Year: 2011

I’ve been saying to journalist pals that “if you don’t put your foot down and show some discipline in the face of all the Toronto Film Festival temptations” — junket interviews, dinners, parties, panels, lunches, pretty girls — “you can easily fill your days without seeing any films.” And they’ve all agreed to a man/woman…of course, easily!

I have my five or six stories per day quota to fill plus my usual evening social-political shenanigans (i.e., a couple of parties per night or a dinner and a party), and with that daily load I’ve been fitting in only two and 1/2 films per day. I used to be able to fit in at least three.

Earlier today I saw Sarah Polley‘s Take This Waltz (at 9:30 am) and Whit Stillman‘s Damsels in Distress (at 12:30 pm). I then retired to a Starbucks to bang out some stories before catching The Oranges at 4:30 or whenever. But I couldn’t get going right away and piddled around and eventually decided to blow off The Oranges. It’s now 5:05 pm and I have the Albert Nobbs dinner from 6 pm to 8:30 pm. I’ll try to post the Waltz/Damsel reviews later tonight. Maybe. No, definitely…if I’m not too whipped. I can work solid for about 12 hours but then I need to eat, drink and recharge.

I haven’t seen Nick Broomfield‘s Sarah Palin, You Betcha! or Roland Emmerich ‘s Anonymous or Fernando Meirelles‘ 360 or Michael Winterbottom‘s Trishna. Four full viewing days left after tonight, and then back to NYC.

I saw The Raid yesterday afternoon and it was a total bum steer — a murky, grainy, blue-tinted bullshit Asian shoot-em-up macho chopsocky cheese-whiz movie. Me to critic friend: “Why would you, a bright sophisticated film guy, recommend this thing to me? Why?” Critic friend to me: “Because the action is crazy.” I hate hate HATE Asian action films. Whump….hah! Whuh-pah! Whoof-hoof-whunh! Choppy-kick, slap, thunk, chest punch, neck punch, groin punch, finger-snap….whuh! Whah! Hahh!

You don’t beat this festival. It beats you, every time.

Jonathan Levine‘s 50/50 (Summit, 9.30) is an exceptionally honest, no-punches-pulled, very honorably acted adult drama about a young guy (Joseph Gordon Levitt) grappling with The Big C. It’s seasoned with occasional laughs, for sure, but there’s no way this is a light mood comedy, as the 50/50 trailers have implied. And I mean that with the utmost respect.

Based on screenwriter Will Reiser‘s brush with cancer a few years ago, 50/50 is about an

obviously “difficult” subject, markeing-wise. A significant portion of the public (i.e., people over 40 or 45 or 50 who think of films solely as recreational entertainments that are going to make them feel good and giddy in the same way that a Quaalude or a tab of Ecstasy is going to make them feel that way) is going to presume that this will be a downish, difficult or unpleasant thing to sit through and avoid it like the plague.

A bright, fairly-with-it 40ish woman with whom I discussed 50/50 a couple of weeks ago was instantly repelled, I could tell.

The irony is that 50/50 is a straight-dealing, occasionally amusing drama about real human beings dealing with a real-deal issue — the kind of movie that I live for. Cheers to Levine and Reiser for making something very unusual and in fact exceptional. The writing is true and honest and clear. And Levine’s hand is straight and to the point and unfettered and not in the least pretentious. He serves the material well, as any good director should.

Levitt, Seth Rogen, Anna Kendrick, Bryce Dallas Howard, Anjelica Huston, Phillip Baker Hall and Matt Frewer — every last performer (including the guy who plays the doctor who delivers the bad news) delivers like a champ.

This is obviously Joseph Gordon Levitt’s most complete and wholehearted performance since 500 Days of Summer. I’ll never forgive Rogen for The Green Hornet but what a relief to see him in a really good film again. Howard’s unsympathetic character is well written and totally believable — not an admirable person, but that’s what a lot of people are like (i.e., scared of cancer, unable to cope in a supportive way). Kendrick gives her best performance ever, I feel. Huston’s best acting since…what, Prizzi’s Honor? The Grifters? (Her role isn’t big enough to really be compared to her ’80s work, but you know what I mean.)

The ending doesn’t tell you everything’s totally okay again, but it feels positive and right and optimistic, given what’s happened and given that Levitt’s hair has begun to grow back, and that’s how it should be.

The theme, I think, is something along the lines of “when the chips are down, you’ll find out who people really are.” There’s a line is Undefeated, the football doc that I saw a month ago, about how “football doesn’t build character, it reveals character.” That’s clearly what cancer does also, if this film is any kind of honest representation of what the experience is like, and I believe it almost certainly is that.

But is it a kind of “comedy”, as the press notes say and the trailers have more or less suggested? Despite Rogen’s best efforts (and they are considerable and highly appealing) and despite the very welcome humor that pops through when it needs to or ought to if the film is going to be at all natural and real, the answer is an emphatic NO. The answer to the Summit marketers is, due respect, “bless your hearts and souls but take the needle out of your arm.”

All mature art is mixture of drama and comedy. Any film that insists on being a drama-drama or a comedy-comedy doesn’t get this. Life is always a mixture of the two, so naturally 50/50 is flecked or flavored with guy and gallows humor here and there plus one or two anxious-mom jokes and/or chemo jokes and/or jokes about being in denial,etc., but there’s no way in hell anyone could honestly call it a “funny” movie, or a “comedic” or even half-comedic one, really.

The most you could say is that it’s amusingly jaunty at times. It’s good humored and good natured when the material calls for that…when it feels right and true. And any critic who knows quality-level filmmaking when he/she sees it is going to recognize that humor is definitely a part of the package, definitely an element. But the Summit marketers are in a major denial mode if they think they can get away with calling this a kind of comedy. They should put a lid on that here and now…just put it to bed.

Asked by TIFF co-director Cameron Bailey about his tendency to make movies about flawed characters facing tough times, The Descendants director Alexander Payne bristled and snapped, “I don’t mean to pick on you, but what movie doesn’t have characters who are flawed and are facing tough times in their lives? I’m sorry, but I was asked the same question at the press conference this afternoon, and I don’t get it.” — reported last night by TheWrap‘s Steve Pond.

Come to think of it, even if a character isn’t flawed — even if he’s Mr. Perfect — Jesus Christ, for example — all dramas are about struggles, woes and facing tough times. So whaddaya whaddaya, Bailey?

Unlike most I don’t immediately default to Charly when I think of Cliff Robertson, who died yesterday at age 88. I think instead of his performance as Higgins, the cynical CIA official in Three Days of the Condor (’75). Or his hammer-like performance as Joe Cantwell, the sanctimonious, Richard Nixon-esque presidential candidate in The Best Man (’64).

Charly is an agreeable, sweetly touching drama, and Robertson played a mentally challenged man with care and sensitivity. But gentle sentiment never ages well. For me something more interesting came out when Robertson played shits.

Christopher Plummer‘s beguiling performance in Mike Mills‘ Beginners (i.e., a 70ish dad who decides to come out and live his waning years as a gay man) has looked like a strong contender for Best Supporting Actor Oscar all along. But after seeing Plummer charm and electrify and ham it up and speechify in gloriously boozy Shakespearean fashion in Barrymore, which I saw a couple of hours ago at the Bell Lightbox, I’m all but convinced he has the Oscar in the bag.

Christopher Plummer during a post-screening interview with director Atom Egoyan following this afternoon’s screening of Barrymore.

As long as the Academy sees this low-budgeted Canadian film, that is. Once they all see it, the game will be pretty much over. Because Plummer isn’t just portraying the late John Barrymore, and is so doing reanimating all the flamboyance and lamentations and exaltations of a once-great actor’s career in his last year of life, he’s also playing, in a sense, himself. There are, after all, certain parallels.

Add this performance to Beginners plus Plummer’s turn in David Fincher‘s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, and he’s going to be awfully heard to beat.

Barrymore basically captures (and visually enhances to some extent) the stage show that Plummer performed in New York and Stratford in the mid ’90s, and lately performed again in Toronto earlier this year.

Consider this excerpt from Ben Brantley‘s N.Y. Times review of the stage show, called “A Dazzler of a Drink, Full of Gab and Grief“:

“The standup breakdown has become a reigning form in the theater of dead celebrities in recent years. Whether the focus is Truman Capote or Maria Callas, it allows its subjects to spin off witty anecdotes about glamorous lives while occasionally erupting into tormented cries showing the crippled soul beneath the tinsel. It’s like being seated next to a chatty trophy star at a dinner party with conveniently reduced potential for embarrassment.

”Barrymore is definitely part of this somewhat shameless tradition. And the actor in his waning years, a pathological specimen of self-parody, would seem to be an especially shameless subject. But under the assured, appropriately theatrical direction of Gene Saks, Mr. Plummer emerges as far more than the ”clown prince,” as Barrymore here describes himself with sour disgust, of America’s royal family of actors.

“What he achieves instead is the sense of a man whose vertiginous highs and lows were born of the same knot of impulses: a toxic mix of arrogance, insecurity, raw terror, the attention span of a 2-year-old and an insatiable appetite for the pleasures of the flesh. Mr. Luce, to his credit, has not given Barrymore a moment of revelation in which he untangles these elements. And Mr. Plummer seems to live intimately with all of them at once.”

The sidewalk sunlight was hell — I felt like Lawrence of Arabia‘s Gasim baking in the Nefud desert — as I stood for 90 minutes on King Street yesterday. I was a rush line to get into a public screening of Barrymore. I was sweating and melting, and I was beginning to smell like a gym towel on top of that. I will never again suffer like this in order to get into a TIFF public screening.

The Sony buffet for junket whores journalists (myself included) doing Moneyball and The Ides of March interviews, taken yesterday morning inside the Ritz Carlton 2nd-floor lobby.

Posted/tweeted today around 6:30 pm Eastern by Moneyball costar Jonah Hill. These guys have real chemistry in Bennett Miller’s film. it’s not bromance chemistry but a kind of yin-yang thing — Pitt gets into Hill’s face, asks him a blunt question, Hill hesitates and gives him the answer Pitt wants to hear. They do this over and over. It’s great.

Moneyball costars Jonah Hill, Brad Pitt — shot either today or yesterday inside Toronto’s Ritz Carlton.

If my Bennett Miller interview comes off on schedule (i.e., five minutes from now), I’ll be able to catch a 12:15 pm screening of Gareth Huw Evans and Iko Uwais‘ The Raid, which had its Toronto Film festival debut on Thursday night. A Twitchfilm post called it “a bad-ass fusion of Die Hard and Assault On Precinct 13 with a body count that would make John Woo blush as the bullets, blades, sticks, elbows and feet get flying early and never let up.”

A tip of the hat to Fox Searchlight for acquiring Steve McQueen‘s NC-17 Shame. As I more or less said in my Telluride review, it’s hard to like Shame as you’re watching it (because it’s so friggin’ bleak) but it’s all but impossible to not think about it, a lot, after it’s over. It might become a modest commercial hit (maybe0, but the Academy blue-hairs are going to blow this movie off so fast your head will spin. Nonetheless, any distributor that puts cash on the barrelhead for a bona fide art film has my admiration.

Another quote from my Telluride Shame review: “This is what an art film does — it just stands its ground and refuses to do anything you might want it to do.”

At last night’s Ides of March party Phillip Seymour Hoffman — a.k.a. “Philly” — insisted that Paul Thomas Anderson‘s The Master, which he just finished filming, is “not a Scientology film.” But I’ve read an early draft and it seems to be about a Scientology-like cult, i said to him. And I’ve read about the parallels. “I don’t know what you’ve heard and what script you’ve read,” Hoffman replied. “Trust me, it’s not about Scientology.”

Maybe not specifically or literally, but there are just too many proofs and indications that The Master (or whatever it’s eventually going to be called) is at least about a cult with a charismatic L. Ron Hubbard-type leader that could be seen as a metaphor for Scientology. At least that. Read this February 2010 Playlist analysis and tell me it’s not that. And that Hoffman’s denial isn’t perhaps a little too definitive.