Fests and events, 9/22.

"To say that this year's Fantastic Fest is a monumental, orders-of-magnitude, leapfrog-the-unicorn, severed-head-and-shoulders bypass of Fantastic Fest 2005 is zero hyperbole: 58 feature films, 30 shorts, and enough special guests (including Darren Aronofsky, who'll be premiering his ultra-anticipated The Fountain) to qualify it as fanboy (and -girl) heaven." Marc Savlov talks with co-programmers Harry Knowles, Cinemuerte Festival founder Kier-La Janisse, SXSW Film "overlord" Matt Dentler, Alamo Drafthouse co-owner Tim League and then picks a top five he's going to try to catch before the fest wraps this coming Thursday. Peter Martin has a quick rundown of the first day of screenings at Twitch.

Back in the Austin Chronicle: "When the People's Choice votes at this year's Toronto International Film Festival were tallied, University of Texas graduate Alejandro Gomez Monteverde's Bella was deemed the audience favorite." And Marjorie Baumgarten tracks other Hill Country successes as well.

More Toronto postscripts:

• Dave Kehr admires Jia Zhangke's use of HD in Still Life and finds Offside "probably Jafar Panahi's most light-hearted movie since he jumped on the world stage with The White Balloon in 1995 - though that's 'light-hearted' in a strictly Iranian context."

• Tom Charity for Time Out. "Most memorable night? Has to be the world premiere of Guy Maddin's delirious silent, Brand Upon the Brain!... Surely this is the sort of night film festivals were invented for?"

• Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Pages: "The festival's most exuberant shock... was Paul Verhoeven's Black Book, his first film since 2000's dismal Hollow Man. Less a return to form than a rebirth, the return to Verhoeven's native Holland cross-breeds the director's scatological cynicism with the World War II thriller, producing an ever-shifting examination of wartime morality which is, first and foremost, a cracking good yarn."

• Gerald Peary in the Boston Phoenix: "The best film of Toronto 2006? Jia Zhangke's Still Life... The best American feature at Toronto? Studio pictures came and went, but the film that stayed with me was Sleeping Dogs Lie, the scandalous and also unexpectedly sweet American indie written and directed by ex-Boston comedian Bobcat Goldthwait." Also, Peter Keough and Paul Babin's list of assassination movies.

• Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly on The Lives of Others and Deliver Us From Evil and then, briefly, I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, Grbavica, Private Fears in Public Places, My Best Friend and Little Children.

• Scott Foundas on the New Crowned Hope series.

• "If moviegoing is dying, you'd never guess it from the pushy throngs trying to see any and everything here during the last week and a half," observes Josef Braun. A pick from the overview: "Manufactured Landscapes, tightly controlled to emphasize scale in [Jennifer] Baichwal's work, might be this year's most vital and illuminating documentary, yet I wonder if it won't also limit readings of Baichwal's rich and multifaceted work to its environmental significance for many years to come."

• David Walsh at the WSWS: "One felt at the 2006 edition of the Toronto festival a far more substantial connection between world reality and cinema reality than was the case in 1994 or 1998."

• Many didn't spot a running theme in Toronto but the Toronto Star's Peter Howell certainly did: "the loss of American idealism." Via Movie City News.

• And for MCN, Stephen Holt for Movie City News: "The Toronto Film Festival, the undisputed greatest festival in North America, has now also become a queer touchstone par excellence."

Ella Taylor recommends Unshown Cinema: The Animated Films That Got Away, through Sunday, but don't take the kids to tonight's "Dangerous Visions" programm, "a terrific but disturbing collection of international short films that cover everything from family disorder to the death of the planet."

Michael Guillén talks with Susan Weeks Coulter, "chairperson of the Global Lens Initiative, about the Initiative's various aims and its ongoing traveling film series."

Michael Fox at SF360: "Fests, and touring programs such as the currently unspooling Global Lens series, cannily promote themselves as community events deserving of media attention. As such, they can attract press coverage that would never accrue to an individual film from Burkina Faso or Brazil by an unknown director with unknown actors. Forgive me for taking a marketing angle, for the great thing about the films in the Global Lens collection, as well as most of the movies in any festival worth its 501(c)3 status, is the way they value authentic cultural expression above commerce."

"Pop Montreal has a film festival buddy, and its name is - shockingly! - Film Pop." The imaginative lineup includes a series of shorts from local filmmakers paired with local bands. October 4 through 8.

For the Korean Film Commission, Nigel D'Sa reports on the lineup for the 11th Pusan International Film Festival (October 12 through 20). Writing in the Korean Times, Kim Tae-jong sees a PIFF challenger in the new Rome Film Festival (October 13 through 21).

"Putting my screenplays aside this past weekend, I attended the Northwest Documentary Association's DocFarm 06," writes Greg Brotherton at the Siffblog. "I wasn't sure what to expect, but the retreat exceeded my wildest expectations."

Posted by dwhudson at September 22, 2006 9:52 AM