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 Marrakech International Film Festival
Marrakech, Morocco
November 13-20, 2008
 Amsterdam International Film Festival
Amsterdam, The Netherlands November 20-25, 2008
 Palm Springs International Film Festival
Palm Springs, California January 8-12, 2009
 Santa Barbara International Film FestivalSanta Barbara, California January 28 - February 2, 2009
 Locarno International Film FestivalLocarno, Switzerland August 2009
 Montreal International Film Festival
Montreal, Canada August, 2009
 Toronto International Film Festival
Toronto, Cananda September, 2009
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A CURATED SERIES OF SURPRISES
 Harlan Jacobson
Created in 1992 by film critic Harlan Jacobson, Talk Cinema is an independently curated sneak preview film series offering films BEFORE their theatrical release.
Screenings are followed by discussions led by distinguished critics, filmmakers and other industry experts.
Talk Cinema Travels offers guided tours to international film festivals, giving you insider access and the guidance to navigate a film fest like a pro.
Everyone’s a critic provides you with member reviews from an active group of film goers. Be in on the conversation about brand new movies or an older one. Join our online community to read and post opinions, get referrals and even create your own blog.
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Harlan Wraps Toronto
Harlan wraps up Toronto
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Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler
Swedish master director Jan Troell's Everlasting Moments.
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By Harlan Jacobson
Toronto—
Graceful exits, seamless entrances. That’s how one generation is supposed to hand off to the next. At least that was the departure point for filmmakers in much of the best of what was on display at the 33rd Toronto International Film Festival, which ended Saturday night.
Watching parents and grandparents grapple with the need to be worthy of their children—young or adult children—and not disgrace themselves seems to be on the collective filmmaking brain.
Call them Millennial films. In their stories and characters, films here showed the state of things seen by a generation handing off the world to its children, and toting up the costs of all the stupid things that mostly men do in dollars and sensibilities.
Overall, the big Hollywood Oscar-style film crop that came here looking for a boost was considered pretty lightweight by most accounts.
“It’s clear that if Toronto sets the table for the Oscars, we’re seeing a real lightening of tone,” said Brian D. Johnson, film critic of Maclean’s, Canada’s leading weekly news magazine. “Just look at the Coens. Last year it was No Country For Old Men. This year it’s Burn After Reading. It’s a serendipitous but symbolic shift in weight.”
There were a few improbably great performances—Mickey Rourke’s side of steroid beef palooka in The Wrestler, a role that Rourke looks like he lived for the last 20 years or so he’s been missing from major films, And Anne Hathaway, looking like a poor little Liza-clone waif in Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married. Both movies were surprise hits in Toronto, though The Wrestler along with Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire and Jan Troell’s Everlasting Moments were spotted as the ones to watch at Telluride over Labor Day weekend.
Rourke and Hathaway did that Toronto thing of getting plunked down early on the fall nomination trail (Jamie Foxx in Ray, Reese Witherspoon in Walk the Line) that can lead to Oscars in February. No one would’ve predicted those two a year ago, or even ten minutes ago.
“US films have been more personal, less dire, less apocalyptic,” Johnson said, adding “The focus seems to have moved inside, more families in stories made from thinner ligher material. The strongest films seem to have come from Europe.”
What follows are films that made their mark in Toronto, for better or worse, and will see the inside of American theatres over the coming months:
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Harlan reports from Toronto
Burn After Reading
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Brad Pitt at the Toronto International Film Festival
Brad Pitt with Tilda Swinton
Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
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By Harlan Jacobson
Toronto—
“I’ve been knocking on the Coen brothers’ door for quite a few years,” said Brad Pitt at a press conference in Toronto. And when they finally offered him a part in Burn After Reading, Pitt joked he was “really happy they called—until I read the script.”
The film had its press and public screenings over the weekend at the Toronto Film Festival, which Focus Films has used as a launch pad to its well funded TV campaign to support the film’s Sept. 12 opening Stateside.
Pitt plays a gym rat who pushes the stereotype of a strong back and a weak mind over the top as someone dumber than morning toast. With spikey hair splashed with random blonde highlights that look like they were applied by a psychedelic salon, Pitt slides through a cast full of other Grade A actors—George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, John Malkovich, Frances McDormand, Richard Jenkins and JK Simmons—to remind people he can be just like them. Stupid and funny.
Burn After Reading has all the trappings of a Coen Bros. film: a collection of middle-aged maniacs, each with their own whacked out obsessions, all pursuing some wise-guy angle way out of their league or pay grade. There’s the de rigeur gun, a murder that’s more stupid than violent, and like most everything the Coens have done since Fargo, or Raising Arizona before that—a mirror held up to show a slice of America as a confederacy of dunces.
Instead of locating the point where law enforcement turns up an American idiot making a cash grab in rural North Dakota (Fargo) or Texas (No Country for Old Men), or urban LA (The Big Lebowski) or New York, Burn After Reading is set in Washington DC, where the US security apparatus has a headlong collision with gym culture in the form of Pitt and Frances McDormand. The pair play a couple of gym trainers who try to parlay what they think is a top-secret CIA disk left in the locker room into a big payday to finance McDormand’s extensive plastic surgery dreams.
The joke of the film is that the CIA chief, played by JK Simmons, is the only sane normal guy in all of DC.
While the tagline for the film is “Intelligence is relevant,” the Coens stuck pretty close to their own script that their films are about the characters and not about American stupidity.
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Beauty in Trouble
Beauty in Trouble
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English lobby poster
Ana Geislerova
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BEAUTY IN TROUBLE is a smart, funny film by Jan Hrebejk (Divided We Fall), set after Prague’s 2002 floods—a good way to start any new beginnings story.
Star Ana Geislerova, playing a mother and wife, must choose between her hapless, Czech auto mechanic dolt of a husband with a chiseling, brutish mentality linked to the old socialist past, and an older, wealthier émigré Czech with a manse in Tuscany and a whiff of the new capitalist European Union.
Boiled down, the observations festoon a situation comedy plot, with the wealthy guy’s Volvo conveniently showing up in the husband’s chop shop. The collision of characters lets Hrebek sharpen the contrast between the old and new Czecho-no-Slovakias, the country that was and the life that could be, still just out of reach.
The sixth collaboration between Hrebejk and writer Petr Jarchovsky, Beauty in Trouble takes its title from a Robert Graves poem and it’s soundtrack from Once’s busker-songwriter Glen Hansard, including the haunting “Falling Slowly” number, which Hansard gave to Hrebejk when he was in Prague and turned up the young woman who would become his Once co-star, Marketa Irglova.
Think of Beauty in Trouble as Once, told twice, this time from the girl’s point of view that feels like the real deal. Guaranteed to bring smiles on a summer night
—HARLAN JACOBSON. TALKCINEMA.COM |
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