Atom Egoyan's Latest Among the Latest Unveiling for Toronto 09

While I knew the homegrown titles had yet to be announced for this year's Toronto International Film Festival, another round of additions to the line-up kinda makes you (really) wish everything had come in one big swoop. Atom Egoyan's Chloe, which stars Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson and Amanda Seyfried and sounds an awful lot like Anne Fontaine's awful Nathalie... [correction: it is a remake of Nathalie..., as if I couldn't be any less excited about a new Atom Egoyan film], will make its world premiere in the Gala section. Xavier Dolan's J'ai tué ma mère, which everyone expected to play considering the accolades from Cannes and because, well, it's Canadian, will play in the Special Presentations section, and Jean-Marc Vallée's The Young Victoria, with Emily Blunt as Queen Victoria, will close the fest, even though it already hit the DVD market in the UK last month. The titles are listed below. (Sorry for some of these bootleg-lookin' pics I found, but they were the best I had to work with).

[additional note: I'm too tired to fix the redundant use of "latest" in the title.]

Gala

- Chloe - d. Atom Egoyan
- Cooking with Stella - d. Dilip Mehta (brother of Deepa) - w. Don McKellar
- The Immaginarium of Doctor Parnassus - d. Terry Gilliam

Special Presentations

- Cairo Time - d. Ruba Nadda (Sabah) - w. Patricia Clarkson, Alexander Siddig, Elena Anaya
- Defendor - d. Peter Stebbings (directorial debut) - w. Kat Dennings, Woody Harrelson, Elias Koteas, Sandra Oh
- Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel - d. Brigitte Berman
- J'ai tué ma mère [I Killed My Mother] - d. Xavier Dolan
- The Trotsky - Jacob Tierney (Twist) - w. Jay Baruchel, Saul Rubinek, Colm Feore, Jessica Paré, Genviève Bujold

Contemporary World Cinema

- A Gun to the Head - d. Blaine Thurier
- Cole - d. Carl Bessai (Emile, Mothers&Daughters)
- Excited - d. Bruce Sweeney (Last Wedding)
- High Life - d. Gary Yates
- Passenger Side - d. Matt Bissonnette - w. Adam Scott, Robin Tunney
- Suck - d. Rob Stefaniuk - w. Malcolm McDowell, Dave Foley, Henry Rollins, Jessica Paré, Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper, Moby, Paul Anthony

Canada First!

- Year of the Carnivore - d. Sook-Yin Lee (Shortbus actress)
- All Fall Down - d. Philip Hoffman
- Crackie - d. Sherry White
- George Ryga's Hungry Hills - d. Rob King
- Machotaildrop - d. Corey Adams, Alex Craig
- The Wild Hunt - d. Alexandre Franchi

The Rest...

- La donation - d Bernard Émond (La femme qui boit) [part of the Masters section]
- Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould - d. Peter Raymont, Michele Hozer [part of the Reel to Reel section]
- Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands - d. Peter Mettler [part of the Reel to Reel section]
- Reel Injun - d. Neil Diamond [part of the Reel to Reel section]
- Carcasses - d. Denis Côté (Les états nordiques) [part of the Vanguard section]
- Leslie, My Name Is Evil - d. Reginald Harkema [part of the Vanguard section]

Updates On Things I Said Before And Stuff

During the last few weeks of maintaining this blog I've made trillions of unfounded and poorly researched statements that have served to do nothing other than create a small corner of the internet where my world view reigns supreme no matter how different it is from actual reality (though really, who believes in objective reality anymore? That's a 20th Century concept, daddio). Well, occasionally it seems logical to go back and have a quick look to see how wrong that reality is.

1. Jumper will fail at the box office.

While giving my very long-winded opinion on Doug Liman's hip teleportation-porn sci-fi action thriller Jumper, I said the following:

I know Liman intended for the story to continue, but I really hope he had nothing to do with the stupidity of this final conversation, which answers no questions and leaves everyone's fates uncertain. People got mad at the end of Matrix Reloaded and Pirates of the Caribbean 2 because they were left up in the air, but at least the next installments were being made. Jumper ends with pretty much no resolution, and we probably won't ever get any. That's not cool to leave us hanging like that, filmmaking dudes. Look at how pissed off everyone was about Doc Savage and Buckaroo Banzai not getting the sequels we were promised.

Seriously, I'm gutted we never got that Doc Savage sequel, even though the original wasn't that great. Anyway, how badly did Jumper do? According to Boxofficemojo, four day weekend gross was approximately $33,850,000. That's not including the foreign box office, which will significantly include eight and a half of my hard-earned pounds. Not the biggest hit ever, and it will very probably drop off a lot, but two other movies had a four-day opening this week, and they didn't do anywhere near as well. It might even make back its $85m budget in time. I'm not sure that's enough for a sequel, but we can hope.

2. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus might still go ahead.

Seems it is indeed on the way, with Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell coming to the rescue. This pleases me greatly. I may not be the biggest Jude Law fan, but I'm still glad he's onboard. My love for Depp is the thing of legend, and Farrell is my favourite ever mojito fiend, so that's even better.


I will never apologise for loving Miami Vice! Do you hear me, world? NEVER!

3. Torchwood is shit.

No change there; the memory-warp episode Adam was still not good by normal TV standards. However, by Torchwood standards, it was passable. Filled with illogicalities and plot holes and some of the worst acting outside of community theatre, but it had some good ideas. Not all of them were well developed, and it doesn't help that an episode about altered identities is featured on a show where the characters are different from week to week anyway, but it wasn't a total screw-up. Plus, I saw Bryan Dick, who played memory-implant-thing Adam on Neal Street, larking about with some friends on Friday night, and he seemed to be having a great time, and I wouldn't want to contribute to ruining that good mood even a couple of days later. He was not bad in Torchwood, though not as good he was in Master and Commander. Better material and a better director, obviously.



However, our Sky+ box decided to ignore that the next episode, featuring the incredible MARTHA JONES was on after it, so I'm going to have to watch it on the now much-improved iPlayer. It's a battle between content delivery systems!

ETA: Thank you to all who have said nice things about the Meat post. I shall endeavour to monitor Torchwood's status as national shame-provider soon.

This Is A Post About Terry Gilliam

In all my time on the internet tube system, I've never seen a flurry of horror, speculation, rumour, sadness, recrimination, spite, misinformation, grief, and bad taste jokes as last night at 23:15 GMT, when we finished watching Julie Delpy's sour but funny culture-clash movie Two Days In Paris and logged on to find a maelstrom of news surrounding the tragic death of Heath Ledger. Though obviously we don't know him personally, our reaction was one of total shock and disbelief, followed by much sadness. Lots of holier-than-thou jerks on AICN and AV Club took people to task for grieving for someone as lowly as a mere actor when no one laments the millions who die every day of disease, famine, warfare, terrorism, crime, and meteor landings.

They are all tragic losses too, but those people often have no name, and have not made an impression on my life. I can have a detached feeling of sadness for all deaths, but someone whose personality, face, voice, and talent has impinged upon my consciousness is going to feel more real than any of those people, and it's pointless to apologise for that. The news of a deadly plane crash horrifies me. Seeing Ledger's face on the Guardian homepage last night did something more visceral; it made me freeze in my seat, made me ill, made me hope it was a hoax gone wrong. That was Ennis Del Mar. I cried for him once. It's a connection. It might not be as real as that between me and my friends, and family, or even my legion of enemies who plot against me in their dungeon lair every Thursday night, but it's still a connection.


The other thing it made me do is despair for Terry Gilliam. Not on the same scale I felt for Michelle Williams and her daughter Miranda, obviously, but it did cross my mind that yet again his career is scuppered by events beyond his control. Which inspired me to write a post about Terry Gilliam, a man I idolised when I was young, and then kinda gave up on.

At first I fell in love with his magnificent Monty Python animations, but it was when he became a live-action director that I fell in love to the point of obsession with his vision. I remember making one of my beloved lists when I was a kid, of my all-time favourite movies. It was about as unimaginative and as typical a list as you can imagine. All the Star Wars movies to that point, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Jaws: you get the point. The only film that wasn't by Lucas or Spielberg was Time Bandits, a film that had given me nightmares and freaked me out but fascinated and delighted me nonetheless. I had no reason to think that admiration would grow until he became my favourite director, but seeing Brazil (which made it to the UK pretty much intact) sealed the deal. It upset me so profoundly that I could barely cope with it, but just like you poke at a painful tooth, I went back over and over again.

One of the things I loved most was his imaginative use of the frame. The Crimson Permanent Assurance, the short film before Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, is usually dismissed as a frivolity, but for a one-joke short, it not only pushes that joke as far as it can, it also shows off his distorted compositions and command of movement. Not just the beautifully sculpted progression of the action, but the movement of the characters from the beginning of a shot to the end. Check it out, in two parts.





Now, I love fast editing too, especially when it's done well, but old school control of pace within a single shot prior to being added to other equally well-designed shots is lovely too. I'm no film scholar (can you tell?), but I know what I like, and Gilliam had that in spades. And that's before we get to his prodigious imagination, his outrageous flights of fantasy, his angry humour.

Unfortunately, he also has the shittiest luck of any major filmmaker. Not to mention the best chronicled. If you've seen the Criterion Collection DVD of Brazil or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or seen Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of Twelve Monkeys or Lost in La Mancha, or read Andrew Yule's upsetting chronicle of the Munchausen debacle (Losing The Light, which is highly recommended), then you know what I'm talking about. For years I despaired as his vision was compromised by the foolish choices of producers and moneymen, and ignored by the imagination-deprived masses. Why was his genius not recognised? Why did he have to toil so hard for so little attention and praise? It made me unhappy, and just as rooting for the underdog makes you associate with them more, I almost felt his failures as if they were my failures too.


And then came The Brothers Grimm, and I suddenly stopped watching his movies. I'm still not sure why. I will see it eventually, and Tideland as well, which seems to have split opinion right down the middle. It's not even like Fear and Loathing put me off him. I loved the damn thing, and think it's due some serious critical reappraisal. I just suddenly thought, "You know what? All this time, thinking Gilliam was the victim of the financial shortsightedness of robotic accountants, thinking his vision was just too pure and radical to be appreciated by the blinkered peoples of the world, and yet now I find myself wondering if he's just a bit of a dick and cannot even be bothered to try to get on with anyone. No one is that unlucky. There has to be something else at play." It was a weird epiphany, coming without warning.

It meant that for once I sided with the Weinsteins (enemies of cinema that they are, and oh yes, Peter Biskind's Down and Dirty Pictures is approaching the top of my to-read pile). From what I gather from the single Amazon review of Bob McCabe's Dreams and Nightmares: Terry Gilliam, The Brothers Grimm, & Other Cautionary Tales of Hollywood, Gilliam certainly didn't approach the making of this movie in the most professional manner. Apparently he didn't even want to make the movie, but did it because he had nothing else going on.


I'm kinda torn. He has so much difficulty getting his own work going that I understand him wanting to get some work, any work, especially something that might have been a success. However, acting like it was a hardship to make it is a dick move. And so I started to look back at his career and think, perhaps these villains who have compromised his work are not as bad as I thought. Perhaps they were pushed into being careful with their money because he was so unhinged! Oh my God, what have I done with my life? Why couldn't I idolise Ron Howard instead of this difficult maniac?

And then last night, when the shock of hearing about Ledger's death had subsided and my heart had relaxed to its usual beat, I thought, "Damn, Gilliam isn't a dick. He's just jinxed." It's not him, it's what happens when you make films. People die (and some die way too soon), floods ruin sets, producers get cold feet and cut the budget, studio heads think they know better than artists and impose their own ideas on the director; it happens to every filmmaker, but it happens to Gilliam more than most. I should have kept giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Who knows what will happen to The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus now that Ledger is dead. Will it be dropped altogether? Was enough footage filmed to be able to salvage the movie? Will the insurance pay for the film to be reshot with a new actor? I'm sure people will tut-tut at me for thinking about this when someone has just died, but, you know, I can have two thoughts at the same time. The mind is a complex thing. Yes, even mine.


Okay, I've rambled. The short version of all of this is that I have exorcised myself of my sudden distrust of Gilliam for entirely irrational reasons, and will now go and find The Brothers Grimm and Tideland, even if they are as bad as people have said. I will continue to support him and his career, because even if he never recaptures his old mojo (or finishes another movie, which always seems possible), his work was important to me during my formative years and is partially responsible for who I am and what I think. Hopefully this tragedy won't be the straw that breaks the camel's back, and he gets back on his feet soon.

One last thing, apropos of nothing. An actor I think would work well in Gilliam's movies is King of Charisma Sam Rockwell. Today I found this picture, that made me smile while flicking from gossip site to gossip site looking for news of Ledger's death.


Enjoy this gratuitously goofy image, my lovely readers.

ETA: It's not looking good for Dr. Parnassus. From that article, it's interesting to note that Ledger was planning a chess movie, starring Ellen Page. Yet more sadness that we would never get to see that film.

ETA again: IMDb and AICN are running this rumour, that Gilliam is going to have many actors playing Ledger's character. The character passes from world to world and could conceivably be played by different actors each time. Sounds great to me. The alternative is we never get to see Ledger's final performance, and that's not something anyone wants.