Lights, Camera and Some Unexpected Action:  Toronto Celebrates Its 25^th Annual Film Festival

I came to Toronto to immerse myself in ten days of quality cinema.  I’m talking about the kind of films that make you feel actual emotions, as opposed to the check-your-brain-at-the-door movies that routinely clutter the American release schedule.  I had visions of films from internationally acclaimed directors like Takeshi Kitano, Tom Tykwer and Ang Lee.  I dreamt of Oscar contenders from the likes of Cameron Crowe, David Mamet and Rod Lurie.  I even hoped I might see the world premiere of a tiny independent film that would ignite the box office beyond anyone's expectations (a la The Blair Witch Project).

With all of these glorious thoughts backstroking through my head during my drive to Toronto for their 25th International Film Festival, I barely noticed the film crew in and around the lobby of my hotel.  Apparently a Steven Seagal film was shooting a tricky action sequence in the parking garage across the street.  I fought my way through crowds of curious onlookers (the film had already produced one stunt casualty to date) as fear mounted about the irony of expecting gold but getting blindsided by something called Exit Wounds (seriously – that’s the title).

Fortunately, prospects improved during the next week and a half.

The Toronto International Film Festival, which wrapped up this past weekend, actually started as a gathering of films that performed well at other festivals, and for several years went by the name “Festival of Festivals.”  Since debuting in 1976, the TIFF has grown to become one of the largest, most respected and fan-friendly festivals in the world.  Studios love premiering their Oscar contenders (American Beauty and The Cider House Rules were both part of last year’s program) as a litmus test for both critics and the public, and independent filmmakers have found great success bringing their pictures to the fête in hope of landing a lucrative deal with a major distributor.

More importantly, the festival offers so many films (253 features and nearly 80 shorts) from so many countries (over 50) that there’s guaranteed to be something for even the crustiest connoisseur to enjoy.  The TIFF programs foreign films, blockbusters, documentaries and pictures with budgets that barely exceed the cost of a low-end digital camera.  You can see movies that feature big Hollywood stars, talented newcomers, or actors that you’ll probably never see again. And it’s less expensive than you might think – packages are available for as little as $4.60 per film.  I'm talking $4.60 Canadian, which is almost free, eh?

The Rochester area is well represented in this year’s festival.  Mark Ruffalo and Laura Linney star as sibling rivals in You Can Count On Me (limited release 11/10), which is set in Scottsville but filmed downstate in Phoenicia and Margaretville.  My Generation, a documentary about the Woodstock concerts in 1994 and 1999, contains the gravelly rasp of WCMF’s Brother Wease.  But the area’s biggest contribution to this year’s film lineup has to be Philip Seymour Hoffman, who stars in two of the festival's best offerings.

Like his beefy female impersonator and blue-blood aristocrat from last year’s Flawless and The Talented Mr. Ripley, Hoffman’s roles here are polar opposites.  In David Mamet’s State and Main (1/12), the Fairport native plays a naïve screenwriter for a big film production set in a small Vermont town.  A scathing satire of Hollywood, Main plays like a classier feature-film version of the short-lived Fox sitcom Action and co-stars Alec Baldwin, Sarah Jessica Parker and William H. Macy.

In Almost Famous (9/22), Hoffman tackles the role of legendary Creem Magazine editor Lester Bangs, a jaded rock journalist (and the man who coined the phrase "heavy metal") that gives the film’s main character his first break into the business.  The film, written and directed by Jerry Maguire’s Cameron Crowe, is a semi-autobiographical story about a teenage Rolling Stone writer assigned to cover the American tour of a struggling Detroit band in 1973.  With a highly personal story and no bankable stars, Famous may have trouble finding an audience, but if it does, look for this one at Oscar time.

In addition to Hoffman’s Main and Famous, this year’s festival boasts a large number of films about fame and the movie business.  Stardom (limited release 10/27), this year’s opening night gala, is about the meteoric rise to fame of a teenage girl from central Canada after one simple photograph propels her from a frizzy-haired hockey player to supermodel.  Stretching the girl’s fifteen minutes of fame over a two-hour film, Stardom seems like a VH-1 original movie, or possibly something made for E! Television.

The festival’s closing night film – How To Kill Your Neighbor’s Dog – is a bracingly funny film about a successful author/playwright (Kenneth Branagh) whose life is thrown into chaos after a string of stage flops, as well as a current production featuring horrible actors and a clueless director.  To make matters worse, his wife keeps nagging him to have a baby, his mother-in-law’s Alzheimer’s disease is getting worse, and he finds out there’s a slightly deranged man stalking him.

The filming of the vampire classic Nosferatu is featured in Shadow of the Vampire (limited 12/29), which stars John Malkovich as director F.W. Murnau and Willem Dafoe as the creepy Max Schreck. Vampire’s story basically concerns the old legend that has Murnau hired Schreck – supposedly a real vampire – to play his Count Orlock.  What’s more is that the director promised the pointy-eared actor the life of the film’s female star at the film’s completion.  The nearly unrecognizable Dafoe looks like a lock for an Oscar nomination, as does the team responsible for his makeup.

Liv Ullmann’s haunting and beautiful Faithless (limited 1/26) is about a writer (based on the film’s real screenwriter, Ingmar Bergman) working on a script about marital infidelity.  Literally conjuring his female lead before your very eyes, the writer’s unconventional technique involves interviewing this character about her marriage and adulterous affair with her husband’s best friend.  Her story becomes his screenplay.  In the French Code Unknown, Juliette Binoche plays an actress in one of the film’s intertwining Magnolia-like stories that are created by the film’s amazing first scene set on a Paris street.

Fame and film aren’t the only topics on display this year, but after 1999’s heavy slate of dysfunctional movie families, they are a welcome change.  Dysfunction still lurks in the 2000 festival, but not nearly as prominently as last year, where American Beauty won the People’s Choice Award (as the audience’s favorite feature film) six months before it took home a truckload of Oscars.  In Aberdeen, a sexually promiscuous Scottish woman has to cart her alcoholic father from Norway to Aberdeen to see her mother before she succumbs to cancer.  She must act like the parent, but before they make it back to Scotland, their roles have reverted.

Desire begins as a typical boy-meets-girl film, where a divorced lounge pianist falls for an elementary schoolteacher, but the film gets dark and sinister when the pianist's awful relationship with his parents is slowly revealed.  Two young French girls rebel against their parents in the sexually charged Girls Can’t Swim, a film rife with marital problems.  In The Goddess of 1967, a young Japanese man finds his dream car, but becomes embroiled in the life of a blind, gun-toting Australian girl who was sexually abused by her grandfather.  Don’t get too excited about this one – it only sounds like a Jim Jarmusch film.

Perhaps the most disturbing family film is Sally Field's directorial debut Beautiful (9/29), which stars Minnie Driver as a woman hell-bent on winning a beauty pageant.  She won’t let anything get in her way, including a pregnancy that would leave her ineligible for the coveted Miss American Miss crown.  So what does she do?  Pawns her newborn daughter off on her mousy best friend so that she can continue to work the pageant circuit.  The message is that it’s okay to lie, and to hurt other people, as long as you end up on top.  After all, that is the American Dream.

The American Dream is also on display in the touching Two Family House (limited 10/6), the Audience Award winner from this year’s Sundance Fest.  The film is set in Staten Island in the ‘50s, where a Ralph Kramden-esque, blue-collar worker dreams of converting a dilapidated duplex into a popular neighborhood bar.  But he finds obstacles in his nagging wife, as well as a growing affection for the pregnant Irish tenant that refuses to leave the house’s rental unit.

It’s hard to sit through seven films a day and not think about Senate hearings and U.S. government reports about the effects of sex and violence on our poorly parented young children.  Especially when you see films like France’s shocking Rape Me, essentially a hardcore porn version of Thelma and Louise (the film was banned in that country during its opening weekend).  And you won’t catch Capitol Hill talking up Scout♀Man, a disturbing Japanese film about men who recruit women for the country’s booming adult entertainment business.  Two films even showcase brutal anal rape scenes – the Kevin Smith-produced Vulgar (a colossal waste of time – Summer 2001) and Sexy Beast (a dark, funny crime film well worth the investment – Spring 2001).

Charlton Heston would feel right at home at the festival, especially if he saw films like Brother (Summer 2001), Takeshi Kitano’s hilariously ruthless tale of a Japanese Yakuza butting heads with American gangs in Southern California.  Or The Legends of Rita, where a gang of ‘70s revolutionaries commit terrorist acts to fund their fight against the capitalist system in West Germany (but they bring baked goods to their bank robberies, so cut them some slack).  Or the complexly structured Memento (limited 3/9), which opens with a man being shot in the face at point-blank range.  If that’s not enough controversy to fuel a presidential election, there are always popular themes like murder-for-profit (The Yards – limited 10/20), racking up monumental gambling debts (Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth) and cloning (Two Thousand and None).  If you had a nickel for every film that contained either vomiting, or a scene where a character was set on fire, you’d probably have enough to buy a large popcorn and soda.

The White House itself is the subject of another Oscar contender, aptly dubbed The Contender (10/13).  In the film, the Vice President has died and the country’s leader (Jeff Bridges) wants to appoint a female Senator (Joan Allen) to fill the vacancy.  The diabolical Gary Oldman plays the Chair of the Senate committee that will approve her appointment, but not before raking the Veep hopeful over the coals by delving into the nominee's sexual past.

Speaking of Vice Presidential candidates, anti-Semitism reared its ugly head in two festival offerings.  In Stephen Frears’ Liam, a wealthy Jewish family and pawnbroker are the targets of angry, unemployed Englishmen wrapped up in the ‘30s Socialist movement.  Interstate 84 (which was also filmed near Phoenicia and Margaretville) is a Kevin Spacey-produced film about a slow-witted religious orphan who is found dead in a river.  The main suspect is a frightening Neo-Nazi who previously beat up a young Jewish boy.

If the U.S. government isn’t your bag, maybe Bàttu will do the trick.  Danny Glover plays the power-hungry President of Senegal, who oversees the beating and eviction of every beggar in the densely populated Capital.  Bàttu bends over backward to point out that the government, the police, the healthcare industry and the rich have questionable ethics and – get this – may actually be corrupt in some way.  The horror!  Glover had his lines dubbed from English to French and, in one laughable scene, from English to English.  Maybe the cabbies just can’t understand where he wants to go.

Besides Hoffman’s fantastic Exacta of Main and Famous, these films stood head and shoulders above the rest.  Christopher Guest furthers his mastering of the largely improvised “mockumentary” genre with Best in Show (limited 9/27), a hysterical spoof of dog shows starring Guest, Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara.  Ride With the Devil’s Ang Lee is back with the martial arts extravaganza Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (limited 12/8), which features Chow Yun-Fat, Michelle Yeoh and – I kid you not – fight scenes that put The Matrix to shame.  The film won this year’s People’s Choice Award.

Although The King is Alive is from Denmark and about a group of people trying to put on one of Shakespeare’s plays, it has nothing to do with Hamlet.  Full of stark images and vivid colors, the latest (and possibly the best) Dogme 95 offering is about a busload of travelers that run out of gas in the middle of a North African desert.  Running low on food and ways to pass the time, they decide to put on the Bard’s King Lear.

While much could be made about the number of high-octane action films from China (and, specifically, Hong Kong), the three best films from this area of the world were actually heartbreaking love stories.  In Juliet in Love, a young man loses a fortune betting on soccer and is forced to babysit the illegitimate infant son of his hospitalized loan shark.  He enlists the aid of a lonely restaurant hostess he meets in the hospital.  Wong Kar-Wai’s In The Mood For Love focuses on two neighbors who find out that their respective spouses are having an affair (don’t worry – it only sounds like Random Hearts).  The sublime Suzhou River (limited 11/8) is about a motorcycle courier and his teenage girlfriend, the latter of whom takes a header off a bridge after telling him that she’ll come back as a mermaid.

Like Seinfeld’s legendary episode “The Contest,” the Canadian film waydowntown was a blast, but it may not make it south of the border.  It’s about four Calgary office workers that bet one month's salary to see who can last the longest without going outside (they live in a city connected by skywalks), and it took home the award for Best Canadian Feature Film.  When Brendan Met Trudy is a refreshing Irish picture that doesn’t feature a filthy, hungry, dirt-poor Dublin family with an alcoholic father.  Instead, it’s an extremely likeable love story about a schoolteacher/choir singer that falls for a cat burglar.

Greenfingers is an enjoyable light British comedy about a prisoner (Croupier’s Clive Owen) that starts a horticulture program for his minimum-security detention center.  The Princess and the Warrior (Summer 2001), Tom Tykwer’s follow-up to last summer’s sleeper hit Run Lola Run, is almost an hour longer and nowhere near as exciting as its predecessor.  The film, which I’ve heard will be pared down before next year’s release, is about a mental health nurse that falls for a bank robber after he gives her an emergency tracheotomy after she’s hit by a truck.  And they say that romance is dead.

If the festival had one potential breakout star, it would probably be Aussie Tom Long, who turned in two terrific performances.  Looking like a cross between “Aftermath”-era Mick Jagger and Clash of the Titans-era Harry Hamlin, Long knocked ‘em dead in both roles – one dramatic and one comedic.  In the sidesplitting picture The Dish, which was the runner-up for the 2000 People’s Choice Award, Long plays one of three scientists left in charge of providing the television signal for the Apollo 11 moon landing.  Long plays an adjustor trainee at a large auto insurance corporation in the white-collar crime caper, Risk – an auspicious second feature from director Alan White.  A naïve recruit in a cutthroat business, Long’s character is unknowingly becomes part of a fraudulent claims scam run by his boss and a curvy vixen solicitor.

And heads up, Rhinos fans:  A Shot at Glory is the best soccer film since Sylvester Stallone’s Victory.  Robert Duvall and former Glasgow Rangers star Ally McCoist play the manager and star of a struggling second-division team in Scotland.