Sep 11 2008
By Barbara Vancheri / Thursday, Sept. 11, 2008
TORONTO -- It's time to load up the car with notebooks, digital recorders, press kits and a festival program book that's the size of a small phone book and make my way home.
This is my fourth festival and while the star wattage may be bigger every year, with the likes of Brad Pitt, Ben Kingsley (bottom left), Queen Latifah, Jessica Biel, Alicia Keys, Rachel Weisz (left), Adrien Brody, Derek Luke, Benicio Del Toro and Mark Ruffalo (just a tiny fraction of the names), the movies weren't as strong as previous years. Last year's complaint was they were too unrelentingly dark but that batch also nestled "Atonement," "Juno," "No Country for Old Men," "Michael Clayton," "Into the Wild" and that improbable charmer, "Lars and the Real Girl."
Michael Cera is back but "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist" is no "Juno," and the Coens' "Burn After Reading" is not intended to be "No Country." Since I did not have 262 minutes -- yes, four hours and change - to see "Che," I can't say if it belongs in the pantheon of great movies either as a single film or two-parter but I guess I'll find out in a few months when the serious season arrives.
Post-Gazette movie editor Barbara Vancheri can be reached at bvancheri@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1632. More from Toronto at post-gazette.com/ae.
Sep 10 2008
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By Barbara Vancheri / Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2008
At last, some real festival films, not movies I could see back in Pittsburgh this week or next. And nothing put me more in the festival frame of mind than this morning's double feature: "Kabuli Kid" and "Wendy and Lucy."
The first is set in Afghanistan and tells the story of a taxi driver who discovers that a woman clad in a full-length blue veil -- her only identifying characteristic is a tiny birth mark near her ankle -- has left her baby boy in the back seat of his cab. The infant appears to be about five or six months old and the driver has daughters but no sons and is encouraged by his father to keep the boy.
As the driver tries the police, an orphanage and a radio plea for the mother to step forward, the movie shows what life is like in Kabul with traffic patterns that are non-existent or chaotic, children who beg for money or peddle such goods as plastic bags and toilet paper on the street, and a little girl says she doesn't want to get married because "they beat wives."
It provides a vivid window on another world, which is just what a festival movie should do.
"Wendy and Lucy" is a modest film from Kelly Reichardt ("Old Joy") starring Michelle Williams as a young woman from Indiana who is driving to Ketchikan, Alaska, with her dog, Lucy. Wendy hopes to land a job at a fish cannery but her 1988 Honda Accord conks out in an Oregon drug-store parking lot.
Everything she clings to, from Lucy and the car to her modest stash of money, are suddenly in jeopardy. Williams, with a cap of dark hair and wardrobe that comes from a couple of bags in the Honda trunk, gives a beautifully subtle performance that conveys the panic, fear and increasingly muted hope just beneath the surface.
Post-Gazette movie editor Barbara Vancheri can be reached at bvancheri@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1632.
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Sep 10 2008
By Barbara Vancheri / Tuesday afternoon,
Sept. 9, 2008
No wonder the sidewalk in front of the Intercontinental Hotel always has an arc of autograph seekers and photographers both professional and amateur. In just the ground-floor restaurant, Colin Firth from the movie "Easy Virtue" is seated to the right while Philip Seymour Hoffman (left, photo credit: Frank Gunn/AP/CP) and Catherine Keener are to the left talking about the new Charlie Kaufman movie "Synecdoche, New York," which both festival moviegoers and volunteers had trouble pronouncing yesterday.
When Hoffman orders a burger and fries, Keener steals a few to nibble on while talking to me. Keener and Hoffman co-starred in "Capote" and she plays his artist-wife in the early part of "Synecdoche" (pronounced Sih-NECK-doh-kee). Kaufman, who wrote "Being John Malkovich," "Adaptation" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," makes his directorial debut with "Synecdoche." And what is Kaufman, who will later be spotted a few tables over, like as a director? "He's just like he is as a person. He's very bright, very helpful, very kind and there are no stupid questions, that's sort of how it feels, which makes you feel OK in asking."
"Synecdoche" is anchored by Hoffman and a female supporting cast that starts with Keener and includes Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Emily Watson, Dianne Wiest, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Hope Davis. Hoffman plays a theater director whose health, marriage and world start to collapse, prompting him to use a MacArthur Grant to take over a warehouse in New York where he re-creates not only the streets of New York but his life, with stand-ins for himself and others.
The festival program book aptly calls it "part dream, part puzzle, part brainteaser," and it's all that. More to come when the movie opens in Pittsburgh but, as usual with any Kaufman project, it's unlike anything else out there today as it explores the notions of the passage of time, being the star or an extra in your own life and art imitating life, complete with doppelgangers.
In a private part of the hotel bar, decorated with green suede couches and square ottomans, more actors are talking about more movies. Jeremy Renner and Brian Geraghty (who lived in Pittsburgh from roughly ages 3 to 7 and attended North Allegheny's Espe Elementary School while his father worked for Heinz) are promoting "The Hurt Locker." It's directed by Kathryn Bigelow and focuses on soldiers who disarm IEDs or improvised explosive devices in Baghdad.
To the credit of Bigelow and writer Mark Boal, who had a hand in "In the Valley of Elah," it doesn't debate the merits of the war. It simply embeds us with the U.S. Army's Bravo Company and allows us to count down the dramatic days left in Iraq with them. It's an action movie about the IEDs that don't go off because some fearless unit disarmed them and the ones that do, no matter how hard the men try.
In addition to Renner and Geraghty, it stars Anthony Mackie and features Guy Pearce and Ralph Fiennes in extended cameos. It doesn't have a U.S. distributor but I cannot imagine it won't find one before the festival is over. I talked with Renner and Geraghty and will have more information later this week or early next.
The day started with a press conference with director Gavin O'Connor and actors Edward Norton and Noah Emmerich for "Pride and Glory." Colin Farrell, Jon Voight and Jennifer Ehle also star in the story about families united by blood and by their blue uniforms. Voight plays the policeman patriarch whose sons, Norton and Emmerich, and son-in-law, Farrell, are cops, too.
O'Connor, who comes from a family of cops, said, "I grew up in New York and we always heard ‘Cops bleed blue, cops bleed blue, blue wall of silence,' and I thought it was an interesting idea if you took the notion of cops bleed blue because the fraternity of cops is a family and then you take a real family of cops who bleed red. And you put them in this blender and they collide, what would happen?"
The question of where the loyalties fall is the bedrock of the movie, scheduled to arrive in theaters Oct. 24. Much more about what they had to say next month.
Post-Gazette movie editor Barbara Vancheri can be reached at bvancheri@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1632.
Sep 08 2008
By Barbara Vancheri / Monday, Sept. 8, 2008
In "The Wrestler," Mickey Rourke could be speaking for himself. An aging, ailing wrestler two decades past his days of action figures and newspaper headlines, Randy "The Ram" Robinson turns to the crowd and says, "The only ones who are gonna tell me I'm through are you people here."
And Rourke isn't through, turning in one of the best acting performances of the festival as a man whose body and spirit have taken a pounding. He reaches out to his estranged daughter - Evan Rachel Wood - and tries to be more than a customer to a stripper played by Marisa Tomei (by golly she takes off her clothes ... again).
Rourke, who sounds and inhabits a body like Sylvester Stallone's during his "Rocky" days but with long blond hair and fake tan, makes Randy a hugely sympathetic character. The film, directed by Darren Aronofsky, takes moviegoers behind the scenes of wrestling matches where the entertainers plot out their moves and look after one another.
One of the most affecting scenes comes as Randy shows up for an autograph signing, charging a couple of bucks to pose for a Polaroid with fans, and he looks around the room and sees the broken down bodies around him. The ending is somewhat predictable but the film closes with a song called "The Wrestler," written and performed by Bruce Springsteen.
A showing of "The Wrestler" was filled, with every one of the 580 seats occupied. The movie just won a big prize at the Venice Film Festival and Variety reports that Fox Searchlight won an all-night bidding war for the movie, paying a reported $4 million for the U.S. rights, which means it will arrive in theaters at some point. And Rourke's performance is worthy of an Oscar nomination.
Post-Gazette movie editor Barbara Vancheri can be reached at bvancheri@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1632.
Sep 07 2008
By Barbara Vancheri / Sunday afternoon,
Sept. 7, 2008
TORONTO - Kevin Smith turns Pittsburgh into an unlikely porn capital, Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks (left) into racy romcom stars, Brandon Routh into a sexy superman and one of George Romero's old haunts into a location for "Zack and Miri Make a Porno."
"We got to shoot at the Monroeville Mall and for a movie buff, that's a very cool thing. We had [actor] Tom Savini, we shot at the Monroeville Mall, it's as close to a zombie movie as I'll ever get," he told reporters today as festivalgoers got their first peek at "Zack and Miri." Zombies, after all, famously shuffled through the mall in "Dawn of the Dead."
Smith says at its core, "Zack and Miri" is a romcom, although not a conventional or family-friendly one. The MPAA initially gave it an NC-17 until Smith won an R, on appeal.
"Remove the trappings of porno and it's a traditional romcom. ... I'm an unabashed romcom fan, I just like my romcoms to be a little more risque than ‘27 Dresses' or ‘Made of Honor' or something like that. Not that there's anything wrong with those," but he likes his movies a little more, uh, edgy and adult.
In "Zack and Miri," Rogen and Banks play platonic (but made for each other) roomies and graduates of Monroeville High School who are so broke that their water and electricity are turned off the day before Thanksgiving. As they burn their stack of unpaid bills in a trash can in the living room, which in a nice touch is decorated with afghans draped over the furniture, they make a business decision about how they can raise money. They're inspired by a gay porn star involved with a former classmate.
Pittsburgh plays itself and the first time you see Banks, she's wearing fuzzy blue slippers and a blue Pittsburgh Penguins jersey.
Banks, who also did interviews for the movie today, calls Pittsburgh a character in the movie and says it was smart of Smith to shoot "Zack and Miri" there. "Look, if you lose your heat in the summer, there's not really high stakes," as there are here.
"And I also think it's really fun that Kevin set the hilarity of the movie against this backdrop of just gray desolation, and everything's frigid and frozen and meanwhile, we have all this life in us and I thought it adds a texture to the movie that some of Kevin's other movies don't have."
The cast also includes Justin Long, Traci Lords, Jason Mewes, Craig Robinson from "The Office" and adult film star Katie Morgan.
It's too early to tell how the movie will play in Pittsburgh or Peoria, but some Kansas City residents gave it a stamp of approval.
"We screened ‘Clerks II' there, last time we were test screening and it was a great screening and it's totally indicative of the middle of the country," Smith said. "It was a killer test screening."
Pittsburghers will get their chance to see "Zack and Miri" on Halloween.
Sep 07 2008
By Barbara Vancheri / Sunday, Sept. 6
So far it appears that this year's "Juno" is ... still not known.
Although critics are praising some performances - Anne Hathaway's in "Rachel Getting Married," Dakota Fanning's among a wealth of strong women in "The Secret Life of Bees" (left, Fanning with Queen Latifahl; photo credit: Nathan Denette/AP/CP) Keira Knightley in "The Duchess" - the jury is still out on which movie will inherit the crown worn last year by "Juno."
Some of the bigger films possibly bound for Oscar glory, such as "The Road," aren't here. But movies with Mickey Rourke and Jean-Claude Van Damme are, which isn't a punchline or a setup because they're among the features festivalgoers are recommending. Rourke portrays a washed-up wrestler in "The Wrestler," while Van Damme plays a variation of himself in a movie named for a variation of himself, "JCVD."
Just when you think a performer is on the mat, down for the count and never to emerge from the DVD shelves again, he gets up and starts swinging.
Today's schedule brings interviews for Spike Lee's World War II movie, "The Duchess," Bill Maher's "Religulous" and ... "Zack and Miri Make a Porno." I'll keep you posted.
Sep 07 2008
By Barbara Vancheri /
Saturday night,
Sept. 5, 2008
TORONTO - Brad Pitt doesn't need to look for projects to share with Angelina Jolie, his partner and the mother of their brood of six children including newborn twins.
Asked at a press conference if he was searching for a movie to do with Jolie, Pitt said, "Angie and I, we're working together every day, I can guarantee."
If Pitt (left, photo credit: Evan Agostini/Associated Press) is stressed about being the most wanted man in the world - for festival sightings this weekend - he didn't show it. Clad in a silvery vest and pants and white open-collar shirt, he was the picture of handsome health and contentment. He looked little like his character in "Burn After Reading," a personal trainer with hair brushed straight up and a bad blond streak in it.
For much of the movie, he chews a wad of gum, wears a Hardbodies Fitness Center polo shirt, shorts and sneakers, has an iPod strapped to his arm and a habit of grooving to the music in a way that steals every scene in which he appears.
Asked about his inspiration for his character, he said, "That was all me. All me in a former day. Man, I really don't know. It's a mystery to even me and I'm somewhat disturbed by it all," just as his "other half" is, too.
Although "Burn" reunites the Coens with George Clooney, it marks the first time Pitt is working with the brothers who wrote the role for him.
"I've been knocking on the brothers' door for a few years, so I was really happy when they called, until I read the piece and then I was a little upset again," he said, with humor shot through his voice. He plays just one of the knuckleheads caught in the comic and cataclysmic collision of hard bodies, big brains and an ousted CIA analyst who opts to write his memoir just as his wife decides to divorce him.
John Malkovich is the CIA employee, Tilda Swinton his sharp-tongued wife and George Clooney the married federal marshal with whom she's having an affair. Pitt's character works in the same gym as one played by Frances McDormand (not at the press conference), a woman obsessed with Internet dating and trying to find a way to undergo plastic surgery to lift, tighten and tuck various body parts.
She owes her bobbed blond wig and some of her makeover madness to Linda Tripp in her days after the Monica Lewinsky scandal. She prowls a site called BeWithMeDC.com and argues with her insurance company - when she can penetrate the voicemail system -- over her proposed plastic surgery.
You'll find more about the movie, its cast and its makers in Friday's paper.
The day started with "Burn After Reading" and moved to interviews for "Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist," starring Michael Cera and Kat Dennings, advanced to "Ghost Town" with Ricky Gervais and Greg Kinnear and segued to "The Secret Life of Bees," with a screening of "The Duchess" still to come tonight.
In a cringe-inducing question that could have come straight from "The Office," a reporter asked Gervais (left, photo credit: Evan Agostini/Associated Press) what he had done to his teeth in "Ghost Town," in which he plays a dentist who dies during a colonoscopy and comes back to life with the ability to see ghosts.
"No, that's my own teeth," said Gervais. "What, you think I put these in for press conferences?" he asked, pointing to his mouth. "I'm also wearing a fat suit and I'm much taller than this as well. ... A little, fat superstar with bad teeth," as the crowd of reporters howled as he played out this bit for all it was worth.
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Sep 06 2008
By Barbara Vancheri / Sept. 6, 2008
TORONTO -- Steeler Nation is alive and well in Toronto, not that anyone might have doubted that. Stepping onto the elevator at my hotel last night I spotted a Steeler T-shirt - the scores on the back looked to be from the five Super Bowls - and was so busy double-checking that I nearly missed the Penguins jersey on the other passenger. A young couple from Pittsburgh is here for a big musical festival in town and they were flying the hometown colors.
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It seems like just yesterday that Debra Winger (below right) was scooped up in Richard Gere's arms in "A
n Officer and a Gentleman" but I guess it's been a quarter-century or so, which explains how she's old enough to play the mother of Anne Hathaway and Rosemarie DeWitt in "Rachel Getting Married."
DeWitt, who looks like she could be Winger's daughter, is Rachel, a bride who's worried about more than just rain on her wedding day. She is still chafing at the way her drug-addicted sister, played by Hathaway, sucked the air out of the room and the attention out of the family for years. Now, Hathaway's Kym is clean and out of rehab for the wedding and using the rehearsal dinner to try to make amends, per the 12-step program.
Hathaway, with choppy, chin-length hair and an omnipresent cigarette, gets to really act here, tucking that "Princess Diaries" smile away. We learn, about midway through the movie, what Kym did that rent the family in a way that could never be mended.
There is a confrontation scene between parent and child that makes "Margot at the Wedding" from last year's fest almost look like a fairy tale. There is also a music-infused celebration and enough shaky handheld camera movements to send a few people near the screen fleeing for seats farther back, not easy since almost every chair in the theater was occupied.
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If Viggo Mortensen hadn't agreed to co-star in "Appaloosa," director Ed Harris isn't sure he would have made the movie.
"I don't know, I just had to pick somebody," Harris said jokingly, when asked why Mortensen was his man. Mortensen chimed in: "Everybody else turned him down."
Then Harris elaborated at a press conference on Friday, "We worked together on ‘The History of Violence,' you know, and I really enjoyed working with him. Viggo, I not only have great respect for him as an actor but as a human being. He's a really decent guy, he's great on the set, he treats everybody really respectfully. I just thought he'd be perfect.
"These were two guys who had to communicate a lot about being who they were and the knowledge of each other without really talking," about their inner feelings in depth. "I wanted a guy who I could ride next to on a horse for 10 hours and never say a word and feel totally comfortable and I figured he'd be the guy. He's the only man I wanted to play the role."
Mortensen, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, had proved what Harris said. When reporters' tape recorders - including mine - clicked off on the table in front of him, he checked, flipped the tape over and restarted it. When someone snapped a digital photo of him, he obligingly looked at the back of the camera and smiled and when questioned about "The Road," he could be overheard singing the praises of his young co-star, Kodi Smit-McPhee, just as he had done in Pittsburgh.
Yes, a class act and classy actor.
Sep 05 2008
By Barbara Vancheri / Sept. 5, 2008
TORONTO - The running of the bulls is nothing compared to the running of the Brad Pitt fans. The police either removed the metal barricades at one end or the Pitt parade breached them, turning the street next to Roy Thomson Hall into a very loud love-in for the actor.
He's just one of the stars of "Burn After Reading," alongside George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, John Malkovich and Frances McDormand, but he's the one on the first name basis with the world. Daniela Raponi, 20, who lives north of Toronto had been stationed along the sidewalk since 5:20 p.m. Friday - more than four hours before a showing of "Burn" - and was rewarded with both an autograph and a literal brush with fame when Pitt grazed her hand as he took her magazine to sign. She reported both facts to her parents by cell phone afterward, once the shrieks had died down. The screams and cries had moved from one pocket of the crowd to another, as if people were doing an aural version of the wave.
Raponi and her friends did far better than last year when they turned out for "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," also starring Pitt. And by arriving early, they also watched the stars of "The Secret Life of Bees" walk the red carpet into the hall for that movie's world premiere.
After director Gina Prince-Bythewood introduced the source novel's author, Sue Monk Kidd, she brought onto the stage actors Queen Latifah, Dakota Fanning, Jennifer Hudson, Alicia Keys, Sophie Okonedo, Nate Parker and Tristan Wilds.The women wore dresses both short and long, with Queen Latifah clad in a black, one-shoulder knee-length number complementing her sleekly styled, side parted hair. Missing was actor Paul Bettany due to an unspecified personal situation.
In the movie, Fanning plays a 14-year-old who runs away from her abusive father with their housekeeper (Hudson) and finds love, acceptance and motherly approval with the Bo atwright beekeeping sisters. The film is rated PG-13 and attracted such moviegoers as Susan Lee and her 8-year-old daughter, Michelle Lee, who is partial to Barbie movies but was happy to don a red dress, pink headband and fuzzy bracelet for the night out. They had been given the tickets by a friend of Mrs. Lee's husband.
Prince-Bythewood said the cast "all took this gig for way less than what they normally get," because they believed in her vision and she was proud of their sacrifice in that regard. Some of the cast were seeing the movie for the first time with the public and, as a man in the audience shouted out, "Queen Latifah in the house!" it was time to turn down the lights and bring up the film.
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Michael London is here as executive producer of "Appaloosa," starring Ed Harris, Viggo Mortensen, Renee Zellweger and Jeremy Irons and no one directed a question to him during a press conference.
However, afterward, he answered the question Pittsburghers have been asking for months: When will "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh" arrive in theaters? Or will it land there at all?
He expects to close a distribution deal by later this month and said the adaptation of the Michael Chabon novel could be released in the first quarter of 2009. London is the founder of Groundswell Productions which made "Mysteries" along with "Smart People," which played theaters in the spring and is already on DVD.
"It took a long time. It's been a very difficult market in the last six to nine months because smaller movies, the studios are really shying away from, but we're in conversations with actually two or three different companies so we're just finalizing that in the next week or so." London said "Mysteries" turned out very well but it's "dark, it's complicated, it's interesting, it's exactly what distributors are afraid of right now but it's good. It's been a long struggle, it's been a hard struggle but it's going to see the light of day."
Sep 04 2008
By Barbara Vancheri / Sept. 4, 2008
TORONTO - "Star Wars," the headline in orange type proclaims.
It has nothing to do with light sabers and Wookies. It's the Toronto International Film Festival, as the photo of a smiling Anne Hathaway on the free weekly underscores, with the promise: "Like you've never seen her - totally messed up in 'Rachel Getting Married.' "
That's one of 249 feature films playing here through Sept.13. By the time I checked into my hotel at 2:30 p.m., the festival was already under way, with 35 screenings for press and industry representatives today alone. After picking up my press badge, I headed for "Appaloosa," in preparation for a press conference tomorrow with star-director-co-writer Ed Harris and actors Viggo Mortensen (left, photo credit: Evan Agostini), Renee Zellweger and Jeremy Irons.
The Western is based on a Robert B. Parker novel and while it features a romance between Harris and Zellweger, it's really about the bond between the men trying to keep the peace in the lawless New Mexico territory of 1882. Mortensen and Harris, both with expressive blue eyes, sun-weathered faces and an economy of motion, nicely convey the friendship of a marshal and his deputy who can handle an eight-gauge shotgun as well as a test of loyalty.
Trying to map out a plan for the festival seems a little (maybe a very little) like covering, say, the Olympics, but you have to decide who might emerge as the Michael Phelps of the movies. Between 9 and 10 a.m. tomorrow, there are 10 movies playing but I plan to line up early for the Coen brothers' "Burn After Reading."
You can't go wrong with Brad Pitt or George Clooney or onetime Pittsburgher Frances McDormand.
As always, the city is percolating, with pedestrians, bicyclists - lots of places to park bikes at what look like sawed off parking-meter posts - cars, streetcars and taxis zipping through the roads, some of which are narrowed by construction. As a cab driver told me last year: There are two seasons, construction and winter.
Some things are the same north or south of the border, where I crossed over without anyone even asking for my new passport. Perhaps on the way back into the States I'll get to show it off.
In the meantime, I'm enjoying the famous politeness of Canadians. Even a down on his luck man asking for money sat on the sidewalk with a sign that announced, "If you can spare it, great. If you can't, that's OK." And then it said, "Have a nice day."