SUPER DUPER EXCLUSIVE-OOPER

Auditions for the Wonder Woman movie have hit full stride… here is a shot of a very powerful blogger (who cannot be named for legal reasons) who took some time off of her blog to get a costume together and perform for Joel Silver… and if he doesn’t hire her, she’s going to make his life hell!!!

Space… The Final Place To Argue

Discussions are breaking out in other entries… so here is a place for random internal discussions…
As always, try to be civil.

Waste Not, Want Not

The good folks at USA Today asked me and a bunch of other folks for their take on what is what at TIFF this season. A group piece ran on Monday, but the Friday piece didn’t run, so I decided to run what I sent in here.
A fest round-up is due on Friday for publication Monday… interesting how the focus shifts…
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Sunday AM Edition
The two surprise hits of the festival so far are Jason Reitman’s Juno and Anton Corbijn’s Control, both of which came to the festival with distribution. Both are films about young people, one who appears to be out of control, but who is pretty much on top of it and the other about someone who people thought had it all together, but melted down and before his 24th birthday. The new star of Juno is writer Diablo Cody, while the talk of Control is both the director, best know for his videos, and his young star, Sam Riley.
On the Oscar scene, things have been muted so far. Elizabeth: The Golden Years launches Sunday night. The impact of No Country For Old Men has been a bit muffled by the fact that it was already raved in Cannes. Atonement, which also launches Sunday, is under pressure after not winning in Venice, but if it does well here, that will become irrelevant.
The awards buzz on Eastern Promises has been overwhelmed by discussion of the nudity of Viggo Mortensen in the film.
Wed Edition
The buzz films in the middle of the festival have been two more sexually themed films, Craig Gillespie’s Lars and the Real Girl and Alan Ball’s Nothing Is Private. The first threatens to be perverse, but turns out to have a gentle heart of gold. The second turns out to take perversion to a new level for two acts before turning into a more complex piece. However, since Nothing Is Private is, whatever you ultimately think about the content, about sex and a thirteen year old girl, it has already become the sexual Fight Club of the festival and probably the year… it is so disturbing in its obsessive interest in bodily fluids and men completely comfortable with making sexual advances on a 13 year old, that Ball’s trees will be lost in the forest of horror, even amongst those who would have a real interest in the ideas he is chasing.
The big news in that area is the muted to outright hostile reaction to Elizabeth: The Golden Age. The negativity is not unanimous. But it is no minor distraction either. Plenty are projecting crafts nominations for the film’s sumptuous costume and production design. And hiding behind Cate Blanchett’s nomination coattails is not a dangerous position to take.
Atonement is playing well, though the bloat of its third act is making some wonder whether it really deserves the kind of awards expectations that were standard for Merchant/Ivory for years. This team also had a Pride & Prejudice bandwagon, which did well, but not as well as Best Picture.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly didn’t go Gala, but it is playing like gangbusters here, as it did in Telluride.
Roger Spottiswoode’s Shake Hands With The Devil would be a hot awards title if it were not coming on the heels, as all Rwanda movies now do, of Hotel Rwanda. It is a significantly better film, but Hollywood has moved on to other atrocities.
And Sidney Lumet’s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead has been drawing raves from critics who attended advanced screenings and has the promise of a legendary director taking his last big lap around the awards track. (Don’t tell Lumet… he’ll start telling you about the next film he’s making.) The film arrives Wednesday and so, those who are left after the Rosh Hashanah clear-out, will know more next time.

20 Weeks – That Took A Long Time!!!

I can’t believe it took until today for someone to notice that Sean Penn’s Into The Wild didn’t end up on the Oscar charts last week.
It is NOTHING but an stupid oversight… and frankly, I have no idea how I managed it. My first reaction when I read a commented on this blog to that end was to assume they were missing something. But it was I.
As I have otherwise written, a real believer that the film is not only in the race, but has a significant chance to make it into the Final Five.
My apologies to you and to all at Vantage. The corrected chart is now up.

Can Lars & The Real Girl Be This Year

I saw just under an hour of Lars & The Real Girl a few days ago, having to run out to see another film whose last TIFF screening I had to catch while here. The film was charming and odd and unexpected

The Should Be Retitled Sidney Lumet Project

It

Watching The Watchers: TIFF 07

5

That

Watching Toronto Too

Quell Savage

Lionsgate, subtle as a NC-17, invites folks to take home Jessica Alba dripping cream

The great Pages bookstore on Queen

The Sony Classics Wonder Twins after launching 7 films in the first four days of the fest

Looking At Toronto

Li’l Kristen Stewart & The Black Clothes Battalion

The Argento Family

Waiting For Celebs At The Intercontinental

Power Publicists Pound Their Way Through

Two Major Heads

Ryan Gosling Heads Off Into The Sunset

Rough Night At The Working Title Corral

It’s late, but I’ll throw these two logs on the fire before trying to get some sleep before a 9a screening…
We finally got the first real shock of the 2007 Toronto Film Festival today. Elizabeth: The Golden Age is tarnished on an epic level.
I

Sunday Estimates by Klady – Sept 9

The Trouble With Festivals

I got sucked into a vortex of my own creation yesterday and managed to go an entire day at a festival without seeing a single film. And I whined about it all day.
The thing about these festivals is that there are multiple tracks. If you are on the interview track, you see movies in order to do your interviews and because you are a slave to the whims of the ever-changing schedules of talent, the price is not only the specific time involved in getting to the interview, waiting, doing the interview, and getting out of there, but then trying to deal with the unmoving schedule of the films you want to see.
If you are on the movie track, you just go see movies and Toronto allows about 5 a day, though in the past, a more flexible schedule of press screenings allowed more.
Some are on the movie and a party schedule, which means about three movies during the day and then parties all night, from 6p-2a, which is very doable in this first weekend in Toronto.
I have long been in the Movie Monk camp, putting my head down, nodding to the talent, but selecting only a few people who I really, really want to talk with about their films, and prioritizing movies, movies, movies. Yesterday, three Lunch With David segments ate the day and then one of my happy annual concessions to sitting down and breathing, the Sony Classics’ dinner, turned into a charming by bloated 3.5 hour schmoozefest. This was followed by stops at Fox Searchlight’s 5 hour cocktail and AFI’s 4 hour disco marathon. And this meant skipping events I would have liked to have attended – as I had already decided to do parties for a night – including The Weinstein Co’s event, a Miramax dinner, and another 4 or 5 socials being held.
Crazy.
I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy what we did yesterday, a breakfast interview with The Argentos, lunch with Michael Clayton writer/director Tony Gilroy, and a late day coffee with Neil Jordan. I love having the opportunity to chat in some depth with people this talented and whose work I so often admire. And I am really excited about being able to share the conversation, as best as I can, with people who are similarly inclined. (The experience around the actual interviews can be even more compelling.) But I am really ticked to have missed Eastern Promises, even though I will see it in L.A. or maybe here at some other screening. And today, even with just one scheduled interview, I will have to fight to see three films.
It’s silly for me to even think of complaining. It’s just another odd reminder that everything is a choice… give and take… boundaries in the best of circumstances… and in my tenth year at this festival, learning new tricks year after year after year…

24 Weeks To Oscar

The Oscar season has started, not with a bang, but with a whimper.
It’s not that there aren’t a lot of terrific movies out there. It’s just that there is nothing either screening at festivals now or in the near future that suggests that any movie is a lock for a Best Picture nomination.
You can make arguments on either side of almost every contending movie.
The Rest…
The Charts…

Friday Estimates by Klady – 9/7