I’ve been doing the Toronto Film Festival for seven days straight now (counting the travel day a week ago Wednesday, which was moderately stressful and certainly long), and I’m figuring it’s time for a little chill-down and a chance to summarize some films I haven’t yet gotten around to. I’m planning on seeing Cyrus Nowrasteh‘s The Stoning of Soraya M. at 4:30, Vincent Amorim‘s Good at 6 pm, Dan Stone‘s At The Edge of the World at 7:15 and finally a public screening of Barbet Schroder‘s Inju at 9 pm.
Only during a film festival of this magnitude would writing for six hours and then seeing four films be considered a chill-down day.

I’ll never forget the thoughts and feelings that were coursing through my system seven years ago today, starting a little after 9:30 am as I stood inside Bay Bloor Radio, located in the basement of Toronto’s Manulife Center, and watched the unfolding horror on big-screen projection.

I’ll also never forget my astonished reaction on Wednesday, 9.12, to the decision of Rod Armstrong, my Reel.com editor at the time (and now a San Francisco Film Festival programmer), to downplay what had happened in his summary of my column’s content that day. The most Rod was able to squeeze out was that “recent events” had impacted the Toronto Film Festival.
Rod was one of those “keep the column exclusively focused on movies” type of guys, no matter what. A lot of online editors subscribed to this approach in the old days. But something snapped when I read Armstrong’s words, which seemed to me one of the most titanically chickenshit sidesteps in the history of editorial intros, however discreet and sensitive his intention. All I know is that from that point on my column-writing creed began to be “movies now and always, but how can you ignore the other stuff if it pushes its way into your head as much as this or that great, worthwhile, so-so or godawful film?”
“I seriously doubt if anyone will be interested in reading this morning about the latest hip movies at the Toronto Film Festival,” I wrote on the evening of 9.11.01 while sitting in the apartment of Leora Conway, an old friend and Toronto resident who had graciously put me up that year.
“The wind has been knocked out of [this festival], I can tell you that. Not that anyone cares. Festival director Piers Handling announced the cancellation of some 28 public screenings and 13 press screenings yesterday afternoon. The festival resumes today, but people will mostly be going through the motions. It’s now the Festival of the Walking Numb. Spiritually, it’s all but over.
“Those hundreds (more likely thousands) of bodies lying under the rubble in New York and Washington, D.C., have pulverized everyone’s consciousness, and there just isn’t room to let anyone’s particular cinematic vision of life into our heads. Reality has taken over completely. Reality is all. What happened yesterday was beyond horrific, beyond sadistic, beyond the most spectacular Jerry Bruckheimer CGI fireball.

“Commentators and editorialists are saying everywhere that America will never be the same in the wake of those jets smashing into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, and are describing what happened as Pearl Harbor times 10. That’s true in more ways than one.
“Those camcorder shots of the buildings crashing down were terrible but awesome. I watched them over and over yesterday and into the night. We all did, I’m sure. It sounds insensitive to even think this, but one result of that footage is that special-effects companies are going to have to get a lot better very quickly. Because any huge, computer-created explosion in any new movie is suddenly going to look a lot faker. Reality has raised the bar.
“Life is processed with one type of software, and movies with another. We cut movies slack for their occasional lack of verisimilitude while we watch them in the dark, but reality cuts us very little of the same in the cold light of day.
“I was thinking yesterday afternoon of that scene in Apocalypse Now in which Marlon Brando‘s Colonel Kurtz talks about the ‘brilliance … the sheer brilliance’ of the Vietcong having hacked off the arms of several children who’d gotten inoculation shots from American medics. Kurtz obviously respected the psychopaths behind this act, calling them ‘trained cadres … men with families, men filled with love’ who simply ‘had the will to do this.’
“As you listen to Brando go on, you can at least half get what he’s saying. Kurtz is telling us that maybe, just maybe, there can be vestiges of love and noble purpose in the most horrific acts of war. What is the difference between hacking off children’s arms with machetes and slaughtering thousands of innocent office workers in downtown Manhattan and at the Pentagon? Mostly scale, I’d say.”
That last graph was close to what Bill Maher said a few days later on Politically Incorrect (i.e., that the Al Qeada team behind the 9.11 attacks were “not cowards”), which soon after led to his show’s cancellation. But I finished the piece with the following graph, and perhaps saved myself from any possible Reel.com recriminations:
“But who today is even considering for a second that the people behind yesterday’s barbarism are (or were, in the case of those who killed themselves) anything but fiends, and that their motives were anything but twisted and deranged?”

I flew to New York in late September 2001 to attend the New York Film Festival, but the first thing I did when I arrived…well, here’s the piece I wrote:
“I got my first look coming in on the Newark Airport bus at 5:45 A.M., right before we hit the Lincoln Tunnel when you can see most of Manhattan. In the darkness of the downtown area where the World Trade Center used to be, I could see a small (from my perspective) glowing cloud of white smoke, illuminated by the powerful lamps the night crews are using to work by. I decided right then to visit the site that day.
“A few hours later, after dropping off my stuff and grabbing some breakfast, I took the IRT down to Chambers Street. The stop closest to the devastation is Fulton Street, but I wanted to walk around and see it from every angle. The New York cops and the military have the northern end fenced off about four blocks north of the site. But standing at Chambers and looking south, you can see the rubble of the north tower.

“It’s the color of brownish desert sand, mostly. Standing maybe five or six stories tall, with rubble trailing down from the top. It’s chilling when you first see it. It’s chilling when you’ve been staring at it for a couple of hours.
“I walked to the east and down Broadway, past City Hall and down to Fulton, across the street from a small 18th- or 19th-century church (I’d know the name if I lived here) that’s being used as a gathering and refreshment station for volunteers. I saw a hand-painted banner with the word ‘Courage’ painted on the side. The tourist traffic was a lot heavier here. Cops were telling everyone not to take pictures, so as to keep everything moving. I guy next to me told his friend with a camera about the no-photo rule, and the guy said, ‘This is still America.’
“I walked down to Cedar Street, below Fulton, and turned right toward the barriers, which are about two blocks from the site. You can see the outer shell of the south tower, the highest part of which stands about four stories. Guys were watering the rubble down with huge fire hoses, and constant trails of smoke were wafting out in different places. It looked like the steam you see leaking out in Hot Springs, Arkansas. There were six or seven steam shovels scraping at the ground. It seemed that the more the shovels scraped the surface, the more the residual heat from the September 11 fires seemed to escape.
“A news guy who works for a TV station met me. Our idea was to get inside a certain building (I can’t say too much or I’ll get him into trouble) and then get up to the 30th floor, where we’d get a pretty good view. My friend wasn’t carrying a police pass (they take about nine hours to get, he said) but he had some good press ID, and he managed to bluff us past the cops and the Army guys who were checking credentials.
“We got into the building and after talking our way past some more uniformed security suits in the lobby, made our way up to the 30th floor and looked out. My eyes popped open. Startling, staggering…but I felt strangely glad to be there.
“Some people I’d talked to had told me about the smell. Like burning tires, one publicist said. It smelled vaguely to me like a rock quarry I’d once been to in Connecticut, with that powdery aroma of crushed stones. It also brought back a line in a recent New York Times story about the ‘scent of unquieted souls.'”

I should have linked to this 9.10 Sarah Palin–Westbrook Pegler observation by the Wall Street Journal‘s Thomas Frank, which was quickly linked to by Politico‘s Ben Smith.

Magnolia Pictures announced today that Wayne Wang‘s The Princess of Nebraska, a year-old drama that’s been playing the festival circuit since the ’07 Telluride Film Festival, will make its world premiere on YouTube on Friday, 10.17.08.
The free release on the recently launched YouTube Screening Room (http://www.youtube.com/ytscreeningroom) is part of a larger distribution plan which will launch with Magnolia Pictures’ theatrical release on Friday, 9.19 of Wang’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. Magnolia, Cinetic Rights Management and YouTube worked together to plan the parallel distribution strategy.

For the last three-plus hours I’ve been trying to load a large (360 mg) mp4 video of an interview I did this morning with Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle. But the transfer rate is so slow that it’s stalled twice and I’m on the verge of giving up. For now. Tonight I’ll try editing it down into three or four segments and see what happens. I’ve also got an mp3 that I recorded simultaneously.
The Toronto Film Festival has to try and do more to provide more flat-screens for journalists to use at the Sutton Plaza headquarters, yes, but what it needs to provide more than anything else is a couple of huge rooms with super-strong wifi and a shitload of desks and chairs. They need to provide, in short, an equivalent of Cannes’ Orange Cafe and press lounge inside the Palais, which have offered reliable super-strength “air” over the past few years. (The press lounge wifi wasn’t running this year, actually, although it was last year and, as I recall, the year before.) All I know is that this festival has been marked by one wifi hassle after another, and I’m feeling worn down to the nub.

The fact that Che and The Hurt Locker have finally landed distribution deals — respectively by IFC Films and Summit Entertainment — is welcome news, of course. But the fact that they took so long to happen tells you what an oddly neutured climate we’re living in right now.
I re-watched the first half of Che last night at the Elgin, and for me it’s just as tight and special and riveting as it seemed when I saw it last May in Cannes. No diminishment, no sag, no glancing at the watch. And yet the majority (or a good portion) of those who saw it with me at the Palais du Festival have been putting out the word ever since that it’s a problem movie.
Toronto Star critic Peter Howell has actually called it “Havana’s Gate.” Pete is a friend and a good fellow, but this is a grossly unfair thing to say. Because there are few films I’ve seen in my life that are more unlike Michael Cimino‘s 1981 debacle (including potential financial loss for Vincent Maraval’s Wild Bunch), I think it verges on slander. I absolutely know when a film is a gobbler or a major misfire and Che doesn’t come close. It’s one of the most exactingly reconstructed and truthfully told historical epics ever made — an immersion rather than “drama,” cholesterol-free and believable down to the last rifle and combat boot.
All these months I’ve been asking myself “what’s going on here?” A movie of this distinction may not make mountains of money or win over each and every person who sees it, but the fact that it went begging for four or five months strikes me as almost surreal. What’s wrong with this landscape, with our moviegoing culture, with today’s audiences, with “the business”?
Same thing with The Hurt Locker, which began shooting in Jordan right after Brian DePalma‘s Redacted, which was first shown at last year’s Venice and Toronto film festivals. Kathryn Bigelow‘s Iraq-War drama is ten times the movie that Redacted is/was, and yet it was forced to ran for cover when all the otyher Iraq War dramas died late last year.
Which should matter not to anyone truly of the faith. That’s one of the big problems, I suppose. The indie-film business is in a down cycle and there are fewer and fewer “Catholic” distributors as a result. But it’s just wrong for a film as strong as Bigelow’s to have to scrounge around for someone to release it.
The alleged “excitement” about and support for Sarah Palin among the American stooge strata is a disconnect also — a huge one. Eight years of leadership by a neocon Bible worshipper who’s kowtowed to corporate interests at every turn, taken us into massive debt, mired us in a dead-end war that was launched for deep-down personal reasons (which many believe is a prosecutable offense) and ignored any semblance of progressive leadership on energy and the environment, and the Walmart moms and others in the heartland are still for Palin (and oh, yes…McCain) despite the unmistakable signs that would tell anyone over the age of seven that McCain-Palin will keep the Bush routine going full tilt .
Why the slight lead in the polls for for McCain-Palin? Because the heartland moms see her as a feisty, right-thinking, flag-saluting Bible mom whom they relate to culturally. The mind stalls. Something is terribly, terribly wrong out there.
On top of which I’m getting more and more angry at assessments of the election dynamic by MSM reporters and analysts because they won’t allow for anything more than a passing acknowledgment of the racial elephant. Whenever it comes up, which is to say infrequently, it is invariably described as a minor fringe sentiment that is to be pitied and certainly marginalized in terms of frequent or extensive discussion.
And yet every now and then someone will man up and say what “we don’t really know Obama well enough” and “we’re not sure he’s ready to be president” really means. (Bob Herbert, David Gergen…who else?) The elephant — tusks, ears, trunk and all — is standing right smack dab in the middle of every discussion and reading of what’s going on out there and nobody — not the news media and certainly not Barack himself — is permitted to say it’s the absolute front-and-center factor among the less-educated voters out there, which translates as a crucial one since their votes are big factors in the swing states.

It’s nice to fantasize about the United States and Canada agreeing to classify the saying of “oh…my…God!” in a public place as a punishable misdemeanor. Just add this to the list of other small acts that result in minor wrist-slappings, like urinating in an alley or parking in a red zone. A fine of $50, let’s say. Ordinary citizens, under this new ordinance, would be allowed or even encouraged to make citizen’s arrests, with the fine to be levied by the authorities providing (a crucial component, this) that proof contained in cell-phone videos or mp3 recordings is submitted within seven days of the offense.

Two days ago I wrote that Bill Maher and Larry Charles‘ Religulous (Lionsgate, 10.3) “hasn’t [been] shot with an especially vivid sense of style or panache of any kind,” and that Charles has “made it look and sound more or less like Morgan Spurlock‘s Where In The Hell is Osama Bin Laden?” That wasn’t entirely fair. The final 10 minutes of this vital and absorbing documentary — a serious summing-up that reiterates how religious fairy-tale beliefs are keeping humanity from progressing — have been edited like gangbusters.
Here, incidentally, is a Yahoo video piece about the film that includes a good quip from Maher. America is so under the grip of yahoo religion that the presidential race is being degraded and diverted into absurd places. Sarah Palin being one manifestation of this. “Faith and family and faith” and so on. But then, as Maher says, “Americans are not great at connecting the dots.”
This 9.9 Reuters piece by Cameron French, posted yesterday afternoon, explains the Maher press conference in more detail.