TIFF Red Carpet: The Black Swan

Other than Saturday, Monday was the biggest day for celebrities at Roy Thompson Hall. We had shown up earlier to catch a glimpse of Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu the former of which left my copy of Belle De Jour unsigned and the latter being a no show. However it didn't matter because what everyone was really watching for were the people from Black Swan.

Vincent Cassel managed to zip by, only stopping briefly. Unfortunately it wasn't to sign my copy of La Haine.

The guy I was with was eagerly awaiting Winona Ryder as Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands are his favourite movies. I also had a copy of Age of Innocence, that most hated and misunderstood Scorsese film. However, Ryder was sweeped away by her publicist despite chants for her to come back. She kept looking back like an innocent little school girl as if she wanted to come over but couldn't. I later read somewhere that she's one of the worst autographers.

I knew Barbara Hershey was in this movie but apparently didn't do my research properly because she's in one of my favourite movies: Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters. Oh well, next time.

 Here comes Darren Aronofsky

That is Darren Aronofsky grabbing my pen to sign my copy of Requiem for a Dream. I told him he was the next Scorsese and he smirked. I said he was one of my favourite directors and he said "Oh, only one of them?" I think he was joking but this is clearly a man who knows he's good.

It could be pure coincidence but as Aronfosky walked off with wife Rachel Weisz I yelled out "The Shape of Things," which is what I wanted her to sign and she looked back. Not sure if that was what she was looking back about but they both happened at the same time.

Everyone went nuts for the super petit Natalie Portman. She missed my copy of Closer but then her publicist (the girl behind who looks like Sophie Coppola) grabbed it and got her to sign it. She signed for a lot of people but then the guy I was with heard her say "Is that enough now?" to her publicist.

Dominic Cooper showed up for no reason in particular. Mila Kunis was a no show.

TIFF Red Carpets: The Town

Having come unprepared the day before and focusing solely on getting snapshots of the stars, Saturday was when I started getting a taste of autographs instead, which ultimately meant more time begging for stars to come over and less time snapping pictures (I missed John Hamm, Jeremy Renner and Rebecca Hall). Regardless, there are still some good ones to come.

Chris Cooper was the first to arrive. I don't think I saw him stop for anyone even though a few people called for him. He just walked on and smiled. He looks to me like someone's kind old grandpa.

Rachel Lefevre showed up unexpectedly and the Twilight fans went wild. Personally I had no idea who she was at first

Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck showed up together and went in opposite directions. She headed right for the press but (seen here) assured the screaming masses that she would be back and she held to her word. She also favoured the people on the ends who usually get overlooked, which means I didn't get anything from her but that was nice of her anyway.

I think Ben Affleck was born with a pen in his hand. He motored through the crowd, signing just about everything. Even the picture of him that appeared in the newspaper the next day of him out and about town was of him signing something. He signed my copy of Good Will Hunting.

The crowd went nuts for Blake Lively, who blew through giving autographs so quickly it was nearly impossible to get a good picture of her. Unfortunately my Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants DVD got missed by an inch for the second time that day

Easy A (4.5 out of 5)

There’s a moment in Easy A where the story’s hero Olive says that she wishes her life had been directed by John Hughes. In reality, it might as well have been. The gift of Hugh's films was his ability to combine the idealism that we love in the movies with just enough intelligence and humanity to make them feel as though they were talking to, not above or below, us. That’s Easy A’s gift as well, right down to the musical number, and it gets it right for maybe the first time since Juno. There are so few good films about teenage girls that are honest and sincere enough to be genuinely perceptive to the plights of teenagers while also being funny and warm. Throw Easy A on that pile.

Olive (Emma Stone) is just your average teenage nobody until one day, trying to get out of spending the weekend with her best friend’s strange hippie parents, gets caught up in a lie about having lost her virginity. The little bathroom fib makes it’s way to the ears of the school Christian militant Marianne (Amanda Bynes) and soon the whole school knows about Olive and her faux sexcapdes, making her one of the most talked about girls at school.

Finding herself in detention for mouthing off to one of the Christians in class, Olive becomes friends with Brandon (Dan Byrd) who is gay and tormented daily because of it. If she would pretend to have sex with him he could lose his reputation and live happily through the rest of high school. She agrees and soon is in business as guys of all different varieties give her gift cards in exchange for the privilege of telling people they hooked up with her. Their lives are better and her notoriety soars.

As luck would have it, Olive is studying the Scarlett Letter in English class, a book in which its hero smears her good name and reputation in order to help those around her. Ah ha, parallels are brewing. Movies sometimes have a heavy handed way of using classroom scenes in order to bring in texts or theories that draw artistic and thematic parallels to the film itself. Some writers mistake this as being symbolic. Easy A however has the good sense, in that self-reflexive post modern way, to acknowledge itself as a modern day retread of the Scarlett Letter and working that into the story as the starting point instead of the whole point.

So Olive, in an act of defiance, just like in the Scarlet Letter, embroiders a red A onto the corsets she wears to school. This works wonderfully well for Olive until she soon realizes that, all the while everyone was interested in her for what she could do for their social lives, no one is really interested in anything more than that. Call it a critique on the state of our current superficial society in which sex tapes and tabloid exploits are the gauge from which we measure celebrity as opposed to, oh I don’t know, talent, being a good person, etc.

I also call it a lot of fun. Olive’s parents are played by Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson as the kind of movie parents that everyone wants but so few ever really get: they are funny, smart, caring, supportive and understanding. Parents, especially dads, are so often the villains of films that these two are a blast of fresh air. In fact, all of the characters are refreshing. Sure the film sometimes feels like it is going through the motions of the plot (then again no one ever accused John Hughes of being a compass of daring and original work), but they all behave in that funny movie way that we love: they could never be mistaken as anything but movie characters, but they are the kinds whose company we love to be in.

The film is also hip and fresh in that smart and hilarious way that Clueless was in the 90s. But a few weeks ago I just got finished criticising Going the Distance for being too hip for it’s own good. Now here is another comedy that knows about books and movies and music (The Bible is in the best seller section of the local book store, right next to Twilight) but it manages to work them into the story in a way that makes them feel real and authentic. They add to the tone of the story. Sometimes when characters talk about pop culture they are just trying to be funny. Easy A is funny but it also creates the sense that these are smart kids who know how to effectively draw the lines between themselves and pop culture and the film ends with the biggest laugh maybe anyone has ever gotten out of Huck Finn. Mark Twain is out there, grinning somewhere.

Most of the film’s charm must be attributed to its star Emma Stone. Stone has been on the fringes of some good movies (Superbad, Zombieland) but is now on her way to stardom. Sometimes all it takes is for an actor to be in the right role at the right time and that’s what is happening here. Stone is funny and confident and cute and knows how to act in a way, that, although probably not realistic, is still believable in terms of teenage drama. Easy A is also a huge step up for it’s director Will Gluck whose previous credits include the horrible teen comedy Fired Up. Gluck directs this with the flair of a man who knows he needs to prove something. It’s like he’s apologizing for his past sins. Apology accepted.

Why So Angry?

In a way I'm blessed to have attracted readers who are 1) intelligent, 2) respectful, 3) love film and 4) know that debate is about arguing points of view and not attacking characters. In fact, in the history of this blog, I've only had my character attacked once.

On the other hand there was Suite101, an online editorial site that I used to write for before I got fed up of needing to edit my reviews into the third person, essentially stripping the life and personality from them and started this blog where I could do whatever I pleased.

Even though I haven't posted anything on Suite for about a year I still average about 100 views a week and get the odd comment now and then. The thing about it is though is that, most of the commentors don't just disagree, but wage full on attacks of me. I find it all rather amusing really, especially when said commentors are anonymous. I actually look forward to receiving said comments because, not only does it show just how shallow people are but if I have held a position so controversial that it has awakened in you the desire to attack someone you have never met and know nothing of, well, I must be doing something right.

I just recently received one of these comments. In the final days of Suite101 I had planned to start a series about the most overrated films of all time. It didn't work because Suite doesn't allow you to write a series because you can't put #X in the title. So instead I would need to put the film's title as the heading and The Most Overrated Films of all Time in the subtitle, which didn't get published anyway so there was no point in continuing to do it past the three that I did write. The first was on Bertolucci's 5 hour political flop 1900. Read it here if you desire and be sure to check out the comments too.

The point, if I have one, is to ask why some people who claim themselves to be of inherent sophistication, feel the need to, instead of offer a counter viewpoint in order to engage debate, just decide to call names (the writer is an idiot) and make personal judgements (he's never been out of the burbs, yo) as if that somehow makes their stance more correct or valid. Let's face it, when Sam Juliano went off on me all he ended up achieving was making himself look like a fool.

In closing, I feel sorry for these people because, in essence, in their assurance that their opinion is right, the every bit of their being is better than anyone who disagrees, their life more meaningful, their contribution to the universe more grand, they have ceased growing and evolving. Why be stalled by a belief that I'm better than X when I could be striving to become as good as Y instead? Oh well, I can't stay I want them to change because then I would need to find something new to make me smile.

TIFF In Retrospect

Although I have yet to finish posting all of my pictures and although the Toronto International Film Festival still runs until Sunday, for my purposes, it's all over. I was planning on going down today to maybe catch an autograph from Kevin Spacey or Kelly Preston but the rain and the feeling of an oncoming sickness forced me to hang back at home.

Oh well, for five days, despite how exhausting, time consuming and expensive it got, I've just finished living a dream of sorts. Not in the sense that now my life feels complete but in the sense that I felt like I was in the middle of something important. How many people, after all, get to tell one of their favourite director's that he's the next Scorsese and have him respond to it, or tell Michael C. Hall that Six Feet Under was the best show that's ever been on TV and have him thank you? Not a lot.

You see I grew up in a small town of around 5,000 people where citizens and family members cared more about cars and farm equipment than movies. When I told my high school co-op coordinator that I wanted to co-op at a newspaper because I one day wanted to be a movie critic he laughed, and not a good laugh either. Five years later, with the decline of newspapers, I'm still no closer to being a famous film critic than I was back than, or even an unfamous one making money, but I at least now feel like I've been one step closer to the things I truly love.

At first I went down to the red carpets with the sole purpose of snapping some celebrities to show off to the people I know. And then it became about getting autographs. But I wasn't one of those people who stand at the red carpet to get anyone with a pulse who walks by to sign their sheets of paper, I wanted to go and show the actors and filmmakers that I respect that I continue to support them and continue to love them. I even started taking DVD covers to their less popular work: A Scanner Darkly for Keanu Reeves, La Haine for Vincent Cassell, Thief for James Caan, The Long Good Friday for Helen Mirren. Sometimes they got signed, sometimes they didn't. That's life, but it was fun the whole way through. It was an experience that let me meet those people who, until now, have only been projections at 24 frames per second, and realize that most of them are just like us and can only hope that someone will recognize them and show them some love (I still haven't decided if John Madden's publicist coming over and asking if we wanted to meet him was more funny, tragic or just English modesty).

In the end, if I never go back again, it will have been worth all the moments of being pushed, the aching feet, the yelling at the top of your lungs. But who am I kidding, I'm already counting down the days till next September.

Going the Distance (2 out of 5)

We’re getting to a point where comedies are trying to be nothing more than funny at any expense. Some of them have the gall enough to just pull it off, but remember a time when comedies, especially romantic ones, were about characters who just so happened to be funny? Essentially comedies are about human behaviour, juxtapositions of opposing things, dramatic irony and so fourth. That we liked the characters enough to laugh along with them was all just icing on the cake. Going the Distance asks us to laugh at its characters but plays instead like a puff of smoke: it exists in front of our eyes and then quickly dematerializes until it has ceased to exist. It’s real because we can see it, taste it, smell it, but it leaves you wondering where the fire is.

This is basically the romantic comedy of the next generation. It is rated-R so we all know just how edgy it is, has characters talk in conversations that sound more like over anxious screenwriters than real buddies and drops pop culture references just to show how hip to the scene it is. Some of them are broad (The Beastie Boys) and some of them are just obscure enough to please the real diggers (The Accused, Moesha). There was once upon a time, before Scream, when movie characters didn’t talk like they knew things that happened in the outside world. Now it seems as though movies feel that if they aren’t referencing the times they aren’t part of them.

The tragedy of the whole matter is that we don’t go to Drew Barrymore romantic comedies to hear the starlet drop f-bombs and take rips off the bong. We go to see her because she is sweet and cute and because of her charm we always root for her to end up with Mr. Right because she always seems to be just this side of naivety. We pray, above all, that she catches him before screwing it up.

That premise worked for Barrymore in her best comedy, Fever Pitch, in which she and Jimmy Fallon talked like real people, acted like real people, fell in love naturally and expressed legitimate concerns about each other before living happily ever after. The problem with Going the Distance is that it’s too hip to its own game to find a compelling narrative arch to put Barrymore in. God forbid a romantic comedy in 2010 ever drop the safety net for long enough to show it has a heart.

Garrett (Justin Long, charming his way, one role at a time, into becoming the next John Cusack) has just broken up with his girlfriend because he’s apparently the only guy in New York who doesn’t know that when a woman says not to get her a present for her anniversary, what she really means is get me an even better one instead.



He meets Erin (Barrymore) at a bar after interrupting her game of Centipede which she holds the high score for. He buys her a beer to apologize and they end up at his place. Unbeknownst to Garrett, Erin is just doing a summer internship in NY and will be shipping off back home to San Francisco in a few weeks.

Having fallen hard for each other they agree to try to make it work long distance while one of them searches for a job within a respectable distance from the other.

The simple reality of the long distance relationship is that it oozes predictability. You can see Going the Distance coming from a mile away. If the essence of the film is that long distance is hard, well, the response is: yeah, tell me something I don’t know. The couple yearn to see each other, they have the requisite holiday visit where they do the dirty on her sister’s kitchen table...where her brother-in-law has stopped for a midnight snack, they are jealous of opposite sex co-workers and then buckle under the pressure of it just not working. He wants her in New York, she doesn’t understand why it needs to be her to make the move, and the drama spins on.

Garrett has two best friends who are played by Saturday Night Lives’ Jason Sudeikis and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Charlie Day. Both of them are unfortunately designated the role of too-clever-for-their-own-good comedic sidekick role, where Sudeikis is defined by a moustache that is supposed to help him pick up lonely older woman, however Day has the common sense to at least play the material straight and with an endearing quality. Not an easy feat for someone with nothing to work with.

And then the question remains of whether or not they will break up and find a way to make it work. What do you think? The problem is, you don’t care. There is no stake in this relationship because it all boils down to something everyone already knows: long distance sucks and the film isn’t clever or sweet enough to make us really care about the outcome of this relationship. This is a film that ends up not going the distance at all: it smokes, it swears, it winks in recognition of how with it it is and then it ends. There’s a romance in it, but romantic it is not.

TIFF Red Carpets: The Conspirator

Saturday was the biggest day in terms of sheer star power. Unfortunately we missed Hillary Swank, Sam Rockwell and Tony Goldwyn at the Conviction premiere because we instead decided to stroll around Yorkville and saw no one other than Roger Ebert. Guess we either came too late or the stars keep a low profile on the busy weekend days. Regardless The Conspirator was a film I certainly wanted to check out, not simply because it has a great cast or because I think obert Redford's A River Runs Through It is one of the best American films ever made, but because I have read the script and thought it was a masterpiece.

The writer, James Solomon, was the first to show up. I didn't know who he was but the guy who he was signing for apparently did. He was nice and funny and took pictures for anyone who wanted them. "Don't worry guys," he said to some screaming fans, "I'm just the writer." Nice guy.

This is around the moment that I scream "Holy crap it's Alexis Bledel" prompting my girlfriend, a huge Gilmore Girls fan, to almost have an aneurysm. We didn't expect her, she got there before almost everyone else and showed up in a car and not the trademark SUV. I had my Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 DVD in hopes of catching Blake Lively later on in the day but Alexis only signed for a few people, missing us by about an inch.

Yeah, apparently she must have been saying something to someone because Alexis is looking kind of weird in this one.

One more from the side.

I didn't know what to expect from James McAvoy. Sometimes young stars like to sign one of two autographs to show that they care about the fans but really they just want to run to the press (*cough* Jeremy Renner *cough*), but McAvoy was the real deal. He started out at one end and disappeared right down to the other end. He was gone so long we didn't even realize he hadn't gone in yet and was still signing on his way back as seen here. Unfortunately I didn't have anything for him to sign.

Robin Wright was glowing. Not only did she generally seem to enjoy being amongst her fans but she walked those heels of hers all the way to the end of the line, signing, joking, just being all around lovely. Didn't have anything for her to sign but wish I would have.

Justin long appeared out of nowhere. He only signed a few autographs but he really worked the crowd anyway. This guy could charm just about anyone.

I don't mind if celebrities don't sign autographs as long as they give the fans something to take home. Kevin Kline didn't sign one autograph but he really played to the crowd. He got out, blew kisses to the crowd as if he was royalty and walked over to the press. While there people were calling for him to turn around, which he did, humorously for just a second before snapping back. It was a reminder of why he is one of the few to have won an Oscar for a comedy role.

The one man who I really wanted an autograph from, not surprisingly, didn't sign anything, didn't wave, didn't even act like there were hundreds of people there simply to see him. Oh well, that was a pretty hip scarf Robert Redford was sporting.

The floating head of Robert Redford enjoying his producers more than his fans.