Anticipating TIFF, 9/2.

James Urbaniak: "Went to a cast & crew screening of Fay Grim last night and it is, I am happy to report, quite fantastic. A wonderful companion piece to Henry Fool and Hal Hartley at the top of his game. Funny, emotional and resonant. And I say that not just because I'm in it."

Sophie Fiennes: "I am trying to trace the seeds of The Pervert's Guide To Cinema from a personal point of view. It has something to do with a combination of my lack of any formal academic education (something that I both regret and enjoy) and the utter thrill I find in Zizek's approach to thinking (here I am not alone). This is also undeniably a documentary about cinema; about reading moving images, about the art of watching films, which is probably a prerequisite to making them."

Also recently posted at the Doc Blog: Lucy Walker on shooting Blindsight and Alexander Oey on researching My Life as a Terrorist: The Story of Hans-Joachim Klein.

In the run-up to the Toronto International Film Festival, Twitch is running reviews of several films to be screened there, and this being a long weekend and all, you might start with the in-depth three-part piece on the Korean box office hit, King and the Clown by X. Then there's Todd on Family Ties, Election and Election 2.

Also, since the fest "inexplicably does not include trailer links on their website we've decided to try and build a link archive to trailers for as many TIFF-participating films as is humanly possible."

For the Globe and Mail, "Guy Dixon asked some insiders for their must-see films at this year's festival." Via Movie City News, also pointing to Rita Zekas's report in the Toronto Star: "TIFF will not be including income tax forms in the swag bags."

"A new film mixing archival footage and computer-generated special effects to portray the fictional assassination of President George W Bush will premiere Sept 10 at the prestigious Toronto Film Festival - and is already kicking off a firestorm of controversy," writes Tina Daunt in the Los Angeles Times. "British filmmaker Gabriel Range said Death of a President - which is done in a retrospective documentary style that has been described as eerily real - is intended to be a thought-provoking critique of the current political landscape." More from Sarah Lyall in the New York Times. Discussion's lively at the Hot Blog.

Posted by dwhudson at September 2, 2006 1:49 PM