Toronto-rama

Movies, monsters and madness at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival

Chaos, chaos, chaos. As the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival rages through the weekend, it seems like the entire city is going nuts. There are construction crews everywhere. Mobs of frosh kids parading around and chanting slogans. Red carpets. Limousines. A giant Jesus-themed parade complete with cross-toting saviour and world music floats. And me, trying des­perately to dash from screening to interview to screening, and eventually getting my bike wheel caught in a streetcar track, sending me flying over the handlebars and landing on the pavement with a sprained ankle and a broken rib or two. Oh, and did I mention the part where I dropped my iPhone and broke the screen? Film festivals are fun!

This year’s festival started with a celebration, though not necessarily the one the organizers were hoping for. This year, opening day was on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and as you may be aware, there are a few Jews in show business. This is apparently what led to the festival’s curious choice for the opening night gala: not Barney’s Version, the new Mordecai Richler adaptation starring Paul Giamatti and Dustin Hoffman, which was apparently pulled by producer Robert Lantos, but something called Score: A Hockey Musical, which I haven’t seen but which nobody seems to have kind words for. (I just can’t imagine that there’s much overlap between fans of musicals and Olivia Newton John, who stars, and hockey fanat­ics.)

And then, of course, there’s the matter of TIFF Bell Lightbox, the long-in-the-waiting new building dedicated to the festival and filmic activities, which has shifted the fest’s centre of gravity away from the traditional Yorkville and downtown neighbourhoods. The Lightbox, for some reason, only opened on the first Sunday of the fest, meaning it effectively sat empty for TIFF’s first three opening days—the busiest time of the fest, for sure. Whatever the reason, it seems like a nice enough place to see a film or grab a bite (I liked the deconstructed Caesar salad in the café), even if I’m not nuts about the festival’s new hood, in the heart of deep-downtown condo-and-clubland.

DARK DANCING

Anticipation ran high for Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky’s first film since he rebounded with The Wrestler a couple years ago. And this film, interestingly enough, shared some qualities with the Mickey Rourke comeback vehicle: both are about driven performers whose bodies are their art form, and who punish them tremendously to achieve some sort of apotheosis. In this one, Natalie Port-man plays a ballerina in a New York City ballet company masterminded by the Balanchine-esque Vincent Cassel. She’s desperate to move up in the company, and when she’s offered the lead in Swan Lake, she sees her chance, though the demands of the role push her into madness. Portman is fantastic here and Mila Kunis co-stars as the foxy newcomer on the scene. Like all of Aronofsky’s films, it’s totally on-the-nose, overheated and kind of pretentious, but I found it worked here. I’d rather see an epic, over-the-top psychodrama about ballet, of all things, than about, like, drug addiction and society. He does some really neat things with the camera and with digital imagery that make it a compelling watch.

Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go also came with some serious advance hype. Based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, it stars Keira Knightley, a terrific Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield— aka the new Spider-Man—as kids who grow up in an English boarding school only to find out the true, sinister purpose of their existence. (Don’t worry about spoilers, the secret comes out fairly ear­ly.) The film is quiet, gorgeous and a real slow creep-out. Some people might not be satisfied by its somewhat counter-intuitive plot arc, but I thought it worked quite well, weaving an unsettling little spell.

Oh… so, that Let the Right One In remake, Let Me In. Directed by Matt Reeves (Cloverfield) and starring Chloe Moretz (Kick-Ass, (500) Days of Summer), it was perfectly well-made, tasteful, good and everything, if a little pointless. Though Reeves has added some of his own touches, there’s really very little to differentiate it from Tomas Alfredsson’s amazing original. Basically, it’s a movie for people who don’t like subtitles.

THUGS AND HUGS

Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job drew a good response at the public screening on the festival’s opening night. A doc about the financial crisis narrated by Matt Damon, it’s a precise, angry accounting of the policies of deregulation and personal greed that got the world into this mess. Leaving the theatre afterwards, I was treated to the sight of a rock band on a truck trailer featuring strippers, a rapper and a bagpiper entertaining a huge line-up; they were there for the Midnight Madness screening of Fubar 2, which was by all accounts a riot.

The biggest letdown of the festival has to be Brighton Rock. Not because I was looking forward to it, but because it started so strong and then lost steam. Based on the novel by Graham Greene and set in the U.K. holiday town of the title, the film stars Sam Riley (Ian Curtis in Control) as Pinky, a knife-toting young thug who gets mixed up in a whole lotta trouble. The film, directed by Rowan Joffe, begins as a tense, almost Hitchcockian thriller, with real visual panache, but somehow ends up a bit formless and meh. Still, great first 20 minutes or so.

And the biggest surprise has got to be Norwegian Wood. I was interested in this solely because I liked the book by Haruki Murakami, which I read years ago. Great books are so hard to adapt, and Murakami’s style is so particular that I thought of this one as a longshot, but director Tran Anh Hung (The Scent of Green Papaya) just knocks it out of the park, with stunning HD imagery and music from Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead and the There Will Be Blood soundtrack (plus some tunes from krautrock giants CAN). A tragic tale of love and death in 1967 Tokyo, this was probably my favourite discovery at the fest so far. Let’s hope some Canadian distributor picks it up this week.

I also really, really, really enjoyed The Trip. Directed by Michael Winterbottom, the film has Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon (who appeared together in Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull story), playing themselves, travelling to the north of England to tour around, eat gourmet food and basically spend two hours making fun of each other and doing Michael Caine impressions. An intentionally, delightfully slight film, it’s like hanging out with two incredibly hilarious goofs for an afternoon. In the middle of movies about young people dying, gangs and vampires, it was a welcome relief. Errol Morris’s Tabloid was also a delight, a very funny documentary about a former beauty queen who kidnapped a Mormon missionary and tied him spread­eagled to a bed for three days, in the hope of winning his love. Later, she would go on to become famous for having her dog cloned. A very Errol Morris subject indeed.

So, a pretty fun, if calamitous festival so far. And I haven’t even seen the Apichatpong Weerasethakul film yet… or Werner Herzog’s 3D cave doc… or Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours… stay tuned! ■

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