Toronto
2006
..Festival
News
..Festival
Reviews
..Thursday
Films
..Friday
Films
railers 
..,.Gary
Dretzka
..,.Leonard
Klady
...David
Poland
...Doug
Pratt
...Ray
Pride
...S.T.
VanAirsdale
DAY ONE
CANADIAN BACON
AND EGGS-HAUSTION
Old habits die hard even the good ones. Years ago I developed one that has generally served me well when traveling significant distances to get to a film festival and here's how it has applied to Toronto. It starts with taking an overnight flight or what we colorfully call a "red eye." Upon arrival, take a taxi to your hotel, check in and head for the press office to pick up credentials. Then, go back to the hotel and sleep until you wake up. If all goes to plan (personally it never failed), one wakes up prior to the opening night film refreshed.Now there is a price to pay if you deviate in any way from the routine. Generally I sleep for most of the five hour flight but despite being wedged in like a sardine Wednesday night, insisted on working and slept for not quite two hours. Customs was a breeze and I caught up with Brian DePalma at the baggage carousel before grabbing a cab.
Cutting to the chase, here's what I forgot. Last year the Toronto Film Festival changed its routine. It now long kicks off with the opening night film. Thursday is a full screening day and its tradition of repeat screenings on Sunday following closing night was erased. The wise thing in light of the lapse would have been to follow procedure.
However, I looked at the schedule and opted for the new film from Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan who made the extraordinary Distant. It's titled Climates and though it's not as extraordinary, this tale of a complicated relationship once again reveals an idiosyncratic and mature filmmaker at work.
At the end of the screening I segued to The Host, a Korean film that's on the cusp of becoming that country's biggest grossing film of all time. It's a throwback to 1950s monster movies where the creature is a product of chemical mutation. The effects are good, the scares are well orchestrated and its fun. And even though the sensibility is decidedly non-American, there's nothing to clue you into why this film has been such a phenomenon at home in the way that say Godzilla connected in a unique fashion with Japanese society.
What struck me about this abrupt turn in my movie schedule was just how easy it is to see films in Toronto. At any moment there seem be at least three and some times as many as eight films starting within five and 30 minutes. I asked a local distributor if he had any idea how many seats were available during festival peak times. For no particular reason I thought there were 20 screens available to the event (it's actually 25) and wildly guessed somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 seats.
He knew actual seat counts at various locations and several are in excess of 1,000. He didn't have any trouble boosting the number well past 10,000 with several venues still to be added. And it's rare to attend anything that isn't near capacity.
Better judgment and such returned me to the hotel and a couple of hours of sleep prior to what would have been the first film aka opening night prior to 2005. The Journals of Knud Rasmussen is from Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn, the folks responsible for Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), a first film that ranks on a debut level to Citizen Kane, The 400 Blows and Badlands.
Sometime back in the early 1980s festival organizers decreed that Toronto's curtain raiser had to be indigenous and I can think of only two instances where that hasn't been the case. One was directed by a Canadian and the other was based on a true story that took place in Southern Ontario.
Like it or not, the Canadian film industry isn't so big that one can cherry pick a film of quality and entertainment that will appeal to a crowd heavily weighted toward patrons. At the best of times there have been celebrated films from the likes of Arcand, Egoyan and Cronenberg with dark themes rather than warm, embraceable feelings. Knud Rasmussen falls into that category and the audience respected it.
In an ideal world the tale of how Arctic exploration brought the 20th Century to the Inuit for better but mostly worse shouldn't be offered to an opening night crowd that mostly wants to have a good time and rub shoulders with celebrities. A second rate film is often better suited to this cultural environment. Two years ago Being Julia fit the bill quite nicely with star Annette Bening and husband Warren Beatty receiving front page coverage. 'Nuf said.
The happy or at least reasoned conclusion to this inauspicious start occurred as I rounded the corner following the screening and ran into a publicist that assumed I was coming to see a film she represented. It was not supposition on her part. We'd talked several weeks back and it was a film I planned to see … just not at that moment. I explained the best I could and to her credit she said, "You really do look tired."
Admittedly I forced myself to write for several hours before total exhaustion set in. But the lights went out before midnight and tomorrow is another day.
