Gary Dretzka
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Ray Pride
Notes From A Festival Junkie ...
SaturdayWhen the Toronto Film Festival opened for business back in 1977 one of its ballyhooed premieres was the Canadian gender bender comedy Outrageous starring Craig Russell and a very young Helen Shaver. The film was an enormous crowd pleaser and visiting journalists including Rex Reed lauded the movie and its star. It didn't really matter that the film was co-produced by festival founder Bill Marshall, it was a hit and everyone knew it.
Well, everyone but the general public. The film was acquired for the U.S. but despite upbeat reviews never appeared to open outside a few major cities where it performed indifferently, There would be other Canadian films that made splashy Toronto bows and some, like I Heard the Mermaids Sing, would fair well internationally but most quickly faded as the last reel.
For more than a decade Toronto would spotlight Canada's two solitudes in its Perspective Canada section and become a major clearinghouse for sales of its indigenous product. But the majority of the movies had little appeal outside its borders and some filmmakers felt their wares were being ghettoized in the section and preferred to play in another part of the fest or not at all.
Toronto isn't exactly chauvinistic about home made movies though it has a long standing tradition of an opening night Canadian film or co-production. In the rare instances where they've bent the rule, the selection was either filmed in Canada or had some significant Canadian talent quotient.
This year Perspective Canada was quietly put to rest and while there's a new section dubbed Canada First, local movies have been sprinkled throughout the program. It will probably take several years to get a sense whether the approach works or if any sort of window dressing makes a difference to the commercial fate of films from the Great White North.
These aren't particularly good times for the Canadian film industry. Alliance Atlantis, once the major film producer in the country, has been phasing out of production for several years with its last venture included in this year's Canada First program. The head of Telefilm Canada abruptly left for a job at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation two months ago and there's not even a little buzz about a replacement or potential candidates.
Again, the two solitudes portray starkly different situations. In Quebec, it's actual possible to make a film for $2 million to $3 million and bring back a profit from theatrical and ancillary sales in the province. Quebec produces everything from dumb comedies with local television personalities to the Oscar winning work of Denys Arcand.
In the rest of the country, where 70% of the population live and speak English, it's rare for a Canadian film to gross $1 million theatrically. English Canadian movies with budgets in excess of $2 million need U.S. and foreign sales just to break even. With the exception of Egoyan and Cronenberg, there isn't a Canuck filmmaker that can pre-sell a movie in the international marketplace.
This year's curtain raiser Being Julia is a production with Hungary and the U.K. where the Canadian talent quotient is secondary apart from producer Robert Lantos. It's based on a Somerset Maugham story adapted by Brit Ronald Harward, directed by Hungarian Istvan Szabo and stars Annette Bening and Jeremy Irons.
Cynics in the crowd are saying that the film - which received mixed reviews - was selected for the photo op of Bening and husband Warren Beatty on the red carpet and why couldn't the festival have selected something with a little bit more maple leaf.
As I started to wade through this year's selections, I began to wonder whether there was a suitable alternative. Certainly it wasn't Blood, an intense two hander involving a brother and sister from the working class with plenty of profanity, sex talk, drugs and alcohol that wouldn't sit well with opening night patrons. Based on a stage play, director Jerry Ciccitti tries hard to open up the piece to little effect and the harshness of the material will certainly limit the picture's appeal to more than a niche audience.
The advance buzz on Childstar and Phil the Alien was good and the former sounded like it might have Gala potential. Childstar is directed by Don McKellar who wrote The Red Violin and directed a very good first film, Last Night. However, the yarn about a 12-year-old sitcom star making a movie in Toronto and his driver, a struggling avant garde filmmaker, proved to be not at all compelling and comedically flat. It seemed like a good idea for a sketch that went awry as it was expanded into feature length.
In certain respects Phil the Alien seemed superior despite a micro budget that forced its filmmakers to make jokes about its modest resources. The spaced out adventure indeed has a clueless visitor from another planet that arrives in the remote backwoods of Northern Ontario where the yokels look and act in the manner of congenital idiots. Phil is also pursued by inept operatives of the CIA operating from behind Niagara Falls. It has a geek appeal when the humor has that hard to describe Canadian deadpan but steers badly off course when it goes for the banal and inane. It seemed more in keeping with a night at Yuk Yuk's Comedy Club than as a Toronto red carpet event.
But then there was Saint Ralph. The plot synopsis sounded as perverse as Phil but the on-screen presentation was heartfelt, emotional with an underdog quality that easily translates to other cultures and comedies. Set in Hamilton, Ontario in 1953, the titular hero is an awkward 14-year-old Catholic School student that decides winning the Boston Marathon is the sort of miracle that would awaken his Cancer-stricken mother from a lingering coma.
The jibes at faith and coming-of-age tales are nicely interspersed with its Rocky underpinnings of beating seemingly impossible odds. It plucks the heartstrings and jerks the tears without resorting to blatant manipulation and while hardly a brilliant or radical result, it's great fun and accomplished. I had a brief encounter with one of the film's producers and she confessed that the prospect of opening night or a gala frightened her and others involved with the film because they feared that sort of spotlight would raise expectations too high and they wanted the film to be discovered on its own merits.
Frankly I think they and the fest organizers were suffering from false or misplaced modesty. The film's combination of emotion, performance (an amazing turn from Adam Butcher), craft and uplift are tremendously appealing. Buzz or not, the movie would have been a truly electrifying opening night surprise. That sort of discovery should be a top priority for the festival and its absence is worrisome because every great festival needs the bold and the unexpected if it wants to remain a great event.
Saturday's Notes
Friday's Notes
