being that astonishingly different had it been shot in Montreal. Opens Friday, May 18. COMMENTS: mhays@mtl-mirror.com