Just to give you some local flavor (or flavour, as it’s spelled in Canada): The theater above is the Cineplex Odeon Varsity, and it’s where we do things around here. I’ve seen 19 movies at the Varsity this festival alone, out of a total of 34 and counting. And you thought you had trouble distinguishing between A Single Man and A Serious Man.

To wrap this year’s fest, it seemed appropriate to revisit the resolutions I made at the outset. Alas, depending on how you count, I’m only batting .300, which in this context kind of stinks. Maybe there’s a more euphemistic-sounding hockey metaphor? In any case:

1. Make sure to catch both sure-to-be-bonkers Werner Herzog movies. I wouldn’t have missed them for the world, and you can read about them here.

2. Start shouting at someone while waiting in line for the press screening of Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story. I failed on this one, mainly because I had priority status (thanks, press office!) and didn’t have to wait in line, but also because Capitalism turns out to be rather tepid by Moore standards. But another documentary, The Art of the Steal, proved to be a real flash point, albeit less for its filmmaking than for the way that it gets you exercised about what’s happening with the Barnes collection.

3. Challenge a renowned film critic—or better yet, a group of renowned critics—to a Molson’s-drinking contest. I did the usual amount of boozing this year, but I kind of forgot about this item, to be honest.

4. Cut down on egg salad sandwiches at the Bloor Street Diner. Resistance is futile, it seems, although I mixed it up by eating a lot of turkey clubs as well. Also, I must apologize for confusing the apostrophe-deprived Tim Hortons with Timothy’s World Coffee, which strikes me as slightly more sleek but similarly mediocre. I found a solid pizza place on Yonge Street, so it’s all good.

5. Attend another luncheon where pulled-lamb poutine is served. I didn’t see any lamb poutine when I dropped by the shindig where I found it last year, but the Serious Man party one-upped it with the best gefilte fish I’ve ever tasted. (The entire menu consisted of upscale variations on Jewish cuisine.) As a belated, corollary resolution, I was determined to find out which movie threw a better party, Antichrist or Survival of the Dead. Both events were disappointing—though not as disappointing as Survival of the Dead.

6. Start a Twitter fight over a much-maligned film that I like (or a much-loved film that I hate). I’m in under the wire on this one, as a colleague who unfortunately has his tweets protected just launched into a defense of Werner Herzog’s My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done. He’s probably in the minority on that movie, so it doesn’t really qualify as a “much-loved film that I hate,” but I’ll take what I can get.

7. See my third Coen brothers film at Toronto in as many years. Saw it and enjoyed it immensely.

9. Hang out in the lobby when a screening of Enter the Void lets out. I didn’t have time, alas. But I did attend a screening of this festival’s world-premiere scandal, Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers, which follows a group of masked deviants who resemble the cast of a Texas Chain Saw Massacre sequel as they engage in mostly harmless mischief. (As promised, trash cans are violated, early and often.) This hideous, VHS-shot chronicle of juvenilia is the provocation that Korine was born to make, assuming Korine was born to make a film, a question to which I have no answer.

10. Take a break and spend some time in Toronto’s High Park. I’m on my way as soon as this blog post is online—I hope.

Thanks for reading, see you next September, etc. Au revoir, Toronto—it seemed like you were visited by an unusually high number of French-speaking journalists this year.

UPDATE, September 21: Oy. I just realized I left out Resolution No. 8, “Catch the midnight showing of George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead.” Chalk it up to festival fatigue. I was there, I blogged it and I have no interest in ever seeing the movie again. That does improve my batting average, however, bringing it to .400.

UPDATE, September 22: My wrap piece is now online.

The good folks at Indiewire are compiling an ongoing critical survey on 34 festival films, so look over here if you want to see how my taste stacks up against everyone else’s. On one hand, it appears I’m a bit of a hard-ass, running on the lower end of the spectrum on high-profile films like The Road and Up in the Air (though I like the latter well enough). On the other hand, my stances on Chloe and Life During Wartime look generous in comparison to most others’, so maybe my level of contrarianism is just about right.

The titles are well chosen, though no 34 films out of a 271-feature festival are going to come close to being an accurate sample. At last night’s revelry, my colleagues and I went around the table naming our favorite films. To my surprise, the Coens’ A Serious Man seems to have risen to the top of the acclaim-meter after what I initially perceived as a mixed reception. (It’s an extremely sour film.)

The Indiewire tally holds its own mysteries. How is it possible that, as of this late-night writing, fashion-designer-turned-first-time-director Tom Ford’s ridiculously overhyped A Single Man—bought by the Weinstein Company but getting a love-it/hate-it reception from critics—doesn’t have a single grade lower than a B? (Because I haven’t updated my grades since yesterday morning, that’s how.)

Read more »

Nothing got me psyched for this year’s fest like the prospect of seeing two completely bonkers movies by Werner Herzog. While cementing his legacy as one of the medium’s greatest documentary filmmakers, the director has grown increasingly peculiar since his return to fiction features this decade, and his double bill at Toronto is more peculiar than almost any in film history. Judging from a colleague’s reaction, my 10-minute blog post may have given you the impression that I thought Bad Lieutenant was merely trashy and ordinary—as opposed to being a mediocre script transformed into something sui generis (and highly entertaining) by Nicolas Cage’s lunatic performance.

Herzog directs the film with the same stiltedness that’s marked his fiction work since Invincible, generally donning a poker face. Except for some deus ex machina material and the sequences involving alligators and iguanas, Cage is the only clue that Herzog might see this movie as a comedy. But Cage is also playing Klaus Kinski figure—a madman on a quest to solve a mystery. The film holds your attention, largely in terms usually described as “guilty pleasure.” But there’s a pathology at work here. Cage earns laughs just by walking on the screen, and he does a lot more than that, whining about snorting heroin instead of coke, cutting off an old lady’s oxygen supply and offering someone a hit from his “lucky crack pipe.” If you liked Cage’s best scenes from The Wicker Man, you’ll love Bad Lieutenant.

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, by contrast, really could have used the discipline of a Nic Cage. Produced by David Lynch, the movie is rife with Lynch touches (the presence of Grace Zabriskie; Willem Dafoe’s especially effusive offer of coffee to Udo Kier and Chloe Sevigny; weird reactions to everyday situations—e.g., “Mom, this Jello looks hideous”), but I submit that it has no antecedent, no analogue, no equal and no rubric for being processed. (My Time Out London counterpart evidently disagrees.) A friend is convinced the movie is intentionally funny, but as Lynch detractors often complain—I find it weird to side with them for once—nonstop craziness has a way of growing tedious.

Even summarizing the plot is an exercise in futility. (Those who wish to preserve the purity of the experience—a worthy goal—should stop reading here.) At the risk of making it clearer than it is on screen, where it’s told in flashbacks: Brad McCullum (Michael Shannon, on rant autopilot), an actor who keeps pet flamingos (he prefers the term “eagles in drag”), goes crazy after a whitewater rafting trip; then, influenced by his role in The Oresteia (his performance gets so intense his director fires him), he kills his mother with a sword. Fulfilling an apparent contractual obligation to appear in every third film at this festival, Dafoe plays the detective who investigates the ensuing hostage situation, during which Brad taunts the cops by rolling a can of oatmeal at them. There’s a dwarf in it somewhere, and an ostrich eats Kier’s glasses.

Somehow, that doesn’t even begin to describe the film’s disregard for structure or sense, or answer the question of how it was made. No, there’s no way to talk about this movie without making it sound awesome, and I can’t claim I wasn’t fascinated, especially by the way it interacted with an audience. (The stream of walkouts was its own laugh track.) There is a high curiosity factor here, and probably a viewership as well. But bear in mind that these are probably the same viewers who attend regular screenings of The Room.

“He did vote for Bush and McCain, but only because of Israel,” a housewife (Allison Janney) tells her sister about the man she wants to marry. It turns out that the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man wasn’t Toronto’s only exercise in extreme (and often extremely funny) self-deprecating Jewish humor. And so far, against odds, Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime seems to be at least as widely admired.

In Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness, Solondz used the bleakest of comic styles to explore his characters’ pain and frustration. Since then, with increasing conceptual disorganization, he seems to have replaced that empathy with a kind of equal-opportunity contempt. It always bugs me when critics chastise filmmakers for not liking their characters—as if misanthropy itself were a problem in art—but with parts of Storytelling and Palindromes, you had to wonder if Solondz had anything else to offer. Solondz champion J. Hoberman has made a convincing case for the director’s films as having an irresolvable, Talmudic quality, and on that score, Life During Wartime—a sequel to Happiness that uses different actors—delivers splendidly. Solondz gives most of the characters entirely new attitudes (notably, Dylan Baker’s slimy pedophile has been replaced by saddened Ciaran Hinds, and Lara Flynn Boyle’s vain careerist has morphed into a more tremulous Ally Sheedy), forcing us to see them in different ways.

The typical Solondz argument runs something like this. (I’m paraphrasing.) Are we agreed that it’s desirable to forgive those who have wronged us? Why, yes, of course we are. Well, could you forgive a pedophile? Um, I guess so. How about someone who falsely accused you of pedophilia, ruining your life? (Zing!)

It’s the same twist of the knife every time, but just because Solondz’s method of posing questions is sophomoric doesn’t mean the questions don’t cut to some essential truths. I have to digest more, but my feeling is that Life During Wartime—which I imagine wouldn’t make much sense without seeing Happiness, despite some claims to the contrary—falls somewhere midfield in his oeuvre. It’s half a return to form, and half a retread of ideas that were slightly curdled to begin with.

Barely a minute to blog today, but I thought I’d send a quick word on (as the credits call it) The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Werner Herzog’s highly anticipated, um, rethinking of Abel Ferrara’s modern classic. Apart from some hallucinatory asides involving alligators and iguanas, the movie as written turns out to be a fairly routine mediocre cop drama, albeit one rendered distinctive by Nicolas Cage’s most batshit performance yet. Based on the way Cage skulks, yelps and twitches (sample dialogue: “Everything I take is prescription, except for the heroin”), Herzog evidently sees him as his new Klaus Kinski. Besides the central character type—a comprehensively corrupt, drug-addled cop—the movie shares nothing in common with Ferrara’s film, except perhaps the degree of eccentricity that willed it into being. More on this one after I see Herzog’s My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?

After the relatively straightforward arguments of Sicko, Michael Moore returns to the more sprawling approach of Fahrenheit 9/11 in Capitalism: A Love Story, which turns out to be less an examination of the current financial crisis than a critique of all the flaws of capitalism in general. Yes, in two hours. The level of detail is extraordinarily varied, and the interviewees (e.g., Moore’s father, Moore’s good friend Wallace Shawn) are not always what you would call well-chosen. Using anecdotes to prove his points, Moore throws a lot at the screen and sees what sticks. In one provocative detour, for instance, we learn that some companies take out special life-insurance policies that amount to bets against their employees’ lives. It’s a horrifying prospect, previously unknown to me—but it’s also only a small part of the problems Moore is trying to address, at least relative to the screen time it receives.

Some of Moore’s chosen topics really hit home. He makes an impassioned plea for better treatment of pilots, and he portrays Chicago’s Republic Windows and Doors sit-in as an example of productive protest. There are also a lot of great clips, including a hilarious parody of a Cleveland tourism video. And yes, Moore eventually goes to town on Hank Paulson and TARP, albeit in a way that seems oddly like kid gloves. More than most of Moore’s films, this one fails to connect some obviously connectable dots—perhaps because he presumes the link between credit-default swaps and the housing bubble is already well-known to viewers (although given the way he panders in other sections of the film, that isn’t likely), or maybe because he’s just not big on details. He also still has a thing for fuzzy chronology. Moore scores major points casting doubt on Timothy Geithner’s judgment, then a few minutes later portrays Obama’s election as hope for a new era in finance—as if Obama hadn’t appointed Geithner as treasury secretary.

I’m being harsh, because there’s a lot of good material here, and Moore’s irksome stunts are relatively low-key this time around. (It is funny to see him putting up crime-scene tape in front of major financial players’ office buildings.) What the movie lacks are clarity and focus, which are, alas, probably the qualities it most needed.

The Road

The zombie ideas have won, as Paul Krugman is fond of saying. I’ll be back later today with a full report on the state of the economy after seeing Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story, but first, I should talk about The Road and George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead—two actual sorts of zombie movies that screened here yesterday, both of them disappointments.

Let’s start with the father of the zombie genre. Beginning with Night of the Living Dead, Romero has through four decades and five films in this series become a master of making movies about the undead that function both as pulp and as social allegory. Even his underrated Diary of the Dead, which screened at Toronto in 2007, was a powerful endorsement of civilian media in what Romero sees as an age of journalistic irresponsibility. Whereas Survival of the Dead is about…I’m not sure what. At the post-screening Q&A, midnight programmer Colin Geddes asked whether the movie was Romero’s attempt to make a western, and whether the feud between the insufferably overacted Scotsman (Richard Fitzpatrick) and the insufferably overacted Irishman (Kenneth Welsh) was supposed to represent Republicans and Democrats. Romero acknowledged that the allegory is a lot more general this time around—that basically, it’s a movie about war. I suspect what Survival of the Dead is really about is Romero’s desire to make another zombie movie and having the opportunity, even though he’d mostly run out of coherent things to say.

Even sketchy ideas might be okay if the movie were at least scary (or scary-funny), but Romero has boiled this material down to its campiest elements; his sole investment in the direction seems to be in finding as many different angles as possible for blowing zombies’ heads off. On the evidence, he’s given a cast of mostly unseasoned actors absolutely no help, and while the cheap digital look worked thematically for Diary of the Dead, which was supposed to resemble something you’d find on YouTube, here it’s simply hideous.

That’s not a complaint you could level at The Road, the long-delayed adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, which, if nothing else, is real, real purty: The images of the father (Viggo Mortensen) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) wandering a postapocalyptic, ash-covered America really do linger in your mind. This isn’t a literal zombie movie, of course, but that comparison has been made with at least part of the premise, in that it pits man and child against an onslaught of potential attackers who would happily cannibalize them. I had the suspicion that The Road might actually work better as a film, lingering on images that a reader could quickly pass over. Reports from test screenings were all over the map, suggesting, promisingly, that director John Hillcoat (The Proposition) had made a genuinely tough and uncommercial vision—albeit one that some speculate has been subjected to studio tinkering.

Unfortunately, accusations that the movie softens the source material aren’t off-base. In particular, The Road slathers on a score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, a lyrical touch that couldn’t be more at odds with the jagged, objectifying quality of McCarthy’s prose. The story—which should be brutal and demanding from the start—goes down too easily, and the repetitive scenes of Mortensen dispensing wisdom become lulling, even dull. This movie will have its defenders, and not without cause: It has the courage to be bleak (as if it were possible to have this material be anything else) and it is, on its own terms, uncompromising, in the sense that it chooses a particular tone and never relents. And it does pick up for momentary encounters, as when the boy shares food with an old man, or when the father decides the fate of another drifter who would have left him and his son for dead. It’s not a dishonorable film, but the story’s elemental qualities ultimately come across as pretentious and simplified on screen. Maybe it’s not so much a zombie movie as a mummifed one.

At Toronto, the split between perceived popular opinion and one’s own taste can easily drive a person up a wall. Last night, crowds lined up around the block and cheered for a Midnight Madness screening of Daybreakers, an Australian vampire film that I found only slightly more coherent and self-consciously cheesy than an Underworld sequel. Earlier the same day, I heard mostly dismissive remarks about Joe Dante’s The Hole, a fun and lovingly mounted kid-horror flick that finds witty and restrained uses for 3-D, even if it’s admittedly not up to the level of invention of Dante’s Small Soldiers or Gremlins movies. One day, you’ll see Willem Dafoe give a career performance (in Antichrist); the next, he’ll appear in his most blatant paycheck role since Speed 2 (in Daybreakers). For some reason, a lot of Twitter users seem to prefer the performance in which he uses a crossbow. (Just to be clear: That’s Daybreakers.)

A favorite festival pastime is using one film as a rod with which to beat another, and in that respect, the most fruitful double feature so far has been George Clooney versus George Clooney; in two days, the star has appeared in two sorts of modern screwball comedy. As Lyn Cassady, a special operative trained to use his psychic powers as a peacekeeping force, Clooney is one of the few comic elements that pop in The Men Who Stare at Goats, an erratic, true-life-based attempt at Three Kings–style subversiveness that never decides what it’s about. Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air, which arrives on a wave of cannily orchestrated Oscar buzz, is a much smoother ride, beautifully played at least as long as it confines itself to Capra territory and allows its terrific leads to spar with each other. (Clooney flies around the country firing people for a living, Anna Kendrick as the new colleague he trains and Vera Farmiga is his lover on layovers.) In what seems to be a chronic problem at this festival, the movie can’t quite find the right way to end.

Contentiousness, of course, is often a good thing. One of the most divisive, and to my mind, most formidable films to screen has been the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man—their third movie to play at Toronto in as many years. At once recognizably theirs and unlike anything they’ve ever done, A Serious Man employs a mostly unknown cast to tell a loosely autobiographical story of a physics professor in a late-’60s Minneapolis suburb. (The character’s sons are pretty clearly Joel and Ethan.) Larry Gopnik (a wonderfully nervous Michael Stuhlbarg) becomes a kind of modern-day Job, simultaneously coping with a divorce, a tenure battle, a troubled brother and a disgruntled student—and that’s just to start. The movie may be the driest of the Coens’ comedies, but it’s also (I think) a sincere film about faith and how we cope with our problems—and maybe how we’re ultimately on our own.

To their detractors, the Coens have never been serious men (the title is as self-reflexive as Intolerable Cruelty), and the brothers, poker-faced as always, actively court that charge with a parade of self-deprecating Jewish jokes that take their supposed misanthropy to new heights. On the other hand, the movie may be the clearest expression yet of their philosophy—namely, that however hard you try to be serious, perhaps the happiest way to go through life is to get high at your bar mitzvah. Indeed, the Coens’ true perspective may be revealed in what’s sure to be the year’s funniest closing credit: “No Jews were harmed in the making of this film.”

Maybe the first thing you want to hear about is the Antichrist party, which turned out to be more like a Miami Vice party. (It had several sponsors, so there were no talking foxes, alas, but also no grievous bodily injuries.) Or maybe you want to hear about how awesome Matt Damon is in The Informant!, which again shows Steven Soderbergh as a master of pure—but personal—Hollywood entertainment. (You can read my review next week.) Or perhaps you want to know about the wan George Clooney vehicle The Men Who Stare at Goats, which created quite the line yesterday at the normally unfillable Varsity 8. (I’m saving that one for a possible Clooney-versus-Clooney post; his Up in the Air screens here today.)

Besides, in the interest of getting you psyched for the Chicago International Film Festival, the movie you really should hear about is Inferno, a remarkable documentary that presents fragments of a 1964 film that Henri-Georges Clouzot (director of The Wages of Fear and the original Diabolique) never finished. The French title—L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot—more fully captures the ownership of the thing.

The question with any reconstruction is how to present the footage; Clouzot shot less than half of his movie (called Inferno), so you couldn’t even do a patch job the way Jess Franco did to largely negative response with Orson Welles’s Don Quixote. Working with a preservationist’s respect for process, director Serge Bromberg instead chooses to focus on the making of the clips we do have, creating a whirlwind of footage that explains Clouzot’s visual and aural strategies but mostly allows the imagery, which is like nothing ever seen on film, to speak for itself. The simple but effective documentary material (including interviews with director Costa-Gavras and celebrated cinematographer William Lubtchansky) often presents talking heads with fragments of Clouzot’s movie playing on screens behind them; indeed, Bromberg’s film comes to use Inferno’s production as a metaphor for creative obsession. The more standard doc material provides an effective grounding for Clouzot’s material while also staying out of its way.

Read more »

How is it that this year’s festival hasn’t even started, and yet it already feels like a mad dash? Okay, maybe the craziness isn’t visible yet. At this early hour, I doubt anyone’s lining up at the Ryerson for the first midnight screening, and even the normally jammed press office exuded calm and good cheer. But there’s been no shortage of things to do: pick up accreditation materials; check on the status of a mysterious 10am press screening (it is, in fact, happening [update, 10:16am: um, evidently not], despite being listed on some schedules and not others); score a ticket to one of tonight’s public screenings (Inferno—a movie that, as you’ll see, is in keeping with today’s theme); and purchase the one item I forgot to pack (hairbrush!).

For most of the press corps, the festival will kick off at high noon with a screening of either Lars von Trier’s Antichrist or the much-hyped Jennifer’s Body, which is opening the Midnight Madness sidebar. Choose your satanic experience wisely: I’ve said my piece about von Trier’s crazy whatsit, which is simultaneously a complete joke and an alarmingly sincere portrait of the dissolution of a marriage. It’s hard to take a movie that features a talking fox seriously, but I submit that this one demands it, at least at moments.

A movie about a different sort of talking fox, Jennifer’s Body finds limber mean girl Megan Fox possessed by a demon from hell (or maybe she’s just trying to pronounce the dialogue of screenwriter Diablo Cody). Perhaps eager to avoid a repeat of 2006’s unforgettable Borat fiasco (the projector broke and Michael Moore took the stage), Fox—20th Century, that is, not Megan—previewed the movie extensively, for which I’m quite grateful. I’ll have more to say in my forthcoming review, but I have to ask: Is there a market for a demonic-possession movie in which every character talks like Juno MacGuff? At Toronto, the answer is, maybe. Now excuse me while I find out what’s happening with the Antichrist party.