Week Of September 18, 2006 - Mon / Wed / Fri

September 20, 2006

A TALE OF TWO TORONTOS

It was the best of fests. It was the worst of fests.

Let's start with the worst.

CITY ONE

The notion that Toronto is the launching pad for the Oscar season took a big hit this year, as there were only losers, not winners. The only new "discoveries" at the festival were Rescue Dawn, which premiered at the festival and whose only remote Oscar prospects are for Christian Bale and/or Steve Zahn as Vietnam prison camp victims who plan an escape. But the film has a giant problem in that selling to MGM means selling to a company with no marketing or publicity department of any size. There have been Oscar movies pushed hard by consultants, but I don't recall any that made it without a serious in-house team executing the moves.

There was also an Oscar worthy documentary that arrived. Tony Kaye's Lake of Fire is a landmark. But as far as I know, it is not Oscar qualified. And with a September 1 date for qualifying in that category, we'll have to wait until next year to see what comes of this remarkable film that delivers perspective on the abortion debate worthy (though not quite widely enough to be equal to) Claude Lanzmann's Shoah.

The Prisoner: Or How I Planned To Kill Tony Blair not only got a strong reception as the best of the political docs at the fest, but in the process also got another 30 minutes of film, as a guard for Abu Ghraib turned up just before the festival, came to Toronto and did Q&As, and is now about to shoot an extension of the film. The rights to the whole thing were bought up by NetFlix, which continues to push to be a significant part of the pre-Home Entertainment distribution model.

Away From Her, from first-time director Sarah Polley, was a buzz film, bought by Lionsgate. But instead of rushing it into a December release to chase a tough-to-get nomination for Julie Christie, they're waiting for next year's race, where they will be disappointed if they think there is anything there other than a potential nomination for Ms. Christie.

Eytan Fox's The Bubble got what seemed to be unanimous praise from those who saw it, so maybe something will come of that.

And Paul Verhoeven's Black Book is a great pulp thriller comedy (in Dutch, German, Hebrew & English) that could be sold to the $20 million mark here in the U.S. with a high camp sell. But no one has stepped up to it yet.

But aside from those six titles, only one of which has any significant commercial upside in the U.S., the festival was unable to launch much of anything. The players that left as players were players before things played out in TIFF playdates.

There were a few bloodied titles, though even the small number of those is kind of disappointing. All The King's Men was stillborn… and there was no way to avoid that outside of recutting (or reshooting) the film.

The Fountain was lined up and shot in an unnecessarily harsh bit of mid-festival-traumatic-stress-syndrome.

But after that, the damage wasn't nasty aggression so much as benign indifference.

Perhaps the oddest victim of this was Babel, Paramount Vantage's film that premiered at Cannes to spectacular reviews and the assumption of a strong Oscar position. It wasn't that the film was poorly received - though more eyeballs, more opinions - but rather that it just didn't cause a ripple. The name of the film was mentioned often, but the press was more interested in Brad Pitt, his outings with Matt Damon, and the wacky photos of him, which ran on almost every newspaper cover in town. And with so many people who cover Toronto having covered Cannes, the film just never got a foothold at the festival. But again, there is some real doubt about whether that will matter as the awards season progresses.

Paramount Vantage also launched The White Planet, a film that was bought by the last regime mid-production with the intention of releasing it this last summer as a follow-up to March of the Penguins. No one panned it. But no one seemed to care about its existence.

Fox's A Good Year was received as okay fluff.

The Weinstein Company's take-away from the Miramax separation, Anthony Minghella's Breaking and Entering, was shown and forgotten.

Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes The Barley won at Cannes, waned at Toronto.

Nanni Moretti, Aki Kaurismaki, Benoit Jacquot, Hal Hartley, and Volker Schlondorff were all promising… all to quiet.

Controversial titles like 2:37, The Book of Revelation, and Death of a President turned out to be better stories before anyone saw them.

Even some happy surprises, like Shane Meadows' This Is England and Tarsem's The Fall filed to catch fire.

The most heat in the entire festival focused on the Midnight Madness section. Good for them. But this is not why we go to Toronto en masse. Borat was bigger than Jesus. (If offended, consult The U.S. vs John Lennon for a sense of humor.) All The Boys Love Mandy Lane is an average kill film with some cute girls and a buy from Dimension. South Korea's brilliant The Host got some nice attention. Black Sheep, which Peter Jackson should get behind and "present" for some company, got a lot of heat before the humor of it scared buyers off. And Severance got a strong reaction form its surprising Telluride slot and arrived with a distributor, Magnolia, in tow.

There was some better news… though not very high profile. That and more on Friday.

E Me.

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