Hey folks, Harry here... I just got back to the house after finishing up the last night of Quentin Tarantino's Fourth Annual Film Festival... Father Geek and I are now officially the only two beings on the planet to see the complete programming for all 4 years (hell... and technically... we go back to Quentin's first Austin screening of PULP FICTION prior to its national release) Now I have to begin work on tons of business related things that are causing me to miss... THE 25th Anniversary of the TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL... and I'm heart broken.... However... I will be reviewing films that are screening at Toronto... as several filmmakers and their... PEOPLE... Have begun sending me screeners and film prints to screen of their various competition and non-competition films. I will be wrapping up my Tarantino Coverage over the next pair of days... and when all is said and done... Anton is going to be brilliant this year as he was last year. If you are at Toronto and want to help out... Write up something about everything you want to tell us about... It'll help make this as great as it was last year.... Here's Anton...
Greetings, strange monkey beings! Anton Sirius, your intergalactic infant terrible, is back with another ten days of bliss at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Came in early to T'rana (as the natives say) for a concert once again, this time Neil Young. Ran into my friend Yvonne at the airport, just coming back into the city from a photo shoot in Tokyo. We chatted merrily away in the back of a limo for all of about 5 minutes before we were asleep, heads on complementary shoulders. I'm sure most of you know this already, but BABIES AND AEROPLANES DO NOT MIX. Put 'em in the luggage compartment, I says.
Neil was brilliant, of course, but the scene backstage was wild. The lords and ladies of alt-rock had gathered in Toronto for pay homage to their god. Eddie and Pearl Jam, Chrissie, Thurston and Kim from Sonic Youth (I think Thurston said he was sticking around for the fest- he's got a bit in the Nihilist Spasm Band doc)... Many shins were dug. It was faboo.
Anywhoozis, on to the fest. At first glance, the line-up this year looks, I don't know, top heavy. A lot (and I do mean a LOT) of absolutely must-see films, but there don't seem to be any hidden little gems (like last year's The Cup) jumping out of the program bible at me. Oh well, I'm sure something will turn up. This is the 25th anniversary, after all, and Toronto is notorious for little 'uns. The themes I've noticed this year- first films by actresses, neo-noir, rock and roll, classic Russian film and lit, fruit and vegetables, and pro wrestling. Hell of a set of Jeopardy categories if you ask me. If ya smelllllllllllalalalala...
(Speaking of classic Russian stuff- my pledge to you this year is that if I'm EVER tempted to make a quip about either Survivor or Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, I'll replace it with a Tolstoy reference. Deal? No 'this director should be voted off the island' crap from me. I promise.)
Your starting line-up for the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival-
Thursday the7th- The first Thursday is always acclimation day. Time to get used to the rhythms and stresses of queues, fast food, and light/dark iris exercises. Fest kicks off with Benoit Jacquot's Sade, about the marquis, not the singer; Arcand's Stardom gets the Gala treatment; and Maria de Medeiros (best known to most of you as Bruce's pie-lovin' wife in Pulp Fiction) brings her first film, April Captains.
Friday- If you love film, this is the weekend to be in Toronto. The career retrospective this year is on Stephen Frears, and today's flick is the Grifters, on one of the best screens in the city, the Uptown 1. Two hours later, Lynne Stopkewich (director of Kissed) shows her Dialogues choice, Lynch's Blue Velvet. Wow. Also showing- Agnes Varda's new doc les glaneurs et la glaneuse; the new Frears film Liam; Gala time with Best in Show (the new Chris Guest mock doc) and Almost Famous by Cameron Crowe; Clara Law's Goddess of 1967, starring a vintage Citroen DS; Liv Ullman's Faithless; Mamet's State and Main; A la verticale de l'ete by Tran Anh Hung, director of Scent of Green Papaya and Cyclo; and Midnight Madness kicks off with a doozy- Tsui Hark's Time and Tide.
Saturday- Cinegeek weekend continues. Oshima's Gohatto; The Turandot Project, about Zhang Yimou's staging of Puccini's Turandot inside the Forbidden City; one of Canada's young guns, Clement Virgo, shows his latest, Love Come Down; Bruce Paltrow's Duets, starring his little girl Gwynnie; a Hal Hartley short, Kimono; Better Than Sex by Australian video/ad director Jonathan Teplitzsky (no Cellish hackjob here- he wrote the film himself); an Austrian Last Seduction riff, the Stranger; Soldiers in the Army of God, a doc about uber-pro-lifers (to quote the Prophet Bill Hicks, "We're pro-life, and we'll kill your ass"); Girlfight, about, um, girls that fight; Takeshi Kitano's Brother (yes!); Stopkewich's newest, Suspicious River; tonight's Gala is Kathryn Bigelow's Weight of Water; French novelist Virginie Despentes picks up the gauntlet thrown down by Catherine Breillat's Romance, by adapting her own novel, Baise-moi; You Can Count On Me, with that supposedly star-making turn by Mark Ruffalo; and Midnight Madness with Tell me Something, a South Korean serial killer flick.
Sunday- Tonight's Galas- Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Lurie's the Contender. Ye-owch. Also on the slate- Dog Food, by my personal fave Philippine director Carlos Siguion-Reyna; Chasing Sleep, a Repulsion/Tenant riff starring Jeff Daniels; Shadow of the Vampire, the Malkovich/Dafoe Nosferatu film that floored them at Cannes; waydowntown, by Canada's answer to Wes Anderson, Gary Burns; Buffy-esque werewolf flick Ginger Snaps; Gretchen Mol attempts to re-start her career with Attraction; a special treat- Breillat's long-buried first film, Une vraie jeune fille; Nine Lives of Tomas Katz, by Simon Magus director Ben Hopkins; and from Midnight Madness the Foul King, another South Korean flick, this one about a mild-mannered guy who becomes a pro wrestling star.
Monday- Marker's new doc about Tarkovsky, Une journee d"Andrei Arsenevitch; The Isle, apparantly a very fucked up psycho-sexual horror romance thing. Involving fish hooks. Ouch; Michael Haneke's newest, Code Inconnu; Galas are the Luzhin Defense, adapted from Nabokov with John Turturro and Emily Watson, and Bread and Tulips, one of them 'charming' (ulp) Italian films; A Shot At Glory, a Scottish football (soccer to you Yanks) film with Robert Duvall; Sally Field's first directorial effort, Beautiful; Kiyoshi Kurosawa's latest, Seance; Gaea Girls, a doc about joshi puroresu (Japanese women's wrestling) with former Crush Girl Chigusa Nagayo (if you have to ask...); Pacino's Chinese Coffee; Loach's Bread and Roses; Ed Harris directs himself in Pollock, about painter Jackson (not the fish); and at Midnight, American Nightmare, a doc about horror films including interviews with Carpenter, Craven, Cronenberg, Hooper and Romero.
Tuesday- Robert Lepage's Dialogues choice, Tarkovsky's the Sacrifice; Asia Argento's pseudo(?)-autobiographocal directorial debut, Scarlet Diva; Galas Dr. T and the Women by Altman (which worries me, I have to admit- it reeks of that hole he fell into in the 80s) and Wong Kar-wai's In The Mood For Love (remember when his films were part of Midnight Madness?), starring Maggie Cheung (maybe I'll FINALLY get to meet her); Sundance buzz flick Two Family House; Tykwer's newest, the Princess and the Warrior; Vulgar, produced by Kevin Smith; Bernard Rose's ivansxtc. (To Live and Die In Hollywood); What About Me: the Rise of the Nihilist Spasm Band (again, if you have to ask...); Lepage's Possible Worlds; another film with John Turturro, Two Thousand and None; and New Zealand horror at Midnight with the Irrefutable Truth About Demons.
Wednesday- Kevin Smith's Dialogues choice, Do The Right Thing; the freebie screenings of the 25th anniversary Preludes shorts; Galas the House of Mirth (think Age of Innocence, but starring Scully and Eric Stoltz. OK, it'll probably be better than THAT) and Sexy Beast with Ben Kingsley and Ray Winstone; Walhberg/Phoenix/Theron in the Yards; in one of those delicious bits of fest irony, Requiem for a Dream by Darren Aronofsky (the Pi guy who's supposed to be doing Batman Year One) runs right after Tigerland by Schu-not going to say his name BECAUSE THE BASTARD RUINED THE BATMAN FRANCHISE AAAAAAARGH; the first of two related Hong Kong flicks by Fruit Chan, Little Cheung; and 6ixtynin9 at Midnight, best summed up as a Thai riff on Shallow Grave.
Thursday- Barnard Rose's Dialogues choice, Performance (woo!); When the sky Falls, Joan Allen's other film this year; Galas Men of Honor (the boring title that replaced Navy Diver) with Deniro and Gooding Jr., and La Veuve de Saint-Pierre with Juliette Binoche; Princes et Princesses by Kirikou creator Michael Ocelot; Before Night Falls by Basquiet director Julian Schnabel; Michael Radford's Dancing at the Blue Iguana, which looks like Showgirls meets Steel Magnolias, or something; Saint Jude by Curtis' Charm director John L'Ecuyer; the other Fruit Chan film, Durian Durian; and, for Midnight Madness, post-Woo Hong Kong action film the Mission.
Friday- Galas the Dish (funny Aussie look at the US space program) and Julien Temple's Pandaemonium; new Dogme 95 film the King Is Alive, about bus passengers stranded in the middle of the Sahara putting on a make-shift production of King Lear to try and stay sane; little-seen Stephen Frears film the Hit, with an impossibly young Tim Roth; Canadian auteur John Greyson's Law of Enclosures; and at Midnight, the City of Lost Souls, from the director of Fudoh: The New Generation.
Saturday- A showing of Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, with full orchestral and choir accompaniment; final night Gala How To Kill Your Neighbor's Dog with Kenneth Branagh and Robin Wright-Penn; and final film of the fest (Midnight Madness of course and it WILL be mad) Wild Zero, a zombie film with almost-nearly-legendary band Guitar Wolf. Colin (MM programmer) describes it as "a Japanese cover version of Rock and Roll High School, Kiss Meets the Phantom and Dawn of the Dead."
So there you have it. I'll do my name-dropping segment at the beginning of the week, and then try not to party too much before the fest begins. Be seeing you!
