Chloe

There are many ways to approach Atom Egoyan’s new film, Chloe. You could compare it to Anne Fontaine’s Nathalie…. You could discuss the genre elements and how they have been rolled out in other movies. You could obsess on the sex and nudity.
But you’d be missing the movie that’s in front of you.
Erin Cressida Wilson took the original screenplay’s premises and flipped them significantly. She adjusted the meaning. She made text out of what is permanently subtext in much of French cinema. And then she turned the third act into a thriller, but softened the conventions like pancake softens creases in a face. Then Atom Egoyan brought his sensibility to it. And he made the most easily accessible film of his career while still maintaining the integrity of obscurity.
The story of a woman who has lost her connection with her husband, decides that he is having an affair, and hires a prostitute to get her the proof. It gets rather complicated from there.
Julianne Moore is the smart, sexy, professional wife. Liam Neeson is the object. Amanda Seyfried is The Prostitute, Chloe. Who is the victim? Who is in charge? Whose sex defines relationships? What do we really want? These are the questions throughout the film.
I quite like Nathalie…. But Chloe is, indeed, a different animal, albeit familiar in a variety of ways. Fontaine explores female power, but Wilson starts with 2 powerful women who have become so used to the power they have that they linger on the power they do not. It’s a layered piece. One wonders which layer will be used to sell the film. I would say that it is less of a specialty piece than Secretary, but similarly for adults who want to be challenged and, perhaps, get a little aroused. Passion and brains and the interference of one over the other is always interesting and is my kind of fun.

Whip It Good

What’s been the biggest surprise of TIFF ’09 for me? Aside from the false impression by some of the media about there being an inch of Oscar movement here this year or the horror show on the sales side in which films will eventually sold… for 20 cents on the expected dollar?
Drew Barrymore not only can handle the director’s chair, but she has, in her first film, delivered the same kind of charm that made her a major movie star through the Wedding Singer to 50 First Dates period… or more specifically, the Fox movies, like Ever After and Never Been Kissed. She is a very likable spirit. (So much so that she shouted herself hoarse at her premiere party on Sunday night and had to drop out of all press on Monday.)
The film, written for the screen by the author of the book on which the film is bases (who is also in the film), embraces the true modern feminism of now, not asking for permission, but simply moving forward, regardless of age, race, height, weight, dress size or any of the myriad other issues that keep people judging others.
Is it perfection? No. But it is a warm, funny, kind, smart, loving movie that girls, grrrrrls, women, and womyn will really enjoy. It is entertainment with ambition. And how does one say, “no” to that? (it’s a rhetorical question… one doesn’t.)
Ellen Page takes her next step, unencumbered by belly, cutting violence, or overly snappy dialogue. But Barrymore and screenwriter Shauna Cross spread the wealth around to veterans like Daniel Stern, Marcia Gay Harden (both pretty and shrewish), and Juliette Lewis, as well as newcomers like Kristin Wiig and the sparkly Alia Shawkat.
You can pick it apart if you really want to, but the spirit is stronger than each narrow detail. If you have a girl under 18 in your home, you will become intimately familiar with this film, as will your DVD player. Just give in and enjoy it. You’ve been whip-it-ed.

DP/30 Sneak Peek – TIFF '09 – A Serious Man

A snippet of a chat with the title character – Michael Stuhlbarg – and his two co-stars – Richard Kind and Sari Lennick – from the new Coen Bros picture, A Serious Man.

BYOB For A New TIFFy Week

DP/30 Sneak Peek – TIFF '09 – Harry Brown

Sir Michael Caine and Emily Mortimer talk about the TIFF premiere film, Harry Brown.

DP/30 Sneak Peek – TIFF '09 – Terry Gilliam

DP/30 TIFF '09 Sneak Peek – An Education's Mulligan and Sarsgaard

Parnasssus Not For Scaredy Cats

The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus is a movie starring Christopher Plummer as the doctor of the title, who is a former monk who chanted the story of man – stories must be told for mankind to keep going – until he and his fellow monks were silenced by the devil (Tom Waits) and they continue in a immortal battle to see what mankind is really made of.
If this makes you gag, you probably aren’t a Gilliamphile and you probably need to see this movie.
It is not the very best Gilliam ever, but it does play like a kind of greatest hits combined with more innovation from a master filmmaker. The big thing here is CG matching Gilliam’s sizable imagination more powerfully than ever. Of course, his love of theatrical ideas – literally, from the theater – is incorporated even there as 2 dimensional flats appear… by the scores.
The rich stew of Gilliam and Charles McKeown’s imaginations along with simple moral ideas that are always being flipped by the quirks of human nature makes this film a 2 or 3 view picture to start. I can’t argue that it is not, at least for America, an art film. But it is a treasure.

Caine Kills @ TIFF

It isn’t the best made movie ever. It is often profoundly derivitive. But it is the first distributor-free mortal lock for a sale out of TIFF this year of which I am concious.
There are plenty of really good movies and there will be plenty of sales (don’t ask how much… it’s impolite), but Harry Brown aka Brown Harry aka The Movie Paul Schrader Should Have Made Years Ago is not quite as much overt fun as Get Off Of Clint’s Lawn, but mate, it’s Sir Michael Caine pushed over the edge and going all Oldman-sequence-in-True-Romance on some young ass. It ain’t $100 million, but Screen Gems or Lionsgate should be able to push it out to at least the 30s domestically.
This first time director doesn’t show a lot of first-timers disease. He likes movies and we now know what movies he likes. We get a good performance by Emily Mortimer, though an earnest one. And some of the twists could have been more twisted (see: Perrier’s Bounty).
But the story here is the Caine Mulatiny. Women twisted their necks not to look, noises were made by the audience, and breath was held.

Life Is Funny

TIFF ’09 has not gone exactly according to plan for MCN. Our Len Klady, a LA resident who grew up here in Toronto, had a major loss in his family a couple of days before the fest and will miss most, if not all of the festival. You will recall that he has written daily from the festival for us for years. And at her first TIFF for MCN after years attending for others, Kim Voynar was hospitalized here in TO with a debilitating, but apparently not ongoingly dangerous condition. We hope she will be up and around by Monday or Tuesday.
This leaves me… and I am on the DP/30 mission.
We love covering TIFF and brought a big blanket this year. But life is funny… and the movies, like our staff, will go on either way. Just a bit more slowly…
Thanks for understanding and enjoy the many outlets that are covering the fest this year. There is plenty to chew on.

DP/30 TIFF '09 Sneak Peek – Soderbergh on The Informant!

Also in this clip, Soderbergh on his next project. The full DP/30 will be up soon…

DP/30 TIFF '09 Sneak Peek – Bright Star director Jane Campion On Women & Directing

Campion is with Ben Whishaw, who plays Keats in Bright Star. He will have more to say in the full DP/30, which should be up shortly after the festival.
(Video changed out for name spell correction)

BYOB Weekend – 911139

TIFF Thursday

As they have now done for a few years, Thursday is now a 2/3 full day of press screenings before the Opening Night Film gets its premiere.
So I saw the ONF, Creation, this afternoon, as well as two Cannes holdovers, Almodovar’s Broken Embraces, and Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank. All in all, a very good day at the movies.
Creation seems to be rather misunderstood already. It’s not really a Charles Darwin biopic or a period piece by its nature (though it is, in fact, period). It is, very surprisingly like the still-controversial Antichrist, a movie about the loss of a child and how the parents deal with it. In this case, however, it just happens to be Darwin, whose work on The Origin of Species was promising to, as one provocateur in the film says, “Kill God.”
Creation is an unfortunate name for the film because it is seems both too simple and obvious. And indeed, it is not the shock machine that Von Trier would make. But it is reasonable to look back at Jon Amiel

Super Movie Friends 5 Sneak Peek – TIFF 2009: The Toronto Media

A bit of the chat with Toronto Reporters/Critics Linda Barnard, Peter Howell, Chris Knight, and Liam Lacey about the Toronto International Film Festival, now & over the years.