wired

About halfway through a chat I had last night with documentarian Eugene Jarecki, director of Why We Fight (and the excellent The Trial of Henry Kissinger, which I saw here in Toronto in ’03), I asked if he’s given any thought to shooting a documentary about the ongoing Katrina disaster, which would naturally include the Bush administration’s sluggish response to the crisis. He said it would be an absolute natural, but that he’s focusing right now on promoting Why We Fight, etc. And then I went to Jeannette Walls’ column this morning and read that Michael Moore is said to be “seriously considering” making a Katrina doc himself. (Walls actually posted the item three days ago, on 9.8.) Moore’s rep didn’t offer comment about the speculation, but Moore has said a few things about Katrina on his website. “Hurricane Katrina came in and blew off the facade that we were a nation with liberty and justice for all,” he said in a posting that went up this morning. “The wind howled and the water rose and what was revealed was that the poor in America shall be left to suffer and die while the President of the United States fiddles and tells them to eat cake. That’s not a joke. The day the hurricane hit and the levees broke, Bush, John McCain and their rich pals were stuffing themselves with cake. A full day after the levees broke (the same levees whose repair funding he had cut), Bush was playing a guitar some country singer gave him. All this while New Orleans sank under water. It would take another day before the President would do a flyover in his jumbo jet, peeking out the widow at the misery 2500 feet below him as he flew back to his second home in D.C. It would then be TWO MORE DAYS before a trickle of federal aid and troops would arrive. This was no seven minutes in a sitting trance while children read ‘My Pet Goat’ to him. This was FOUR DAYS of doing nothing other than saying ‘Brownie (FEMA director Michael Brown), you’re doing a heck of a job!'”

Stephen Frears’ Mrs. Henderson Presents showed this morning at 9 a.m., and it’s obviously going to be huge with the over-30 crowd (an exhibitor suggested after the screening that it could make as much as $100 million) and without question provide Judy Dench with an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. It may even nudge itself into the Best Picture competish. “Inspired” by a true story, it’s a British period piece (late ’30s, Word War II) about a spirited and snobbish widow from the upper classes (Dench) who buys a debilitated London theatre, revovates it, and then hires a dignified old-school producer (Bob Hoskins) to put on vaudeveille shows. This works well enough at first until competition forces Dench and Hoskins to try something bawdy — i.e., adding naked women to the mix. Martin Sherman’s script is spirited, bouncy and appropriately rude…which is to say hilarious. Frears (High Fidelity, Dirty Pretty Things, The Hit) has hit one out of the park…again. And congrats to producers Harvey and Bob Weinstein. One thing I’m still not clear on — who exactly is going to be distributing their Weinstein Co. movies?

Danis Tanovic’s L’Enfer, which was press screened Thursday afternoon and which I was fairly pleased with (although it doesn’t stand up to Tanovic’s No Man’s Land), is getting zapped. A Variety critic I just spoke to hasn’t seen it, but he just told me he’s heard from three different people that the Tanovic is “just plain bad,” “don’t bother,” “not well directed,” etc. Apart from my view that these folks are being way too harsh and dismissive, it reminds me once again how varied reactions can be at a festival of this calibre with all kinds of headstrong know-it-alls chit-chatting a film up or down, depending on their findings and dispositions.

I’ve been watching festival movies for exactly one day and already I despise that Universal-produced trailer that exhorts audiences to show some love for the festival volunteers. It starts with a small team of filmmakers taking bows in front of a big festival and receiving modest applause, and then after they leave the stage a lone festival volunteer comes on stage to turn off the mike and the crowd rises to its feet and cheers him like he’s a pre-couch-bouncing Tom Cruise. It’s sickening, and I have to watch this thing every day, probably two or three times a day, for the next seven or eight days.

Disney is junket-screening Robert Schwentke’s Flightplan (9.23), the Jodi Foster thriller about a mother who can’t find her daughter aboard a plane, in Toronto. The talk among festival-attending journos was that it probably was nothing to run over and catch with any particular haste. This is wildly speculative, but one big-name reporter assumes that Disney’s decision to have its L.A. all-media screening only two days before the national opening is indicative of quality issues.

Daily Mail columnist Baz Bamigboye also had mixed reactions to Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown while attending the Venice Film Festival. He also says that the party thrown at that festival for the film was “flat,” which has nothing to do with Paramount’s decision not to throw any kind of shindig here, and yet the meaning or import of the no-Toronto-party decision has been a matter of discussion among journos. Crowe films are regarded by most journos as semi-events, and the Toronto Film Festival’s hosting of Crowe’s Almost Famous in 2000 was treated by DreamWorks as a very big deal with a very swanky party. The assumption, whatever this may be worth, is that Paramount isn’t going hog-wild on Elizabethtown at the current festival for a reason.

No clear consensus among journos as to which may be the better movie about a Middle Eastern suicide bomber who experiences second thoughts — Joseph Castelo’s The War Within (Magnolia, 9.30), which is set in Manhattan, spoken in New Yawkese and is about “a Pakistani involved in a planned attack in New York City experiences a crisis of conscience,” or Hany Abu-Assad’s Assad’s Paradise Now Paradise Now (Warner Independent, 10.28), which is set in Israel, spoken in native tongues and, according to a 9.6 piece in the New York Times, is about “two young Palestinians who volunteer to become suicide bombers” whose mission is also beset by doubts. Both are playing at the Toronto Film Festival and obviously I have to see both and make comparisons, etc.

I don’t know why I keep referring to this as a nine-day festival. In its fullest, most alive state, the Toronto Film Festival is intended to last for roughly six and a half days..sorta half-assedly starting today, September 8th, but really starting on the morning of Friday, the 9th, and ending sometime in the middle of Thursday, the 15th. All the hot films and hot parties are front-loaded (i.e., standard procedure for every big-time festival these days), with quasi-leftover clean-up movies like Mrs. Harris, The Matador and Edison trying to derive whatever energy or enthusiasm may be left during the last two and a half to three days.

Which relatively unheralded film will be the first surprise must-see… the first stop-what-you’re-doing-and-see-this-film no matter what? And which medium-profile release with big names will be the first to bomb out, like The Human Stain did two years ago?

It’s 8:40 ayem in Toronto on the first day of the festival, and a loud rumble was just heard over the city, followed by rain showers. Not a “bad omen” or anything, but I’m thinking twice about catching the 9:30 a.m. screening of The President’s Last Bang…because I don’t have an umbrella and it’s warm and cozy where I’m sitting. And no, I don’t anticipate that my Toronto Film Festival “Word” items over the next nine or ten days will be as banal as this one.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s performance as Truman Capote in Bennett Miller’s Capote “was the talk” of the last week’s Telluride Film Festival, the Hollywood Reporter‘s Anne Thompson has written, which has led to presumptions that “an Oscar nomination for Hoffman [is] inevitable.” In other words, Thompson and her Rocky Mountain ilk, many or most of whom were “wowed” by the performance, are more or less concurring with my view in last Wednesday’s column that Hoffman “is right at the top of my list right now — he’s the guy to beat in the Best Actor category. Anyone who’s seen Capote and says he’s not in this position is averse to calling a spade a spade.”

There’s a view that advance-praising a film or setting up high expectations before it gets seen at a film festival, as I may have done in the case of Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown in last Saturday’s Peter Howell/Toronto Star forecast piece, is not necessarily desirable because it sets the movie up for a fall. By this criteria or scenario or what-have-you, someone else coming along and going “nyah, nyah…Garden State was better,” as Variety‘s Leslie Felperin has done in her review out of the Venice Film Festival, balances the high-expectation effect, which I guess is a good or at least a mitigating thing, from Crowe’s point of view…right?