..,.Gary
Dretzka
..,.Leonard
Klady
...David
Poland
...Doug
Pratt
...Ray
Pride
..Confessions Day One ..2007 Toronto Film Festival My sister lives in Toronto and the night prior to the start of the Toronto International Film Festival I dropped in and she began to quiz me about what was good among the 300 or so titles. She has some sort of pass that gets her into day screenings, assuming there are seats to be had. After a lot of back and forth I told her that the two films I had seen prior to the festival that she had to see were The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the Julian Schnabel film that won a prize in Cannes, and the Jesse James film. You know the one with the long name that no one can quite remember exactly.
So as we continued to gab, she started to rifle through NOW, Toronto's alternative newspaper that had a section with ratings on most of the programs. It has a maximum five star rating and my two picks were both give two stars.
If you've never lived in Toronto you're likely unaware that it has a long history of terrible film critics. The exception was Jay Scott who tragically passed more than a decade ago. The other thing that's worth noting is that apart from the 10-days of TIFF it's not a particularly thriving center for alternative film. Montreal is Canada's great movie going center (or centre as they say north of the 49th parallel), followed by Vancouver. Toronto, on a pound for pound basis, is comparable to Edmonton and Winnipeg.
That fact is a total conundrum. In the early days of the event, people in the industry used to make jokes about the incredible receptivity of the Toronto audience. You could get a full house for a 9 a.m. screening of a Lithuanian language film and by that I mean a film about that language and not a drama from the country. People in acquisitions used to buy movies based upon the enthusiastic response of the local crowd but soon discovered there was almost nothing it didn't like.
For people that live in cities with film festivals you likely know the traditional arc. The event struggles to get attention and draw in crowds for anything other than its high profile screenings. Local government and sponsors take a wait and see position and in the lucky instances it builds into a legitimate attraction by year three or four. Again, Toronto was the exception. It was a hit from the get-go and grew like Topsy.
To be more precise it was a crucial part of the social season and people that would never see anything with sub-titles, for instance, would devour foreign-language fare during its run. Victor Loewy who started Alliance releasing - Canada's premiere art distributor - began to demand that the festival only have a single screening of his movies because two public screenings seriously ate into the subsequent commercial gross.
I hit the ground running this year catching five pictures on Thursday and four the following day. None were shameful but at the same time there was no title worth adding to my sister's list. The most fun was Mongol about how Genghis Khan became the great Mongol leader and warrior by Russian Sergei Bodrov who's evolved into his country's Zhang Yimou; making big historical pageants with plenty of action and intrigue.
The flip side of the coin is (and we love invoking this title) Young People Fucking, that I'd been told was very good for a modestly produced production. And it did have some charm and attributes though it's marked by more talk than action. The fact that it had no below the waist nudity was another tip off that this was a safe sex comedy.
Another highlight had nothing to do with films or the festival. Around noon Thursday I emerged from the Varsity where most of the press/industry screenings unspool to see a crowd of students from the University of Toronto with signs running down Bloor Street. It had something to do with tearing down old buildings or faculty I was told. The light changed at Bay and Bloor and suddenly this group of a hundred or so moved into the intersection and sat down. It was amazing and perfectly orchestrated.
No more than 90 seconds later a cop car pulled up and stopped. The two cruiser cops stepped out and one went up to an organizer and seemed very pissed off when he said, "You can't stay here; you've got to move on." The organizer nodded, made a motion and the group stood up and moved on. That's, as they say, what passes for confrontation in Canada.
