Day: September 7, 2013

I’m not complaining about having been invited to five parties tonight. It’s lovely to be asked, and it always feels soothing to greet and be greeted and not drink alcohol, etc. But as I sit on my stool at a Starbucks on Queen and John Streets I guess I am sort of whining about it, whiny little bitch that I am. Four or five parties in the space of four and a half hours will wear you down. But I really want to say hello to all my industry pallies at the Sony Classics party uptown, and then at the Fox Searchlight and IFC Films and Metalhead parties down in this neck of the woods, and finally at the Dallas Buyers Club party which starts at midnight. All hail Matthew McConaughey and especially Jared Leto!

I saw Nicole Holofcener‘s Enough Said a couple of hours ago. It’s another myopic, mild-mannered visit with the denizens of Holofcenerland — upscale, educated, liberal-minded 40- and 50-somethings who live west of the 405. It’s a bittersweet experience due to the presence of the late James Gandolfini, whom I’ve long felt a special kinship with (and whose funeral I attended last June in Manhattan), but otherwise it’s basically about how it’s a bad idea for a divorcee (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss) to go out with an ex-husband (Gandolfini) of a client she’s getting to know (Catherine Keener) because one way or another the ex-wife is going to list every shortcoming of the ex-husband in spades, and that stuff is toxic, a kind of poison, and it’ll kill the relationship pretty quickly if you let it into your head so you shouldn’t. That’s basically what the film is saying.

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It’s 3:35 pm Toronto time, and so far I’ve seen Peter Landesman‘s Parkland, which isn’t anywhere close to being as authentic and grounded as it needs to be (and I’m saying this as a fan of Landeasman’s script) and Jean-Marc Vallee‘s Dallas Buyers Club, which looks to me like a definite maybe among Best Picture contenders. The last third in particular delivers the tragic dimensions and brings home the sadness and humanity. The surprise is that everyone sat down expecting to see a Best Actor-calibre performance from Matthew McConaughey. They got that, but when the lights came up the first words out of everyone’s mouth were “Jared Leto, right?” Leto’s performance as McConaughey’s drag-queen ally and drug-dispensing partner is, trust me, easily and squarely in the Best Supporting Actor race now. And Jennifer Garner really nails it also — her Dallas Buyers Club doctor is probably the best role she’s ever had and the best performance she’s ever given.

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Jason Bateman‘s Bad Words, a tartly ascerbic spelling-bee comedy aimed at the diminishing ranks of non-moronic moviegoers, went over extremely well at the Ryerson last night. It’s a kind of Rushmore-meets-Bad Santa piece about a pissed-off, close-cropped 40something guy (Bateman) who takes advantage of a loophole to compete against kids in the National Quill Spelling Bee competition, and in so doing bonds/warms up to/gets down with a reporter (Kathryn Hahn) and a 10 year-old Indian kid (Rohan Chand) as he seeks a kind of satisfaction that has nothing to do with winning the $50,000 first prize. Dry, subdued, bordering-on-perverse performances + Andrew Dodge‘s witty-ass, occasionally scatalogical screenplay resulted in much laughter with some in the audience wondering if the film goes “too far,” as one questioner inquired. Trust me, the “too far” stuff is one of the main reasons the film went over so well.

At Toronto’s Ryerson theatre last night following screening of Bad Words (l. ro r.) director-star Jason Bateman, costars Rohan Chand, Kathryn Hand.

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