Gary Dretzka
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Ray Pride
Notes From A Festival Junkie ...
Friday
This is one long distance runner that's limping to the finish line.
It simply goes against nature to be looking at about five films a day and then squirreling away in a room to write articles and reviews for three to four hours. You don't eat well, you don't socialize much and sleep is a precious, elusive commodity.
Including films caught prior to the Toronto Film Festival, my 2004 total must have been about 50 movies. Objectively that should be a pretty good cross section of the program but virtually a day didn't go by in which someone ran up and asked if I'd seen (fill in title) … It was like a running gag. Not only hadn't I seen the picture in question, I hadn't even heard of it. But it wasn't all one-sided. I could toss back a picture I thought was worth catching and that film invariably had eluded that person's festival radar.
To various degrees, everyone's schedule will be determined by assignments and showtimes. Still, I can't recall being to a festival of this size where so few of the regulars on the circuit had so little to say to one another. People were simply going to a wide variety of films and the festival was large enough to accommodate vastly different itineraries.
I'm not exactly sure what that says about the festival and its selections. One thing that pops to mind is that the program didn't have a lot of films that screamed out to be seen immediately. There were many titles including Ray, House of Flying Daggers, Sideways and The Motorcycle Diaries that people felt could be caught closer to their commercial release and they concentrated on films that either did not have commercial distribution or would not open domestically in 2004.
I also noted earlier in the week that by the time word-of-mouth kicked in on discovery titles, they had often disappeared from the schedule.
My marching orders included a fair number of Canadian films and that wound up cutting into seeing films from emerging nations and nascent talents. The Canadian roster was quite dire and even some of the promising selections don't have much hope for significant commercial exposure. The best advice to pass unto the next head of Telefilm would be to hire a dramaturge because while local product generally has strong craft and performances, the stories lack dramatic juice.
I also saw very few non-fiction films, though Mark Wexler's portrait of his father Haskell in Tell Them Who You Are still haunts me. Very few of the narrative films had remotely the emotional punch of this film that makes the similarly themed My Architect seem like a stroll in the park.
Sex was a big part of a number of very different films. Kinsey, an unorthodox biopic, did an excellent job of pointing out how little attitudes have changed since the repressive 1950s. In 9 Songs, Michael Winterbottom exposed a lot of flesh and unsimulated sex in a surprisingly tender look at a passing affair. And at the other end of the spectrum, there were a lot of things to admire in the triptych Eros but you couldn't precisely call it a sexy picture.
The program had a few too many fungible movies that had the semblance of pedigree but proved to be mediocre fare in very fancy duds. Veteran directors didn't appear to be at the top of their game and with a couple of exceptions the exhilarating wave of talent from Asia - particularly South Korea - appeared to be on the decline. There were very few well executed curve balls but one worth noting was the Czech entry Up and Down, an eccentric comedy with a half dozen plot threads that wind up almost miraculously coming together and providing a sharp portrait of life in the former Eastern bloc.
One is always looking for where the creative juices appear to be enjoying a renaissance and at the moment that would appear to be South America and Spain. The already much acclaimed The Motorcycle Diaries proved to be an unconventional, sometimes daunting experience that threatened to tip over but ultimately pulled off an unconventional examination of the early years of Ernesto Guevara. Bad Education saw Pedro Almodovar not resting on his laurels as he explored the tyranny of religious teaching but the most potent offering from the area was The Sea Inside, the saga of a quadriplegic who seeks the means to end his life legally. It's a radical emotional turn from the director of the Gothic ghost story The Others and anchored by an amazingly truthful performance from Javiar Bardem.
All else now seems like window dressing. Closing night is the truly inane and silly antics of Jiminy Glick in La La Wood and Sunday brunch brings the announcement of audience and jury awards. Monday, life returns to normal … whatever that is.
Thursday's Notes
Wednesday's Notes
Tuesday's Notes
Monday's Notes
Sunday's Notes
Saturday's Notes
Friday's Notes
