MCN Blogs
Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

I Just Flew Into Toronto, and Boy, Are My Arms Tired

After a full day of travel, I finally landed in Toronto around 10PM tonight. I spent part of the flight watching screeners — I’ll have a review of Swedish film Behind Blue Skies up soonish, but in brief: it’s kind of a Swedish Holy Rollers (the Jesse Eisenberg, Hasidic Jews smuggling ecstasy flick), set in the ’70s, and stars Bill Skarsgård (Son of Stellan) in a soulful, impressive lead performance.

I have to finish watching my other screener, Erotic Man here, though — there’s a nudity in the film, and the 14-year-old boy across the aisle from me was getting an eyeful and his mother did NOT look amused, so I shut it down and opted for decompressing with some Kingdom Hearts instead.

Now I am in the flat, settling in and looking over the P&I schedule so I can figure out what I’m seeing when. I have a short list of must-sees based on Telluride/Venice buzz, including Russian film Silent Souls (said to be a contender for the Golden Lion at Venice); Danny Boyle‘s 127 Hours (which I am about DYING to see); Darren Aronofsky‘s Black Swan (if it’s more The Wrestler than The Fountain, I’ll be happy); and Casey Affleck‘s Joaquin Phoenix doc, I’m Still Here.

Other films on my radar: Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black‘s directorial debut, What’s Wrong With Virginia (starring Jennifer Connelly as a mentally ill mom); Passion Play, starring Mickey Rourke in another down-on-his-luck role, this time as a musician; Half-Nelson team Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, here with It’s Kind of a Funny Story; Mike Leigh‘s Another Year; Stephen FrearsTamara Drewe; and Charles Ferguson‘s Inside Job.

I do want to catch Ben Affleck‘s The Town and Never Let Me Go while I’m here as well, since I’ll probably be missing the Seattle screenings, but I’m going to try very hard to balance the “name” stuff with some more obscure films that might just be gems.

So on that note, a few films you may NOT have heard of that also have my attention among the crowded fray here: Takashi Miike‘s 13 Assassins; The Sound of Mumbai: A Musical; The Piano in a Factory; Windfall, a doc about a wind turbine project in upstate New York; Dirty Girl (in part because it’s set in 1987 in Norman, Oklahoma — my old stomping grounds); Henry’s Crime — which features the very interesting mix of Keanu Reeves, Vera Farmiga and James Caan — no, seriously!; and … Machete Maidens Unleashed!, a doc about B-movie making in the Philippines.

Of course, I’ll be keeping my ear to the ground for the hottest buzz from the fest, so I will no doubt be adding films to my slate later on that may not be on my radar screen at the moment, but with only 8 days to watch films, I’ve got to narrow it down somehow … and I think I have a good start.

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2 Responses to “I Just Flew Into Toronto, and Boy, Are My Arms Tired”

  1. Don R. Lewis says:

    Glad to see you back on the festival beat, Kim….especially at the fest that sought to take you down 😉

    Have a great time, can’t wait to see your reviews!

  2. james stserd says:

    i love your blog i found it on msn

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” — 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 — 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 — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — 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 named—” “Yeah, sure — 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 I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’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 didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — 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. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’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