I haven’t read anything or spoken to anyone about Laurent Cantet’s Vers le sud, which will show at the Toronto Film Festival. But the following description of it (provided by TIFF director Piers Handling) in Peter Howell’s insider-forecast piece (“The Buzz Stops Here””) in the 9.3 Toronto Star strikes me as odd. “I loved Cantet’s last film, Time-Out,” Handling explains, “and this take on three middle-aged (North American) women in Haiti looking for sex and companionship from the islanders is bound to be smart, intelligent and well-acted.” Hold on…middle-aged North American women looking for sex in with Haitian islanders?

Oh, yeah…Howell contacted me for the same piece, and here’s what I said about three eagerly awaited Toronto Film Festival selections (among many others): (1) Elizabethtown, directed and written by Cameron Crowe: “I’ve read the script so I know what it more or less is, and unless Crowe is suffering from a drug-dependency problem or has somehow lost his ability to direct movies as skilfully as he has before, it’s simply going to be one the festival’s best.’ (2) Bubble, directed by Steven Soderbergh: “Sooner or later Soderbergh is going to pull himself out of his slump, and he’s always better when he’s working small and quirky so maybe this’ll do it for the poor guy. If he flubs it again, the next film will be the Che movie, I guess, with Benicio del Toro.” (3) Romance and Cigarettes, directed by John Turturro: “Anything that risks ridicule gets my vote, and any time you have actors like James Gandolfini, Kate Winslet, Steve Buscemi et al singing or lip-synching or whatever, you’re definitely risking or at least flirting with ridicule.”