It’s 1:55 pm, I have about two hours left before my next event, and I haven’t posted any kind of reaction to at least eight films now. I’m starting to feel like an air-traffic controller dealing with more and more jets circling above and the caffeine anxiety starting to really build up. Not to mention the other eight to ten more flicks I’ll be seeing and responding to Monday through Thursday before heading home on Friday afternoon.
The un-assessed films are (a) Danny Boyle‘s initially bothersome but finally superb Slumdog Millionaire (which I took two hours to review yesterday but lost due to online access shutting off before I was able to save it); (b) Bill Maher and Larry Charles‘ Religulous, which I saw and mostly liked (with reservations) in Los Angeles; (c) Jonathan Demme‘s partly inspired, partly problematic Rachel Getting Married (also seen in L.A.); (d) Andreas Dresen‘s surprisingly touching Cloud 9 (which I saw here last Thursday), (e) Claire Denis‘ low-key but precise and absorbing 35 Rhums (ditto), (f) David Koepp‘s Ghost Town (ditto), a playful mainstream studio wanker that has no business being in Toronto, really, except to satisfy the ambitions of its distributor, Paramount Pictures; (g) Matteo Garone‘s savage, inescapably “real” Gamorrah, (h) Guillermo Arriaga‘s The Burning Plain, a layered and well-acted adult drama that doesn’t really hit the mark; or at least isn’t on the same plane as the Innaritu-directed films based on Arriaga scripts (h) Kevin Smith‘s Zack and Miri Make a Pormo, which I just saw this morning.
I’m not going to catch up. All my advance homework, hard work and dogged attempts to see everything I should see have come to naught. It’s all collapsing into a heap. I just decided to blow off the Kevin Smith Zack and Miri press conference — that will buy me an extra couple of hours.