Catching up with TIFF.

Coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival is torrential, so first, to tick off some of the main hubs, nodes and special sections before sampling a few bits from other spots below:

• IndieWIRE: Buzz, deals, first impressions and Anthony Kaufman's "Critic's Notebook."

• Movie City News: Reviews from David Poland and the MCN crew, plus linkage galore.

• Hollywood Elsewhere: Jeffrey Wells, posting up a storm.

• Twitch: About two handfuls of reviews a day, mostly of films being ignored by everyone else.

• Cinematical: Seems like half the team at least is up there, blogging away.

• Toronto Life: Features, profiles, daily roundups.

• The Globe and Mail: Diaries, reviews and loads more.

• And of course, Variety and the Hollywood Reporter.

Updated.

And thanks to Ryan Wu, a few more:

• The AV Club Blog: Scott Tobias and Noel Murray, daily. Each.

• Mike D'Angelo: Capsules and grades, several a day. Look who scored an 82.

• Michael Sicinski: "Another 10-day, 50-film clustertiff."

• Theo Panayides: Notes on about half a dozen films a day.

• Victor Morton: Sharp, quick takes from the conservative side of the aisle.

I thought I'd added...

• framing device: Days' viewings smoothed into essays by J Robert Parks.

... but hadn't yet. Til now.

One more:

• TIFFReviews.com: A community of TIFF fans. The best way in is probably through the blog.

"It's like a filmbloggers convention over here, and we've been convening in restaurants, subway trains, and sidewalk ticket lines," writes Girish, listing (and linking to) nine he's run into so far before offering his takes on Climates ("a solid kick-off"), 12:08 East of Bucharest and Lights in the Dusk: "As a Kaurismäki fan, I want so badly to get and like this new film. But from what I have to go on so far, it's frustrating."

Darren Hughes has caught the first two and also Hamaca Paraguaya ("a stunning piece of filmmaking") as well as These Girls ("a difficult film to watch"), Toi, Waguih ("the kind of political movie I like best: a meditation on memory and on the waves of personal consequence that ripple through history") and Un Pont sur la Drina, a film he's still thinking about two days "and six film programs later."

Abderrahmane Sissako's Bamako reminds Michael Guillén "why I chose The Evening Class as the name for my film blog. It is right in league with Sembene's assertion that African cinemas are the evening class for adults who approach cinema as a means to focus on the issues of their lives." Also, "The Host was worth being rained on while waiting in line and every exhausted step home!"

Jim Emerson: "For the first half of Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn, the fictionalized movie based on his documentary 1997 Little Dieter Needs to Fly, I wasn't sure if Herzog had tamed the commercial feature or if it had tamed him. By the end, I felt it was the most harrowingly realistic and unsentimentalized P.O.W. film I'd ever seen." Also: "At 150 minutes, in three parts, The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema (catchy title, no?) is probably the fastest-moving, most shamelessly enjoyable film I've seen in Toronto so far this year." Plus, Shortbus, Volver and Babel.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian's Cheryl Eddy: "Believe the hype: Borat rules." Plus, a slew of docs, a question - "Why can't every morning for the rest of my life begin with a Johnnie To movie?" - and B Ruby Rich: "The Lives of Others could be a lesson to US filmmakers on how to create complex characters that lead an audience through complex issues - to learn how to think and feel at the same time, as [director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's] compatriot Fassbinder once put it."

Salon's Stephanie Zacharek catches Suburban Mayhem, "one of those overly clever little movies that isn't sure what it wants to be: black comedy, potent drama, punk rave-up, exploration of the femme fatale as a convention"; Jia Zhangke's Dong, which, "at just 66 minutes, is filmmaking that feels expansive and compact at once. And it makes just a half-day of moviegoing feel incomparably rich."

Dave Kehr on the film Jia Zhangke made before Still Life: "It's a beautiful and lovely and fascinating film in itself, though Dong will probably reveal its deeper character only when it stands... side by side with its sister work." And, The Host: "Bong is not in Park Chan-wook's league as a visual stylist, but knows how to draw an audience into a story."

Frank at chromewaves: "[W]hile I don't know that Euro-Asian martial arts hybrids will be the next big thing in international filmmaking, based on Jade Warrior it is definitely a concept that's worth investigating."

The festival "has been all but overrun with films attacking President Bush or the protracted war in Iraq — in subtle ways and like sledgehammers, with vitriol and with dispassionate fly-on-the-wall observation," claims David M Halbfinger in the New York Times.

Patrick Goldstein talks with Venus director Roger Michell for the Los Angeles Times.

Matt Riviera catches Fido, Shortbus, End of the Line and Venus.

Online viewing tips. Video at the Risky Biz Blog: Werner Herzog and Sacha Baron Cohen.

Posted by dwhudson at September 11, 2006 10:12 AM