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Toronto International Film Festival 2007
• Wednesday, September 19
"Day Six"
 Getaway day usually means at least one movie before hot-footin' it to the airport, a rush from screening room to taxi stand that doesn't always pay off in artistic satisfaction. So it was first with apprehension, then relief, then considerable pleasure that I found myself watching Gregg Araki's new opus, the dope comedy Smiley Face. Araki's movies always have something funny in or about them; he tends to address the audience with the same effective lack of subtlety that Moe's hand used to address Curly's cheeks in the Three Stooges shorts...
• Saturday, September 15
"Day Five"
With my time at the Toronto International Film Festival - or TIFF, as we insiders refer to it - drawing to a close, it's time to ramp up my screening attendance. So the day starts off promptly at 9 am with a showing of Useless, the latest documentary from Jia Zhang-ke, the mainland Chinese director drawing the most intense interest these days. Jia works in high (very high) definition digital, which gives his film's surfaces a watery, almost glassy surface, though also providing, as if in emotional compensation, a technically unlimited deep focus...
• Friday, September 14
"Day Four"
With only three screenings on your correspondent's personal schedule today, it was a good idea to start off with the movie version of an extra-caffeinated eye-opener. Hong Kong's Johnnie To has been popping eyes open for three decades now, so he certainly knows how to grab your attention. Mad Detective, his newest (as of this minute, anyway - the man works fast), opens with a detective squad leader hacking away at a pig carcass and then ordering his newest subordinate to zip him into a soft-sided suitcase and kick it down two flights of stairs...
• Tuesday, September 11
"Day Three"
Nothing like a bit of light entertainment to start the day, though it turned out that the absence of light was what the Spanish-made (though English-dubbed) animated feature, Nocturna, was all about...
• Monday, September 10
"Day Two"
Nothing like a bit of light entertainment to start the day, though it turned out that the absence of light was what the Spanish-made (though English-dubbed) animated feature, Nocturna, was all about. The feature debut of Adrián Garcia and Victor Maldonado, the 83-minute movie is about the adventures of a little orphan boy named Tim, who can only assuage his fear of the night by gazing at one particular star ...
• Saturday, September 08
"Day One"
Whenever five different movies, selected more or less at random, suggest a common theme, then you have to wonder: Is it the viewer's undifferentiating eye that insists on similarities, or do the movies actually have something in common...
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 • Legong, Dance of the Virgins
From the mid 1920s well into the 1930s, American and European audiences had a well nigh insatiable appetite for films set in the South Seas – whether they be features, documentaries, or travelogues. One of the most outstanding examples turns out to be a recent rediscovery, Legong: Dance of the Virgins, made by the French adventurer and international socialite, the Marquis Henry de la Falaise. more
 • I'm Going Home
Nonagenarian Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira has been enjoying one of the most extraordinary careers in cinema history. After a directing career that went through fits and starts, he settled down into his productive years in his 70s and has been producing a steady stream of provocations, curiosities, and masterpieces ever since. more
• Cure
 Despite the fact that it left audiences rapt and creeped out at the 1998 Toronto International Film Festival, and then again at Toronto in 1999, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure never hit with American audiences when it managed a small release in the United States a few years ago.
That might be because the only Japanese movies that make it through the “free-trade” barriers that keep most foreign films out of the U.S. are either some of Beat Takeshi’s or the grotesquely violent and sadistic chop-‘em-ups that have developed a cult following. more
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• Douglas Sirk
 Auteurist critics have embraced the whole of Douglas Sirk’s work for at least 35 years, an intellectual clinch first marked by the filmmaker’s entry in Andrew Sarris’s "The American Cinema 1928-1968." Summer Storm, A Scandal in Paris, There’s Always Tomorrow, All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, Imitation of Life – these have been long acknowledged as unadulterated masterpieces. But celebrating Sirk was a more hazardous venture than, say, fêting Samuel Fuller...
• Read Part 1
• The Peter Panning of Steven Spielberg
 (Reprint / 1992) - The "Panning of Steven Spielberg" ran as a two-part series in consecutive issues of Film Comment in 1992. I don’t see any reason to back off either the general premise – that an analysis of Hook reveals Spielberg’s central preoccupations in his films up to that point – or the individual analysis of movies.
• Read Part 1 | Read Part 2
• Clint Eastwood - "Scraps of Hope" |
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• Links To Other Sites
Visit other film critics whose commentary on cinema is extremely valuable. more |
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• Eastern Promises
 Don't make an occupation out of your preoccupations. That's a lesson to be drawn from David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, the disappointing, if not wholly unexpected, successor to the masterful A History of Violence. It was foreseeable because over his career, Cronenberg has often let his fascination with the power of spontaneous (or at least sudden) mutation in human beings overwhelm character, story and structure. This isn't a new phenomenon; it stretches all the way back to 1979's The Brood which despite its horror elements and occasions of suspense was almost a term paper. more
• George Romero’s Land of the Dead
 George Romero’s zombies have come a long way since we got a first ghastly look at them in 1968’s Night of the Living Dead. Literally, of course, they’ve only made it from rural western Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh – though that’s not so bad for creatures who drift about randomly and slowly, hoping to run into human meat on the hoof. more
• Batman Begins
 The first four modern-era Batman movies were such cacophonous lumberers that it’s tempting – very tempting – to over praise the fifth in the series, Batman Begins. Because it’s a prequel that concentrates on the mental formation of the young Bruce Wayne, there’s a critical urge to celebrate its concentration on character. Because it deals directly with the issue of superhero/supervillain-inspired fear, there’s a similar instinct to praise its “meta” qualities. And, finally, because the action is swift and compact rather than grandiose, one might reflexively use on of those trite phrases (“in your face,” for example) to describe it. more
• Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith
 If he’s proven nothing else with his six Star Wars movies, writer-producer-director-uberlord George Lucas has demonstrated that he is one of the most persnickety filmmakers of all time. With the three most recent of the movies (prequels to the first three, as if you didn’t know), Lucas has nailed down every loose plot point from the first three with the finality of a mortician hammering shut a coffin. To keep the movies up to date technically, he has revised the effects in the first three not once, but twice. more
• Palindromes
 In the past, Todd Solondz has gone to town with characters who desperately crave happiness but who start from such a deficit that maybe the best they can hope for is a kind of equilibrium between depression (or worse) and, well, if not happiness, than anti-depression (or anti-worse). The work that seemed to hit home hardest was 1995’s Welcome to the Dollhouse, the story of a young misfit (brilliantly embodied by Heather Matarazzo) who suffered from familial indifference and junior-high-school cruelty. more
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• Clint Eastwood
 On November 19, 2003, Clint Eastwood sat down with Henry Sheehan for an interview at his offices at Warner Bros. more
• Vincente Minnelli (Web exclusive)
• Johnnie To (March, 2003)
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 • Million Dollar Question
SPOILER ALERT: The following contains major revelations of surprise twists in Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby, including the ending.
The difference between criticism and journalism showed was revealed under a particularly bright light in a February 5 column by the Los Angeles Times’s Tim Rutten. Rutten writes under the heading “Regarding Media,” and while many sins are committed in the daily press under the guise of journalistic dissection, Rutten is not one of the offenders. Maybe that’s why I felt so personally disappointed by this column. more
 • Too Hot To Handle
Determined to prove that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, Jack Valenti, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, has prevailed upon the distributors of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 to change a quote in the movie’s ad. The quote, as it happens, is from Richard Roeper, and read in its original form, “Everybody should see this movie.” more
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• All About Henry Sheehan
 Henry Sheehan, current president of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, has been a professional film critic for over 25 years and has been published in Film Comment, Sight and Sound, the Chicago Reader, the Boston Globe, and LA Weekly. Since 1986, he has been based in Los Angeles, where he currently appears as a regular panelist on KPCC-FM’s "Film Week," an hour-long live discussion show broadcast Friday mornings from 10am to 11am. "Film Week" can also be heard on KPCC’s web page. more
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