TIFF, 9/12.

Let's begin a highly unscientific sampling, more like an aimless evening stroll through some of the reviews and such coming out of the Toronto International Film Festival with Tom Hall on The Pervert's Guide to Cinema: "[Director Sophie] Fiennes and Zizek are a perfect match for each other, the former making the wonderful decision to place her subject on the sets and locations of the various films he is discussing and the latter an often hilarious, exhilarating and engrossing intellectual who isn't afraid to show us the subconscious meanings of some of our favorite movies.... I can't think of a brisker, happier 150 minutes."

Then, Brand Upon the Brain!: "Having just sat through a 2.5 hour film on Freudian interpretations of cinema, it was not hard to be completely floored by one of the most definitively personal, touching, and hilarious examples of Freudian self-analysis ever comitted to celluloid. [Guy] Maddin's film is at once extremely personal and incredibly accessible, retaining both the wit and unique vision of his previous films but somehow transcending his earlier work."

More on Brand from Kurt and Opus at Twitch; also Kurt on Michael Glawogger's Slumming, "a fascinating character study," Todd on György Pálfi's Taxidermia, "like nothing you have never seen before," and on Pan's Labyrinth: "[T]his is not a coming of age but the end of one. It is masterful, heartbreaking and his finest work to date." Michael Guillén: "Pan's Labyrinth is a film I will return to over and over again when I am feeling most real and have lost hope."

Q&A notes at Twitch: Hirokazu Kore-eda and Bong Joon-ho. Kurt: "One big surprise at this years festival has been from Manuel Pradal's wintry New York set film Un Crime." And another review from Todd: "Too smart by far for the multiplex, The Fountain is almost certainly doomed to fail at the box office yet is is almost equally certain to be looked at five and ten years down the road as a watershed moment, a film like 2001 and Blade Runner that changed understandings of what the genre was capable of, a film that redefines the language of science fiction."

Jim Emerson writes that Darren Aronofsky's "grand mythical fantasy that interweaves three tales about the fear of death and the quest for eternal life, is a terrifically ambitious spectacle that Aronofsky commits to completely... [I]t's exhilarating to see somebody go this far out on a limb for his vision." More from Tom Hall.

Dave Kehr on Coeurs: "This is Resnais' darkest and most moving film since Mélo in 1986... At 84, the eternally elegant, emotionally reservered Resnais seems to be allowing the mask to slip a bit: this is the quietly devastating testament of a deeply lonely man."

Noel Murray at the AV Club: "Woman on the Beach isn't as slow or obscure as some of Hong [Sang-soo]'s earlier work, but it's no less assured and artful." More from Victor Morton: A "precisely observed, finely-detailed miniature of a romantic comedy on the battle of the sexes."

Michael Sicinski on Song and Solitude: "Without a doubt, [Nathaniel] Dorsky has produced his best and most visually enthralling film since Variations, the masterpiece that placed him at the forefront of avant-garde cinema." The only other film he's given a "9" to so far is Bamako.

"Superior middlebrow political drama, mildly frustrating because it might have been a masterpiece in the hands of a true stylist," writes Mike D'Angelo of The Lives of Others. Even so, "this is a reasonably complex and relentlessly gripping portrait of unsought empathy, as well as the rare crowdpleaser that genuinely earns its optimistic opinion of human nature."

For J Robert Parks, Times and Winds "is certainly one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in several years."

The latest big browsable TIFF special section comes via a tip from Eugene Hernandez and Brian Brooks's entries on The Last King of Scotland, Shortbus and Volver at indieWIRE: In NOW Magazine's "Film Fest Guide," you find features, profiles, daily reviews and commentary and, if you're actually in Toronto, plenty of practical info as well.

The most recent interviewees in iW's Discovery series: Bliss director Sheng Zhimin, DarkBlueAlmostBlack director Daniel Sanchez Arevalo, Maati Maay (A Grave-Keeper's Tale) director Chitra Palekar, Griffin & Phoenix director Ed Stone, Family Ties director Kim Tae-yong, The Silly Age director Pavel Giroud and Vanaja director Rajnesh Domalpalli.

Also at iW, Anthony Kaufman: Emanuele Crialese's Golden Door "is unflinching in its depiction of both the rocky Sicilian hillside town where his poor protagonists come from and their brutal experiences during the Atlantic passage and stranded in Ellis Island," Tsai Ming-liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone is "surprisingly hopeful," Asger Leth's The Ghosts of Cité Soleil is a "thrilling hip-hop chronicle" that "speeds along at such a swift MTV-like clip that it doesn't stop and unearth the complicated relationships on display." Also, "Next to World Trade Center, [Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn may very well be the most patriotic movie of the year. And that doesn't mean it's necessarily bad, either."

James Israel: "Like Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley (also at Toronto) which is about the British oppression of Irish right after World War I, Rescue Dawn shows in minute detail how war impacts and destroys individual lives as they struggle with the cruelty and absurdity that armed conflict brings."

But for Cinematical's Martha Fischer, "Rescue Dawn is a terrible waste of a brilliantly talented man's skills, and a profound disappointment as a result." Also: "The Bothersome Man is a dark, nasty little movie that's never quite as deep or as clever as it imagines itself to be."

"If there is a single theme at this year's Toronto Film Festival, it's disappointment," writes David Poland. "It's not the festival's fault... But the bottom line... there just aren't enough festival films to fill the schedule with quality right now."

"It is not that the films are bad; just not exciting," writes Peter Bowen at Filmmaker. "For me, the festival has begun to feel a bit like a Christopher Guest comedy, with the films, guests and city playing out their chiches with perfect pitch."

Matt Riviera: "In many ways this Festival for me feels like a flashback to 1996: there's the resurgence of Queer Cinema (Shortbus), the Australian feature film revival (Jindabyne, Ten Canoes), and with Diggers, a return to heartfelt US indies about men's mid-life breakdowns in small-town America."

At fps magazine, Madeline Ashby reports on the Norman McLaren retrospective.

Gregg Goldstein has an odd tale at the Risky Biz Blog about trying to get the Death of a President team to tell him how much the film actually cost: "With all of the blurring of fact and fiction in DOAP, I suppose the question over the authenticity of its budget is a fitting coda."

Online viewing tip. Cinematical's first roundtable: James Rocchi, Kim Voynar and Martha Fischer discuss the atmo at public vs press screenings and several of the films they've caught so far.

Posted by dwhudson at September 12, 2006 3:28 PM