There’s a shot at catching a press-industry screening of Death of a President later this morning, as well as a public screening of Black Sheep, which hadn’t apparently sold as of last night, despite expectations to the contrary. Having missed it yesterday (the press-industry screening was full by the time I got there), I asked an IFC guy for his reaction. “It’s good, it’s funny,” he said. “Tell me what you think when you see it.”
Newmarket pacted yesterday to handle the U.S. distribution of DOAP, which has picked up a lot of heat (some of it adverse) because of its fictional depiction of an assassination of President George Bush. There’s also said to be ardent interest in acquring Sarah Polley’s feature directing debut Away From Her, a coping-with-Alzheimer’s story with Julie Christie.
I got into a small VIP theatre screening of Anthony Minghella‘s Breaking and Entering (Weinstein Co., 12.8 limited), a smart, well-written, not entirely successful drama about…well, a lot of things. A short list would include social inequity, trust, thievery, infidelity and caring for errant children in modern-day London. It costars Jude Law, Robin Wright Penn, Juliette Binoche, Vera Farmiga (in a standout supporting role as a Russan prostitute), Ray Winstone.
It’s the infidelity aspect that caught my attention, and I probably won’t be alone. Law’s character — a well-to-do architect — is the infidel, you see, and there’s no way to brush aside his own personal history with this subject, not to mention his having played a philanderer in Mike Nichols’ Closer.
I have to leave already — the DOAP screening starts in less than an hour — and I’m frankly wondering about my ability keep burning the candle at both ends. As usual, I expect to file some stuff later on this afternoon. I have a Todd Field interview scheduled for 2:45 or thereabouts, and several other things to attend to. My head is spnning, the wheels are turning….the pressure is on again.

I ran into Ghosts of Cite Soleil director Asgar Leth last night at the rooftop bar on top of the Hyatt. I saw his knockout documentary, which also played at Tellruide, six months ago in Los Angeles vai the good graces of exec producer George Hickenlooper. It’s a kind of Cain-and-Abel story that was filmed entirely in Haiti just before, during and after the overthrow of Haitian president Jean Bertrand Aristide in March 2004. An excerpt from the piece I wrote: “I now see Haiti as less of a Ground Zero for abstract political terror and more of a place where people on the bottom rung are trying to live and breathe and create their own kind of life-force energy as a way of waving away the constant hoverings of doom. In short, this excellent 88-minute film adds recognizable humanity to a culture that has seemed more lacking in hope and human decency than any other on earth. It’s been a kind of growth experience for me. I feel like I almost ‘get’ Haiti now, and I haven’t stopped telling people about it since.”

A friend of The Departed (no title, no name, no gender) passed along a view today on the absence of Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed at the Toronto Film Festival. Warner Bros., he/she said, “felt that the movie was too commercial to be presented at a film festival like Toronto’s.
“Playing at Toronto, they felt, can give audiences a sense that it’s an art-house style film. I know that many would disagree with this view, but they felt that there was no real upside in screening it there when they know that they have a hit film on their hands.”
To which I say, “Excuse me?” A good movie is a good movie is a good movie, and critics at Toronto going apeshit for The Departed (assuming they will or would have gone apeshit) would have meant nothing but commercial heat and buoyancy all around. Instead WB kept it out of circulation and let a lot of people think (i.e., speculate, wonder, guess, presume) there was something wrong.
They could have at least allowed visiting critics and columnists to see it here in Toronto, but no — they restricted access only to people taking part in the New York junket. Brilliant neg-head thinking, guys. Hats off.

Baaah….baaah. Jonathan King‘s Black Sheep, a horror comedy, suddenly became the big hot-pants Toronto film after a well-received midnight screening last night. Sales rep John Sloss is reportedly fielding several offers. Meanwhile I tried to get into a screening of the damn thing this afternoon at 3 pm, but I was shut out. Baaah. Last night someone told me there was some heat on this film. Another person said the same thing this morning. A publicist friend wrote today and said, “Have you seen or heard anything about this yet?” Baaah.

Stu VanAirsdale (a.k.a. “the Reeler’) submits a snippy-rippy review of movie fall-preview pieces by six or seven Manhattan publications.

Reuters guy Arthur Spiegelman went to last night’s Toronto Film Festival premiere of Death of a President and has reported that it received a “short burst” of “mild applause from an audience that seemed more interested in how it was made than why.” He also writes that “moviegers left with mixed feelings, with one American tourist calling it overhyped but interesting.”

Producer-director Gabriel Range “complained there had been a rush to judgment about his film, spurred by both its subject matter and by a still photo from the movie that superimposed President George Bush‘s head on an actor being shot,” Spiegelman writes. “Many of the questions for Range concerned how he managed to make the film so realistic and whether authorities in Chicago, where it was filmed, knew what he was doing.”
That’s the part that has me interested — the purported realism of the footage. That’s why I’m making Tueday’s press screening come hell or high water.
DOAP “opens with demonstrations against Bush as he visits Chicago in 2007. As he leaves a hotel after delivering a speech, he is shot by a sniper in a nearby building. A police hunt leads to the arrest of a Palestinian man on flimsy evidence. Later the man is convicted of the assassination and kept in prison even as evidence points to another man as having committed the crime.
“Despite the sensationalism of its subject matter,” Spiegelman observes, “the film tries to be a low-key and sober look at the effects of Bush’s post 9/11 policies on U.S. society, especially on civil liberties.”
“I hope we portrayed the horror of assassination,” Range said. “There have been plenty of fictional films about assassination and I don’t think anyone would get the idea of assassinating Bush from this film.”

Anne Thompson is running video links on her Risky Biz blog to a post-Rescue Dawn q & a with director Werner Herzog and star Christian Bale, and also a post-Borat q & a with Sacha Baron Cohen.

DVD jacket art for two titles from Warner Home Video’s forthcoming (11.7) Marlon Brando Collection, which I wrote about in mid August.

Miami Herald critic Rene Rodriguez has seen Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed here in Toronto, and he’s calling it “class-A pulp…grave, resonant, psychologically complex and acted to the skies.”
And that’s not all: “Anyone who’s been waiting for Scorsese to return to form after the Oscar-baiting turgidness of The Aviator and Gangs of New York won’t be disappointed,” he’s written. “This is Scorsese’s best and most invigorating work since the underrated Casino, if not GoodFellas, as well as his most sheerly entertaining.”
If Rodriguez is on the money, then what is Warner Bros. publicity’s problem? They’ve got something that allegedly works on a feisty-pulpy crime-movie level and yet they send out signals left and right that it’s got issues, that they’re concerned about reactions (as indicated by a clear reluctance to show it), that “it’s not a festival movie,” etc.?
Rodriguez’s view is just the first word and he may end up 180 degrees apart from the eventual general consensus (or not), but if he’s right WB publicity has created a totally unnecessary neg-head smokescreen about this film.
If on the other hand what Rodriguez is saying appears in hindsight to have been a bit too breathless, then what WB has been doing makes sense…I guess….but this is becoming more and more fascinating by the minute.

Last night Little Miss Sunshine was handed the Deauville Film Festival’s Grand Prix award — hooray for that. The smart, sometimes darkly-shaded comedy, directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris and written by Michael Arndt, “was met with loud applause and raucous laughter when it was shown at the festival ,” blah, blah. Deauville’s Jury Prize went to Ryan Fleck ‘s “Half Nelson”, and the award for Best Screenplay and the International Critics’ Prize went to Laurie Collyer‘s Sherrybaby.

In a Leonardo DiCaprio profile that went up on 9.10, L.A. Times writer Mary McNamara conveyed that unlike the vast majority of entertainment journalists thus far, she’s actually seen Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed (Warner Bros., 10.6), in which DiCaprio costars with Matt Damon and Jack Nicholson.
The film “burrows into the Boston underworld [and] is vintage Scorsese, rife with grit and gore and more expletives than Snakes on a Plane,” McNamara writes. “As a cop who infiltrates a mob run by Jack Nicholson, DiCaprio stands fully baptized into the Scorsese canon, smashing gangsters in the head with beer mugs, holding fellow officers at gunpoint and going mano a mano with Nicholson in all his maniacal glory while trying to decipher the code of true loyalty.”
The Departed‘s press junket will happen in Manhattan later this week. I’ve been asking for the last two or three days about attending a local press screening of The Departed in Toronto, but the responses have been vague. Last night a visiting publicist told me that a journalist told him that a local screening had been slated for either yesterday or today. These developments on top of the weeks-old decision not to show The Departed at the Toronto Film Festival obviously sends out a certain type of smoke signal that I don’t have to decipher for anyone.