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Movies hope to get bounce from festival
By Steven Rea
Philadelphia Inquirer
Published on Friday, Sep 05, 2008
Last year's Toronto International Film Festival launched more than a few exceptionally good, and, as things turned out, Oscar-contending titles: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Eastern Promises, Juno, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men and Persepolis among them. Not bad.
This year's festival, which will run through Sept. 13 in the movie-crazed Canadian town, boasts 249 features from 64 countries. To quote the Toronto singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith, there's gold in them hills. And probably more than a few 2009 Academy Award nominees-to-be in the mix.
At the same time, there are several ''difficult'' projects that hope to use North America's most important film festival to gain acclaim, attention, and good box office numbers down the line.
The Lucky Ones, from Neil Burger, director of The Illusionist, is a road movie looking to shrug off the Iraq war-movie curse (as in nobody's bothered to see any of those pics). It stars Rachel McAdams, Michael Pena and Tim Robbins as three returning veterans on a wild cross-country drive.
Synecdoche, New York, which had its premiere at Cannes in May, marks screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's directing debut. The Being John Malkovich/Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind surrealist has assembled a crack cast — Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton and Michelle Williams — for the dark tale of a hypochondriacal theater director and the women, and worry, in his life. Sony Pictures Classics will roll the movie into art houses starting in October — hoping for a bounce from Toronto.
And Steven Soderbergh's two-part Che — with Benicio Del Toro as the revolutionist and T-shirt icon Che Guevara — is another high-profile pic that's counting on emerging from the festival with a formidable buzz.
There should be smoother sailing for some studio and specialty division releases boasting big stars and top directors: Anne Hathaway is the lead in Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married, a family comedy that's already generating strong word of mouth, and is slated to start its theater run in early October. Miracle at St. Anna, from Spike Lee, offers the inspired-by-history drama of four black American soldiers trapped in an Italian hill town during World War II. It will open Sept. 26.
Appaloosa is an old-school Western directed by and starring Ed Harris, with Viggo Mortensen, Jeremy Irons and Renee Zellweger along for the ride. And The Duchess boasts the cheekbones and beaming smile of Keira Knightley, in the role of 18th-century noblewoman Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Ralph Fiennes and Hayley Atwell co-star, and Atwell, at least, makes it sound pretty provocative.
''My character is this lover and confidante of the duchess,'' she said in an interview in Philadelphia last month, when she was plugging Brideshead Revisited. ''But she also ends up being the lover and confidante of the duke. And they live together as a menage a trois for 25 years, and I found that concept fascinating.''
Fascinating! The Duchess will open Sept. 26.
Lighter Coen fare
The Coen Brothers, multiple Oscar winners for No Country for Old Men, will return to Toronto this year with lighter, loopier fare: Burn After Reading is a screwball spy caper with Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand as Washington fitness instructors who try to extort the CIA, and get in way, way over their heads. George Clooney, Richard Jenkins, John Malkovich and Tilda Swinton are caught up in the huggermugger, too. Burn After Reading, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival this week, will opennext Friday.
Among the many, many titles going into Toronto looking for distribution deals are Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, with Mickey Rourke as a retired pro on the comeback trail; Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles, with Ben Chaplin, Claire Danes and Zac Efron; Management, with Jennifer Aniston, Woody Harrelson and Steve Zahn; Gigantic, with Jane Alexander, Paul Dano, Zooey Deschanel and John Goodman; and John Stockwell's Middle of Nowhere, a teen romance with Eva Amurri, Anton Yelchin and Susan Sarandon.
Last year's Toronto International Film Festival launched more than a few exceptionally good, and, as things turned out, Oscar-contending titles: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Eastern Promises, Juno, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men and Persepolis among them. Not bad.
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