TORONTO '08 CRITICS NOTEBOOK | Discovery Section Films Aim To Break Through

For certain movies, placement in the Discovery section of the Toronto International Film Festival almost seems like a plea. The festival catalogue calls the program "your introduction to gifted and innovative directors who are certain to become household names," but that's assuming those directors actually get discovered. Some of this year's Discovery films have already achieved that hefty goal and found a fair amount of support -- from distributors, at least.
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TORONTO '08 CRITICS NOTEBOOK | "Gigantic" Breaks Out; "Pedro" Does Justice To Activist; Auds Dig "Every Little Step"

Nobody in the Toronto International Film Festival audience at the Monday evening premiere of "Gigantic," a lovely, funny, unabashedly odd romance from first-time feature filmmaker Matt Aselton, mentioned the name Wes Anderson in the post-screening question-and-answer sessions. But they would have been correct to reference the director of critical hits "The Darjeeling Limited," "The Royal Tenenbaums" and "Rushmore" and I imagine that Aselton would have relished the comparison.
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TORONTO '08 CRITICS NOTEBOOK | Death Defying Acts: Strong Returns for Aronofsky, Bahrani, and Ustaoglu; "Kisses" Hits

On Sunday night, hours after winning the top prize at Venice, Darren Aronofsky's "The Wrestler" premiered for North American audiences here in Toronto, riding a wave of positive buzz and critical approbation. But standing in front of a revved up crowd at the majestic, cavernous Elgin Theater, director Aronofsky wisely tried to tamp down the hype, jokingly calling the film "crap"; more seriously, he told the crowd, "This is a gentle, small film."
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TORONTO '08 CRITICS NOTEBOOK | Veteran Filmmakers Stand Out With "Last Stop" While Newcomers Deliver "Power" and "Deadgirl"

British director Nigel Cole, best known for the popular art-house comedies "Saving Grace" and "Calendar Girls," introduced his latest film, the father/son road drama "$5 A Day," by explaining to the Toronto International Film Festival audiences at its Saturday night premiere its qualifications as a classic independent feature. Cole, also a veteran of television sitcoms and nature documentaries, emphasized the film's low budget, short shooting schedule and salary sacrifices made by the cast and crew. More importantly, he singled out his lead actor, Christopher Walken, a marquee name of independent features and the standout feature of Cole's by-the-numbers; surprisingly unfunny film.
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TORONTO '08 CRITICS NOTEBOOK | Intimate Moments with Denis, Kore-eda and Kim; and Linklater Channels "Orson Welles"

Not only can few Toronto attendees pronounce the name of this year's opening night film "Passchendaele," a Canadian WWI epic, but few among us have actually seen it. So much for a rousing start. Rather than major big-budget works (although the Coen brothers' "Burn After Reading," by most accounts, is an adequate romp), it's the festival's quieter, more intimate films that demand the most attention. On the first official day of screenings, for example, Claire Denis' latest "35 Rhums" ("35 Shots"), fresh from Venice, drew a packed press screening in the mid-afternoon. When Denis, the French maverick of "Chocolat" and "Beau Travail" fame, delivers the buzz picture of the moment, it gives heart to the endurance of art-house cinema, which, of late, has taken a beating in the industry press.
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LAFF '08 NOTEBOOK | Top Docs: "Trinidad," "No Name," "Pressure Cooker," "Loot" and "Boogie Man"

"Everyone feels the need to express themselves and they hope that when they do the world accepts them." Truer words were never spoken by director PJ Raval whose first feature, "Trinidad" (co-directed by Jay Hodges), premiered in competition at the Los Angeles Film Festival in the past week. In Raval's case, he was speaking about the subjects of his film, a group of transgender women who undergo sex-change operations in a small Colorado town. But, he might as well have been talking about himself, Hodges and their competition-mates, a strong group of documentary filmmakers with very distinct stories to tell about the world around them. The diverse pool of talent drummed up by programmers Rachel Rosen and Doug Jones has offered plenty of hope for the future of independent documentaries and, ironically enough, the ones that float to the surface favor aptitude with classic filmmaking models over innovation.
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CANNES '08 NOTEBOOK | The Revolution By Night: Steven Soderbergh's "Che"

The one overwhelming message coming from the competition films at the 61st Cannes Film Festival is: shit's messed up. "Waltz With Bashir" digs into the never-fully-healed wounds of war. In Matteo Garrone's "Gomorra," organized crime isn't an aberration; it's just the shadow army of an irredeemably venal free-market system. The Dardenne Brothers' "The Silence of Lorna" expresses a horror at a not-too-underground economy in the trade of human lives. Lucia Martel's "Un Mujer Sin Cabeza" takes a still, near-surreal look at class (un)consciousness, and doesn't like what it sees. Even the period melodrama here, Clint Eastwood's fact-based "The Changeling," fairly bristles with anger at corrupt authoritarianism. And even the not-overtly socially conscious family saga here, Arnaud Desplechin's "A Christmas Tale" (Un Conte de Noel) emphasizes fissure and disruption over harmony and affinity.
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PARK CITY '08 NOTEBOOK | Overlooked Frontier and Midnight Sections Offers Standout "Half Life" and Well-Directed "The Broken"

While the Sundance 2008 comes to close and the air clears around the buzz for the big sales out of the premiere and competition sections, the often wrongly overlooked New Frontiers and Midnight programs float to the surface as some of the year's most interesting offerings.
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PARK CITY '08 NOTEBOOK | Under Construction: The Nonfiction New Wave Takes Root at Sundance

At the end of a recent blog posting, Premiere film critic Glenn Kenny wondered aloud about some of the documentaries he'd seen at the Sundance Film Festival. Summing up his thoughts on Nanette Burstein's hit "American Teen" Kenny wrote "Burstein's trim, fast-moving film utilizes tricks and techniques that would give old-schoolers such as Wiseman and the Maysles Brothers rage attacks. The pop soundtrack, the voiceovers, the graphic collages, the animation sequences illustrating the dreams and desires of some of its subjects...none of it's a surprise, coming as it does from the co-director of the Bob Evans fantasia "The Kid Stays in the Picture," but all of it does raise the question of just how documentary is defining itself these days." Kenny's questioning reflects a decades-old discussion, often fueled by film critics (and sometimes by journalists or by some within the documentary community) over the use of construction -- created or recreated content -- within the context of nonfiction filmmaking. Often this is accompanied with a similar name check of a veteran filmmaker, with the implicit understanding that construction represents a shift in tradition within the genre.
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PARK CITY '08 NOTEBOOK | Docs Shine at Sundance; "Teen," "Polanski," and "Myths" Among Hyped Titles

The buying frenzy that has engulfed a number of nonfiction films at Sundance 2008 is all the more remarkable for the fact that 'A,' everyone was predicting a hands-off approach to docs after a lackluster 2007 for theatrical documentary and 'B,' not a single narrative film -- as of this writing early on Tuesday -- had landed a distribution deal. While it's a well-worn idiom that the Documentary Competition lineup at Sundance is usually superior to the Dramatic Competition, that gulf feels especially profound this year. In fact, a number of industry insiders have been saying that many of the nonfiction titles in the Slamdance lineup are superior to the narratives here.
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