Final Toronto Picks

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So much for my dream that Oliver Stone's W, Jim Sheridan's Brothers, Gerald McMorrow's Franklyn and Beeban Kidron's Hippie Hippie Shake might play the 2008 Toronto Film Festival.

George Clooney, Frances McDormand in Burn After Reading

None of 'em made this morning's final list which means the first two weren't submitted and that issues of one sort or another are afflicting the second two, since both are expected to open in England later this year. I don't mind saying I'm damn disappointed.

Especially about the W no-show. The 10.17 opening, just over a month after the close of TIFF, would make the festival an ideal launch site by giving the film its first big blast of attention. But it only wrapped in July so this morning's absence presumably means it's not quite in "ship-ship-shape!," as Tony Curtis's Jerry once said in Some Like It Hot.

The seven new world premiere galas include Joel and Ethan Coen's Burn After Reading (the script tells you it's a can't-miss comedy in a dry slapstick vein), Rod Lurie's Nothing But The Truth (which I reviewed last night); Gavin O'Connor's Pride and Glory, the top-tier crime drama with Ed Norton and Colin Farrell that WB honcho Alan Horn is reportedly willing to dump for the right price; and Neil Burger's The Lucky Ones, a stateside Iraq War vet drama costarring Rachel McAdams, Tim Robbins and Michael Pena that Lionsgate has delayed the release of over concerns about the failure of other Iraq War dramas.

Michael Pena, Rachel McAdams and Tuim Robbins in The Lucky Ones

Rear-guard galas will include Dean Spanley starring Peter O'Toole; Jodie Markell's The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, from a rediscovered Tennessee Williams screenplay (title sounds way too precious); Caroline Link's A Year Ago in Winter, Jerry Zaks' Who Do You Love with Alessandro Nivola; Anne Fontaine's La Fille de Monaco, Jean Francois Richet's Public Enemy No. 1 with Vincent Cassel as legendary gangster Jacques Mesrine, and Singh Is Kinng, a romantic comedy (forget it!) from director Anees Bazmee.

The Masters program will show Paul Schrader's Adam Resurrected, about a charismatic patient in a mental institution for Holocaust survivors with Jeff Goldblum and Willem Dafoe. (Does anyone expect Schrader to even hit a strong double these days? I wish it weren't true, but with each succeeding effort the Schrader balloon seems to leak more and more air.) The festival will also preem Werner Schroeter's Nuit de chien.

What fresh insights, I'm asking myself, can possibly come from Adria Petty's Paris, Not France, an "examination of the Paris Hilton phenomenon" that's "modeled after 1960s pic Darling"? Does the latter statement mean it was shot in black and white? Or that it reveals the presence in Hilton's life of an older British lover who resembles Dirk Bogarde?

Bulked-up Vincent Cassel in Jean Francois Richet's Public Enemy No. 1

Special Presentations includes the work-in-progress omnibus New York, I Love You, composed of 12 shorts directed by Brett Ratner, Allen Hughes, Shekhar Kapur, Joshua Marston, Mira Nair, Fatih Akin, Scarlett Johansson, Ivan Attal, Natalie Portman, Shunji Iawi, Jiang Wen and Andrei Zvyagintsev.

25 titles were added to the Contemporary World cinema lineup, including Nigel Cole's$5 a Day with Christopher Walken, John Stockwell's Middle of Nowhere with Susan Sarandon and Anton Yelchin; Ole Christian Madsen's Flame & Citron (a sort-of Dogma movie, apparently) and Olivier Assayas' L'Heure d'ete.