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September 8, 2005
The Luc Besson-produced Banlieue 13 kicks off the Toronto film festival oday, at Friday's midnight movie screening for press and industry at 9am. And if any of the industry is smart, they'll pick this one up in a hurry. It may not be Hero, but this French-language action flick, directed by Pierre Morel, is not demanding in the subtitle department and goes, goes, goes for its 85 minutes.
The hype machine is already gearing up to overstate the events of the festival this year. My sense of it that there are a lot of good films, but the Crash moment seems as unlikely as it did going into last year... which means that we are all left guessing.
The biggest reality is that the entire indie world is changing dramatically and there simply isn't the amount of quality product in that marketplace that there was a few years ago. The overhyped slump of 2005 is mostly on the doorstep of indiefilm, which has had - with the exception of Miramax dumping - releasing a lot less product into the market with a lot less enthusiasm. More and more, the film business is like the TV business, where trends rule each year in a shockingly reactive way. It has always been easy to say, "If a comic book movie works this year, everyone will have a comic book movie next summer." That is true, but the infection is expanding across the distribution world.
Perhaps the most troubling problem of the moment is a sharp case of Searchlight-itis, in which every studio now thinks they can come up with the next great Fox Searchlight year, if only they make the right calls. As this year is showing, it's not a great business model... even for Searchlight, which has basically moved its whole year into fourth quarter or thereabouts. Likewise, Lions Gate, which is stuck between being a "real studio" and a "true indie" is capable of greatness, but cannot sustain the intensity as long as it is stuck betwixt and between. Like DreamWorks, all is well when you are winning, but you need a very strong base (Lions Gate has its library for that) when things go sour, even for one or two pictures. But beyond being able to sustain a business, a studio marketing machine is really hard to rev up and down over and over and very few have ever been capable of becoming really strong at releasing a wide array of kinds of movies.
The irony is that everyone last year in Toronto said that Crash was "a Lions Gate movie." And you know what? They were exactly right. Had anyone else released it, it may well have been lost in the sauce.
So here we are, ready for more aspirations, many of which will be dashed.
There will be big premieres that are here to cheaply get the world press in one place at one time. There will be lots of junkets... a phenom so pervasive that the festival pass warns that the pass will not get you into studio junkets unless the studios invite you. And there will be lots of talk of Oscars for movies that really have no chance.
And now, I have to run off to see my first film... I saw Banlieue 13 a few months ago... I'll be starting with Imagine Me & You, Fox Searchlight's recent pick-up. And the world keeps spinning...
