MCN Blogs
David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Toronto 9/7 – The First Three Movies

TIFF 2006 started with a thud today…
It wasn

Be Sociable, Share!

10 Responses to “Toronto 9/7 – The First Three Movies”

  1. jeffmcm says:

    So what was the ‘impressive’ part of 2:37 since everything in the above review makes it sound lazy and stupid?

  2. PetalumaFilms says:

    Regurgitations, yay. I hope something good comes out of the fest, but I feel your pain on the start.

  3. T.H.Ung says:

    With things not quite in full swing yet, DP and JW must be “seeing” a lot of each other.

  4. Danny Boy says:

    But wasn’t Crash met in Toronto ’04 with mild “this does nothing but ape P.T. Anderson” reviews? And it turned into the movie of 2005, which makes me want to cry.

  5. KamikazeCamelV2.0 says:

    2:37 isn’t gonna be anywhere near a Crash situation.
    THat movie has been extremely controversial down here for multiple reasons. I’m seeing it tomorrow at a special screening for Australian Film Institute members (which I am). I absolutely loved Elephant so I’m wary of a film completely aping it’s style. But we’ll see.
    The film received an R18+ rating here (our harshest rating but not as harsh as your NC17) and Thalluri came out and said he was really upset that the film’s target audience weren’t going to be allowed to see it because you have to be 18.

  6. bobbob911 says:

    Just felt like I had to post this somewhere…
    TIFF Day 1 was a total clusterf**k. First, the film Ten Canoes was presented without subtitles. The problem is, huge portions of the film are in native aboriginal. šŸ™ The director was stunned that the wrong print was screened.
    Next, Borat was halted after 15 minutes due to a broken projector. Larry Charles and Michael Moore tried to valiently keep the crowd from rioting for almost an hour before they announced they could not continue.
    What fun….

  7. EDouglas says:

    “But wasn’t Crash met in Toronto ’04 with mild “this does nothing but ape P.T. Anderson” reviews? And it turned into the movie of 2005, which makes me want to cry.”
    Well, I personally loved Crash so I’m not too surprised…then again, it’s also very much an ACTORS movie and they make up the largest part of the Academy. I mean, look at the road to Oscars… Golden Globes, barely a mention… critics awards, ditto… and then it won the SAG Ensemble award (which I foresaw happening because I knew with that many actors and performances it couldn’t get overlooked)… obviously, when it came to picking the picture, the biggest percentage of the Academy went with the actor-driven movie. (If we look back in previous years, that’s often been the case except for with Mystic River)

  8. KamikazeCamelV2.0 says:

    Everyone knew it would win at SAG. But we’re not getting into THAT argument again.
    bobbob, they really screened Ten Canoes without subtitles? Jesus Christ, what idiots do they have working there? Rolf (de Heer, the director) has a right to be stunned. It’s a great movie too, it’s a shame you missed out.

  9. KamikazeCamelV2.0 says:

    Okay, so I saw 2:37 and I agree with you completely. In Elephant the point was that all these kids lives such mundane lives and even then at the end pretty much all of them died, so even if they did have big dramatic lives we couldn’t see where they lead because they were killed.
    However, here, all these characters are dealing with major issues (as you say, those two characters are dealing with heavy shit) and then the movie just ends and doesn’t resolve any of them.
    http://kamikazecamel.blogspot.com/2006/09/afi-screenings-reviews-4.html
    for an rambled-thoughts review.

  10. Lota says:

    ohhh. no.
    sorry to hear that about TEN CANOES…I think Rolf de Heer is a talented director. Can’t wait to see TC.

The Hot Blog

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” ā€” some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it ā€” I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury ā€” he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” ā€” and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging ā€” I was with her at that moment ā€” she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy namedā€”” “Yeah, sure ā€” you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that Iā€™m on the phone with you now, after all thatā€™s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didnā€™t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. Thereā€™s not a case of that. He wasnā€™t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had ā€” if that were what the accusation involved ā€” the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. Iā€™m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, ā€œYou know, itā€™s not this, itā€™s thatā€? Because ā€” let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. TimesĀ piece, thatā€™s what it lacked. Thatā€™s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon