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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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TWO “MECHANICS”
Egad, are there filmmakers out there who can take material previously handled by the infamous Michael Winner and make a worse – make that much worse – movie out of it? Based on the evidence of director Simon West’s new version of Winner’s The Mechanic (1972), starring Jason Statham as a hit man, the answer is an emphatic yes.
• The Lincoln Lawyer
Based on the final result, one would have to assume that whoever was the chief auteur of Los Angeles-set The Lincoln Lawyer had a simple plan. To wit: Take all the elements from 15 years of lawyerly dramas, mix them up in a bucket, then throw the contents against a screen and see what sticks.
• Limitless
You’d expect something unusual to happen in a humorous sci-fi action movie such as Limitless, and it does. But it’s not the pill that triple boosts the hero’s brain power; it’s not the p.o.v. shots that make the pill’s first effects look like a super groovy acid trip; or even the multiple fights the non-pugilistic pill popper wins through a supercharged learning ability.
• Red Riding Hood
Thanks, no doubt, to careful planning and probably to nobody’s surprise, Red Riding Hood is not much more than Twilight set in a school-play style Middle Ages. Amanda Seyfried plays Valerie, a village girl fascinated by the local bad boy but betrothed to a nice ‘un by her social-climbing parents (Virginia Madsen and Billy Burke, who by crazy coincidence plays the heroine’s father in the Twilight movies). As if this local romantic dilemma weren’t bad enough, the village is suffering from the bloody depredation of a werewolf. Even this is a special problem for Valerie, since the werewolf likes to corner her and hold conversations that nobody else can hear.
• THE 5TH QUARTER
Nothing kills a movie like a funeral. Not always, of course. The march to the cemetery in John Ford’s The Sun Shines Bright (1953) is a folkloric triumph. The occasion in Abel Ferrara’s The Funeral (1996) serves as a rich background. But a funeral that exists mostly to increase a bathos quotient can bring a movie to a sudden halt. And movies are like sharks: If they stop moving, they die.
• Japanese filmmaker Eiichi Kudo
Japanese filmmaker Eiichi Kudo (1929-2000) spent most of his career making samurai films at the Toei Company at a moment when the studio specialized in mid-budget features aimed at middle-class audiences. If there was ever a formula for critical obscurity, that was it, since the circumstances guaranteed that Kudo’s movies were neither highbrow or lowbrow enough to be fashionable.
• INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL
There’s this very nice scene in Steven Spielberg’s latest Indiana Jones slog where the aging, tired-looking and paunchy titular adventurer enter a combination prison-insane asylum looking for some info.
• Iron Man
 Years from now, when your great-grandchildren ask you how in the name of god so many American voters could have chosen George W. Bush to be the president (even in the stolen 2000 election, he still received tens of millions of votes) and supported the invasion of Iraq, don’t bother trying to explain the conversion story that was supposed to locate this self-indulgent rich-boy on a higher spiritual plane than the rest of us. Just show them Iron Man, the 2008 power trip that reruns Bush’s self-created myth in popular culture terms.
• To Be Twenty (Avere vent’anni) (1978) - Brucia, ragazzo, brucia (1969) - Dir.: Fernando Di Leo
The Italian filmmaker Fernando Di Leo (1932-2003) has enjoyed posthumous resurgence in popularity, largely due to the crime thrillers he made during the 1970s. These hardboiled, violent, but strangely introspective movies have had the good fortune of falling into line with 21st-century notions of what makes for a proper action outing, especially the misogynist notion that women don’t belong on-screen unless they’re naked or firing a gun (or both).
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• 1986 INTERVIEW WITH SAMUEL FULLER IN BOSTON
As it pretty much says in the article, this interview was conducted over Thai food in Boston in 1986. At the time Fuller was in his second eclipse. The first had ended when auteurists celebrated the uniquely bold language of his movies. Unfortunately, the wave of enthusiasm had broken just about the time The Big Red One came out in a truncated version. No one except the usual critical minority raised a hue and cry when White Dog was nearly put down for good by Paramount. Luckily, the college film groups, museums and cinematheques of the world maintained their interest throughout. Hence my dinner with Sam.
• 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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•  THE OTHER TWENTY PERCENT
The specialty divisions of the major studios aren’t what they used to be. In fact, some of them aren’t at all. This past May, Warner Bros. – which is about as big as an entertainment conglomerate can get – shuttered its two boutique houses, Warner Independent Pictures (Good Night and Good Luck) and Picturehouse (La Vie en rose). This was only a short while after Warners had closed down another outpost of its empire, New Line (Lord of the Rings). Similar operations at other majors are still open for business, but in most cases their lists of releases are shrinking.
• 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, past 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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