Film Fests Archive for September, 2009

TIFF 2009 Dispatch: Ready, Set, Show

By Kim Voynar - Thursday, September 10th, 2009

I got into Toronto late last night. Getting in after 9PM actually isn’t a bad time to arrive, as I’d seen a lot of Tweets about long customs lines earlier in the day. After 9PM, though, it was pretty dead — and as an added bonus, I actually had a customs officer with a bit of a sense of humor and an interest in film, so once she learned why I was here, she zipped me on through.
Today’s the first day of screenings, and already my schedule is packed. I’m the primary person reviewing films at the fest for MCN, and I’ve been charged with seeing and writing about as many films as humanly possible over the next 8 1/2 or so days before I head back to Seattle and real life. This fest can be brutal — a fellow fest junkie always reminds me that “it’s a marathon, not a sprint,” to which I inevitably reply, “No, it’s a marathon in which you have to spring from start to finish.”
This year, I’ll be covering a different slate of films than I’m used to covering at this fest; my other times here I was expected to cover as many of the “big name” films as possible, and if I was lucky, I could maybe sneak in a few obscure foreigns here and there. This time around, I’ll be covering a lot more of the obscure stuff that I’m not likely to get a chance to see elsewhere — the great little films without distribution (yet).
In my experience, sifting through the lesser-known films like these tends to yield a higher ratio of interesting films, so I’m excited to delve deep into foreign cinema to my heart’s content. I’m figuring I can see and review roughly 32 films in this time frame, of which I expect a small percentage to be bigger films or films that had buzz coming out of Cannes, and most to be films you likely haven’t even heard about. It’s going to be a cinematic adventure, and I hope you enjoy going along for the ride with me.
Today’s slate: Hotel Atlantico, Dogtooth, Vision … and (hopefully I’ll still have the energy for it) City of Life and Death, followed by nibbling some protein while writing until my vision blurs and I’m falling asleep at the keyboard. Tomorrow’s schedule kicks off earlier, so I need to knock off by at least 2AM so I can hopefully squeeze in a full six hours sleep to see me through another busy day.
If you’re here at TIFF, I hope to run into you at a screening, and if you’re not, I hope you enjoy reading about the films and the fest.

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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