TIFF Originals Archive for September, 2011
The Blur Of Indie Sales: TIFF ’11 Edition
with all the chatter about the 30+ sales at TIFF this year, there were a total of 6 buys by companies in those 20 that generate major dollars. Searchlight bought Shame, CBS bought Salmon Fishing in The Yemen (which seems to be the high sale of the year at $4 million), Lionsgate bought two films, one with Roadside (Friends With Kids) and the other on their own, You’re Next, The Hunter, and IFC grabbed Your Sister’s Sister and for their new IFC Midnight division, The Incident.
Read the full article » 4 Comments »DP/30: God Bless America, writer/director Bobcat Goldthwait
Earlier with Bob…. after the jump….
Read the full article » 1 Comment »TIFF ’11 Reviews: Last Roundup — Your Sister’s Sister, Chicken with Plums, Pink Ribbons, Inc. and Lucky
Your Sister’s Sister With her latest film, Your Sister’s Sister, writer-director Lynn Shelton again teams up with Mark Duplass, who plays Jack, an affable slacker caught between two sisters, Iris (Emily Blunt) and Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt) in this lightly drawn but well-executed tale. Shelton has a knack for putting average people into beyond-average situations, as…
Read the full article » 1 Comment »TIFF ’11 Reviews: Oslo, August 31 and Melancholia
Oslo, August 31 One of the last films I caught at TIFF this year, almost by accident, was Oslo, August 31, the sophomore effort of Reprise director Joachim Trier. Oslo, August 31 reunites Trier with Anders Danielsen Lie (who played Phillip, the troubled writer of Reprise) in this spare film about addiction, the choices that…
Read the full article »DP/30 @ TIFF ’11: Your Sister’s Sister
Meet the family of My Sister’s Sister. Writer/director Lynn Shelton and co-stars Mark Duplass and Emily Blunt.
Read the full article »TIFF ’11 Review: Alps
One of my strongest festival memories is of watching Giorgos Lanthimos’ third film, Dogtooth, at TIFF in 2009, and walking out of the theater with a mass of fellow dazed critics, filled with excitement at having just seen this bizarrely brilliant work by an artist who seemed to materialize out of nowhere with the rare…
Read the full article »TIFF ’11 Review: Goodbye First Love
With her latest film, Goodbye First Love, Mia Hansen-Løve handles her subject matter of adolescent love in a way that’s remarkably free of pretense and condescension, even as her youthful characters occasionally make choices that make you want to throttle them. The story is pretty simple: 15-year-old Camille (Lola Créton) and 18-year-old Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky)…
Read the full article »TIFF ’11 Dispatch: So Long, and Thanks for All the Films
This was a pretty fantastic year to be at TIFF. I saw many solid films, a fair number of fair-to-middling films, only one film bad enough to warrant a rare walkout, and even a few that were great. The area around the Lightbox and Scotiabank felt like a real live festival center this year, complete…
Read the full article »Annnnd…. Scene!
It was the easiest, hardest, best, worst, perfectly imperfect TIFF ever… made more so by the fact that I am summing it up days before it even ends. Sony, first through Sony Classics and then through the only studio doing serious TIFF junketting this year, Columbia Pictures, dominated the festival in every way. Clooney and…
Read the full article » 27 Comments »TIFF ’11 Review: Take This Waltz
Take This Waltz completely slayed me. With her 2006 feature film debut, Away from Her, Sarah Polley examined the intricacies of a long-term relationship through a couple married for many decades, who were faced with one of them dealing with early-onset Alzheimer’s. In that film, she explored marriage, infidelity, and commitment with a deeply innate…
Read the full article » 5 Comments »Confessions of a Film Festival Junkie: Day 4
Glitch! Saturday morning’s early morning screening of The Descendents – Alexander Payne’s new film starring George Clooney – at the Toronto International Film Festival got into rather severe technical problems. Those of us standing in line were told at about 20 minute intervals that there was a problem but exactly what problem was kept vague….
Read the full article »TIFF Dispatch #2: Catching Up
It’s been a very busy few days for me here at TIFF, as I’ve been aiming for four-five films a day this year and trying not to be hunched over a keyboard in the 15-20 minutes I have between screenings. So here’s a nice catch-up for you of some of the films I’ve been enjoying…
Read the full article »TIFF ’11 Review: God Bless America
Think of God Bless America, directed by Bobcat Goldthwait, as kind of a mix of Falling Down and Super — but funnier than Falling Down, considerably more accurately satirical than Super, and relentlessly violent in a blackly comedic way, without being meaninglessly so.
Read the full article » 3 Comments »TIFF ’11 Review: A Dangerous Method
David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method stars Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud and Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung in a stagey drama about the professional relationship between two men whose ideas shaped the field of psychoanalysis, and their relationship with Sabine Spielrein (Keira Knightley), Jung’s patient-turned-protegee, who went on to become a psychoanalyst in her own…
Read the full article » 2 Comments »Confessions of a Film Festival Junkie: Toronto 2011 – Day II
Historically the festival has an almost unerring capacity for choosing the wrong opening night picture. This year was no exception with its selection of the U2 profile From the Sky Down. More rumination than concert film, it focuses on the group’s preparation for the 2011 Glastonbury festival, one of England’s most beloved musical events. They decide to revisit their seminal album Achtung Baby, recorded 20 years earlier in Berlin.
Read the full article »TIFF ’11 Review: Pina
One of my favorite films of this year’s TIFF so far is Wim Wenders terrific 3-D documentary, Pina, a visually evocative, stunningly lovely tribute to legendary German choreographer Pina Bausch. If you are inclined to enjoy the language of dance, and you like to see terrific, creative choreography that utilizes all the subtleties of movement…
Read the full article »TIFF ’11 Dispatch #1: Can You Say Party? I Knew You Could.
Another year, another Toronto International Film Festival. It doesn’t feel like a whole year since the last TIFF, but here we are, back in the land of ketchup chips and butter tarts, churning through four-five movies a day. The fest has a different feel to it this year, with most everything officially moved down to…
Read the full article »CONFESSIONS OF FILM FESTIVAL JUNKIE: Toronto 2011
There are some festivals that pivot abruptly from being a film geek favorite to an industry whistle stop. Historians cite the 1989 screening of sex, lies, and videotape as just such a turning point for Sundance. It wasn’t simply a rabid audience response (it was crowned their favorite but failed to nab the jury award)…
Read the full article » 1 Comment »TIFF ’11 Preview: Real to Reel
There are 26 films in the Real to Reel section of TIFF this year, of which I’ll be able to catch maybe five or six. As always, it’s hard to tell by the catalog descriptions which films you’re going to love and which you aren’t; in 2009, I wouldn’t have necessarily had The Topp Twins…
Read the full article »Two Doc Reviews – Crazy Horse & Paul Williams Still Alive
One is classic documentary form… no voice over… no director in the movie… beautifully shot and edited reality about an interesting subject. The premise of the other is that the director thought a star he once loved was dead and found out otherwise.
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