Toronto International Film Festival - 40th Anniversary Edition

[Stay Puft]

Started from the bottom now it's here. September 10th to 20th, 2015.

This year sees a brand new program, titled PLATFORM, which will showcase "up to 12 films of high artistic merit that demonstrate a strong directorial vision" (source (http://tiff.net/whats-on/news-events/platform-jury-announcement)). A three-panel jury will award one film a cash prize of $25000 alongside the other returning TIFF awards (people's choice stuff, etc.) at the awards ceremony on Sept. 20th. The program is named for Jia Zhangke's sophomore film, and Jia Zhangke will serve on the inaugural jury alongside Claire Denis and Agnieszka Holland.

Also, the first set of Galas and Special Presentations were announced this week. (Press release here. (https://s3.amazonaws.com/presscontent.tiff.net/docs/Y6qxpY_Galas_and_SPs_2015__872 3632_1438368210.pdf))

GALAS

Beeba Boys (Deepa Mehta)
Demolition (Jean-Marc Vallée) OPENING NIGHT FILM
The Dressmaker (Jocelyn Moorhouse)
Eye in the Sky (Gavin Hood)
Forsaken (Jon Cassar)
Freeheld (Peter Sollett)
Hyena Road (Paul Gross)
Legend (Brian Helgeland)
Lolo (Julie Delpy)
The Man Who Knew Infinity (Matthew Brown)
The Martian (Ridley Scott)
The Program (Stephen Frears)
Remember (Atom Egoyan)
Septembers of Shiraz (Wayne Blair)
Stonewall (Roland Emmerich)

SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS

Anomalisa (Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson)
Beasts of No Nation (Cary Fukunaga)
Black Mass (Scott Cooper)
Brooklyn (John Crowley)
The Club (Pablo LarraÃ*n)
Colonia (Florian Gallenberger)
The Danish Girl (Tom Hooper)
The Daughter (Simon Stone)
Desierto (Jonás Cuarón)
Dheepan (Jacques Audiard)
Families (Jean-Paul Rappeneau)
The Family Fang (Jason Bateman)
Guilty (Meghna Gulzar)
I Smile Back (Adam Salky)
The Idol (Hany Abu-Assad)
The Lady in the Van (Nicholas Hytner)
Len and Company (Tim Godsall)
The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos)
Louder than Bombs (Joachim Trier)
Maggie's Plan (Rebecca Miller)
Mountains May Depart (Jia Zhang-ke)
Office (Johnnie To)
Parched (Leena Yadav)
Room (Lenny Abrahamson)
Sicario (Denis Villeneuve)
Son of Saul (László Nemes)
Spotlight (Tom McCarthy)
Summertime (Catherine Corsini)
Sunset Song (Terence Davies)
Trumbo (Jay Roach)
Un plus une (Claude Lelouch)
Victoria (Sebastian Schipper)
Where to Invade Next (Michael Moore)
Youth (Paolo Sorrentino)

[baby doll]

I'm guessing what's being remembered in the Egoyan film are the days when his movies didn't suck.

[dreamdead]

I'm guessing what's being remembered in the Egoyan film are the days when his movies didn't suck.

Do people expect a filmmaker to still be releasing powerful if not revelatory cinema three to four decades after their debut? Not to excuse Egoyan's decline, but that's so typical of directors in general. He's said what he has to say, and has said it with such regularity that there's no surprise or snap to the work anymore. That's why someone like Malick is more interesting -- his three films after Days of Heaven changed and evolved in style, while bearing his earlier signatures. But that couldn't have occurred naturally if he were putting out a film every two or three years. (See the decline into "ok-ness" of TtW.)

I don't expect a marvel from Jia or Terrence Davies anymore. Just something that's still generally interesting and reminds me of their best work when they hit and ride that wave of solid editing and cinematography and writing for a section.

The Trier film has me greatly excited, since I still think his best days are ahead of him.

[baby doll]

Do people expect a filmmaker to still be releasing powerful if not revelatory cinema three to four decades after their debut? Not to excuse Egoyan's decline, but that's so typical of directors in general. He's said what he has to say, and has said it with such regularity that there's no surprise or snap to the work anymore. That's why someone like Malick is more interesting -- his three films after Days of Heaven changed and evolved in style, while bearing his earlier signatures. But that couldn't have occurred naturally if he were putting out a film every two or three years. (See the decline into "ok-ness" of TtW.)

I don't expect a marvel from Jia or Terrence Davies anymore. Just something that's still generally interesting and reminds me of their best work when they hit and ride that wave of solid editing and cinematography and writing for a section.

The Trier film has me greatly excited, since I still think his best days are ahead of him.Personally, I think Malick started to lose it about two-thirds of the way through The Thin Red Line when the narrative comes to a sudden dead stop. (If anything, To the Wonder seems to me a slight improvement on The New World and The Tree of Life in terms of narrative unity.)

But where Malick's decline since the '70s can be attributed to a variety of factors--chiefly, his "let's keep the camera rolling until it literally runs out of film" shooting style, and the advent of digital editing, which hasn't had a positive impact on anyone's work--Egoyan's more drastic decline is difficult to account for, even as personal burnout, and is therefore much more shocking. It's like when you see before and after photos of people who get hooked on crystal meth.

Then again, coming from a country as mediocre as Canada where hacks like Deepa Mehta and Jean-Marc Vallée not only continue to work but are spotlighted by the national film apparatus (don't count on Guy Maddin getting the opening night slot at TIFF anytime this millennia), I guess the fact that Egoyan was able to make good movies as long as he did is something close to a miracle. (Incidentally, I don't think it's an accident that his best movie, Calendar, isn't technically speaking a Canadian movie but a German-Armenian coproduction.)

[Mysterious Dude]

I'm looking forward to Room.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C6fZ-fwDws

[baby doll]

I'm looking forward to Room.Tommy Wiseau quote-off in three, two, one...

"I did not heat her."

[Pop Trash]

I'm guessing what's being remembered in the Egoyan film are the days when his movies didn't suck.

Has his recent films been that bad? I'm kinda afraid to watch them. I still count him as one of my all time favorite filmmakers because of Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter (although his earlier films like The Adjuster were kinda interesting too). It's weird because I always get a shoulder shrug when I mention him as one of my favorite directors, unlike the nearly unanimous positive response if I mention Wes Anderson or Tarantino or something. The last film of his I watched was Chloe which I didn't think was nearly as terrible as it was made out to be. In fact, as far as off-movies-by-auteurs that year, I remember liking it slightly more than Shutter Island.

[baby doll]

Has his recent films been that bad? I'm kinda afraid to watch them. I still count him as one of my all time favorite filmmakers because of Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter (although his earlier films like The Adjuster were kinda interesting too). It's weird because I always get a shoulder shrug when I mention him as one of my favorite directors, unlike the nearly unanimous positive response if I mention Wes Anderson or Tarantino or something. The last film of his I watched was Chloe which I didn't think was nearly as terrible as it was made out to be. In fact, as far as off-movies-by-auteurs that year, I remember liking it slightly more than Shutter Island.I've seen Felicia's Journey a couple times on Canadian TV over the years, and while it's fairly solid, it's also surprisingly forgettable. I'll see it on the TV guide and think, "Oh yeah, that's a film that exists." Ararat reminds me of James Wood's article on "hysterical realism" in the novels of Pynchon, Rushdie, Wallace, etc. Any one of these stories might've been convincing on its own, but when you put them all together it's just too much: the customs officer who busts the kid for heroin smuggling is the dad of the guy whose Turkish boyfriend is acting in the Armenian genocide movie on which the kid's mother served as technical consult. Of course, I still like it better than Crash, and I like Where the Truth Lies and Adoration more than most people--which is to say quite a bit--but I have to admit I find them less impressive on second viewing. Chloe was the last one I saw as well (I haven't yet been able to bring myself to see Devil's Knot and Captives), but while it has some interesting elements (especially Moore's performance), the last third of the movie is really stupid. So maybe they haven't been that bad, but we're a long way from the glory days of Next of Kin, Family Viewing, Speaking Parts, Calendar, Exotica, and The Sweet Hereafter.

[Stay Puft]

Canadian films were announced last week but who cares about that.
This week, however, saw a ton of announcements:

TIFF CINEMATHEQUE

Adieu Philippine (Jacques Rozier)
Harlan County, USA (Barbara Kopple)
The Mask (Julian Roffman)
The Memory of Justice (Marcel Ophüls)
River of Grass (Kelly Reichardt)
Rocco and His Brothers (Luchino Visconti)
The Round-Up (Miklós Jancsó)
Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman)

VANGUARD

Collective Invention (Kwon Oh-kwang)
Demon (Marcin Wrona)
Der Nachtmahr (AKIZ)
Evolution (Lucile Hadžihalilović)
February (Osgood Perkins)
Lace Crater (Harrison Atkins)
Love (Gaspar Noé)
Men & Chicken (Anders Thomas Jensen)
My Big Night (�lex de la Iglesia)
The Missing Girl (A.D. Calvo)
Veteran (Ryoo Seung-wan)

MIDNIGHT MADNESS

Baskin (Can Evrenol)
The Devil's Candy (Sean Byrne)
The Final Girls (Todd Strauss-Schulson) CLOSING FILM
The Girl in the Photographs (Nick Simon)
Green Room (Jeremy Saulnier) OPENING FILM
Hardcore (Ilya Naishuller)
The Mind’s Eye (Joe Begos)
Southbound (Roxanne Benjamin, David Bruckner, Patrick Horvath and Radio Silence)
SPL 2 - A Time For Consequences (Soi Cheang)
Yakuza Apocalypse (Takashi Miike)

MASTERS

11 Minutes (Jerzy Skolimowski)
The Master (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
Bleak Street (Arturo Ripstein)
Blood Of My Blood (Marco Bellocchio)
Cemetery of Splendour (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
Every Thing Will Be Fine (Wim Wenders)
Francofonia (Alexander Sokurov)
In the Shadow of Women (Philippe Garrel)
Jafar Panahi's Taxi (Jafar Panahi)
Our Little Sister (Hirokazu Kore-eda)
The Pearl Button (Patricio Guzman)
Rabin, The Last Day (Amos Gitaï)
Right Now, Wrong Then (Hong Sang-soo)

TIFF DOCS

Amazing Grace (Sydney Pollack)
A Flickering Truth (Pietra Brettkelly)
Journey of a Thousand Miles: Peacekeepers (Geeta Gandbhir and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy)
A Young Patriot (Du Haibin)
Being AP (Anthony Wonke)
Bolshoi Babylon (Nick Read)
Dark Horse (Louise Osmond)
He Named Me Malala (Davis Guggenheim)
Heart of a Dog (Laurie Anderson)
Hitchcock/Truffaut (Kent Jones)
Horizon (Bergur Bernburg and Fridrik Thor Fridriksson)
In Jackson Heights (Frederick Wiseman)
All Started At The End (Luis Ospina)
Janis: Little Girl Blue (Amy Berg)
Je Suis Charlie (Emmanuel Leconte and Daniel Leconte)
Miss Sharon Jones! (Barbara Kopple)
The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble (Morgan Neville)
Nasser (Jihan El-Tahri)
Our Last Tango (German Kral)
P.S. Jerusalem (Danae Elon)
The Reflektor Tapes (Kahlil Joseph)
Return of the Atom (Mika Taanila and Jussi Eerola)
Sherpa (Jennifer Peedom)
Thru You Princess (Ido Haar)
Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom (Evgeny Afineevsky)
Women He's Undressed (Gillian Armstrong)

[Stay Puft]

The rest of the Galas and Special Presentations are being announced next week. In the meantime, TIFF dropped a couple more announcements this week. They announced the films for the Platform program, and also announced a new program, Primetime, that celebrates the art of the television medium by bringing some new TV programs to the silver screen.

PLATFORM

Bang Gang - A Modern Love Story (Eva Husson)
The Clan (Pablo Trapero)
French Blood (Diastème)
Full Contact (David Verbeek)
High-Rise (Ben Wheatley)
HURT (Alan Zweig)
Land of Mine (Martin Zandvliet)
Looking for Grace (Sue Brooks)
Neon Bull (Gabriel Mascaro)
The Promised Land (He Ping)
Sky (Fabienne Berthaud)
The White Knights (Joachim Lafosse)

PRIMETIME

Casual (ep 1,2)
CROMO (ep 1,2,8)
Heroes Reborn (ep 1,2)
Keith Richards: Under the Influence (Netflix Original)
The Returned (s2 ep 1,2)
Trapped (ep 1)

[Stay Puft]

I think this covers the remaining programs? Here are this week's announcements:

CITY TO CITY

This year's focus is on London, England.
Click here for press release/list of films. (https://s3.amazonaws.com/presscontent.tiff.net/docs/zmlXy2_City_to_City_Festival_2 015_8788514_1439907790.pdf)

SHORT CUTS

38 short films from around the world.
Click here for the list. (https://s3.amazonaws.com/presscontent.tiff.net/docs/k5M70v_Short_Cuts_Festival_201 5_8788590_1439907790.pdf)

CONTEMPORARY WORLD CINEMA

60 feature films from around the world.
Click here for the list. (https://s3.amazonaws.com/presscontent.tiff.net/docs/k5M7NK_CWC_Festival2015_878849 0_1439907787.pdf)

WAVELENGTHS

Highlights for me include a new art installation from Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a new film from Tsai Ming-liang, the lauded three-part Arabian Nights epic from Miguel Gomes, and new films from Ben Russell and Ben Rivers titled, respectively, YOLO and (deep breath) The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers.
Click here for all of the details. (https://s3.amazonaws.com/presscontent.tiff.net/docs/580L4X_Wavelengths_Festival_20 15_8788538_1439907787.pdf)

[Stay Puft]

Oh and of course we have the remaining Gala/SP stuff:

GALAS

Disorder (Alice Winocour)
Man Down (Dito Montiel)
Miss You Already (Catherine Hardwicke)
Mississippi Grind (Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck)
Mr. Right (Paco Cabezas) CLOSING NIGHT FILM

SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS

45 Years (Andrew Haigh)
About Ray (Gaby Dellal)
Angry Indian Goddesses (Pan Nalin)
Being Charlie (Rob Reiner)
Body (Małgorzata Szumowska)
Equals (Drake Doremus)
I Saw the Light (Marc Abraham)
London Fields (Matthew Cullen)
ma ma (Julio Medem)
The Meddler (Lorene Scafaria)
Mr. Six (Guan Hu)
Mustang (Deniz Gamze Ergüven)
My Mother (Nanni Moretti)
Our Brand is Crisis (David Gordon Green)
A Tale of Love and Darkness (Natalie Portman)
A Tale of Three Cities (Mabel Cheung)
Truth (James Vanderbilt)
The Wave (Roar Uthaug)
The Witch (Robert Eggers)

[Henry Gale]

Individual tickets went up today! (Hopefully you guys didn't forget..)

I got mine for Kaufman's Anomalisa, Johnnie To's Office, Gaspar Noe's Love, and I'll be all over the new blocks of tickets for The Lobster, Sicario, and Apichatpong's new joint the mornings of.

[Stay Puft]

Hopefully you guys didn't forget

I did!

Been crazy busy the last couple weeks. I haven't even looked at the schedule. I just checked and everything is off sale. Hooray!

[baby doll]

I just bought my tickets:

Fri., Sept. 11
Wavelengths 1: Fire in the Brain (various)
The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Are Not Brothers (Ben Rivers)

Sat., Sept. 12
The Minotaur (Nicolás Pereda)

Mon., Sept. 14
Wavelengths 4: Psychic Driving (various)
Evolution (Lucile Hadzihalilovic)

Wed., Sept. 16
Frenzy (Emin Alper)
Afternoon (Tsai Ming-liang)

Thurs., Sept. 17
The Event (Sergei Loznitsa)
No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman)

Fri., Sept. 18
The Forbidden Room (Evan Johnson / Guy Maddin)
The Club (Pablo LarraÃ*n)

[Ivan Drago]

Individual tickets went up today! (Hopefully you guys didn't forget..)

I got mine for Kaufman's Anomalisa, Gaspar Noe's Love, and I'll be all over the new blocks of tickets for The Lobster, Sicario.....

I eagerly look forward to your write-ups about these.

[Stay Puft]

I couldn't get any time off of work so it has been a pretty slow fest for me this year. And of course I also forgot to line up for tickets so I missed all the big stuff I wanted to see opening weekend (The Assassin and Cemetery of Splendour, mostly, plus some of the Wavelengths stuff).

I'm probably only going to end up seeing a handful of films but at least I've picked 'em well! Absolutely loved everything I've seen so far:

Fireworks (Apichatpong Weerasethakul) ****
SPL 2: A Time for Consequences (Pou-Soi Cheang) ***½
Louder Than Bombs (Joachim Trier) ***½

I also have tickets for Afternoon and Journey to the Shore. There isn't much else playing this weekend I actually want to see. Midnight Madness didn't have a terribly appealing lineup, either. Quality over quantity this year for me, I guess.

[Stay Puft]

Not as strong a finish, but still enjoyable overall:

Afternoon (Tsai Ming-liang) ***
Journey to the Shore (Kiyoshi Kurosawa) **½

Only five movies this year. Sigh. Sucks but oh well.