Toronto Dispatch. 2.

From Venice to Telluride to Toronto - if you're fortunate enough to live in these cities, or to be able to travel to them, during the month of September, you will find yourself overwhelmed by an entire year's worth of motion pictures packed into a handful of days. One screening leads to another. One day into the next. One week blurs into the week that follows. Print and, increasingly, online journalists suffer these days in the dark to protect you from the horrible pictures and promote the remarkable ones that might otherwise go unnoticed. A public service, perhaps, but not one that will likely find much sympathy from the reader. You're looking for a verdict, even in light of the expected biases and the unreliability of the juror. "Get on with it," you'll say. You'd be right to say it.

How does one make such an experience more manageable? An option, though not always particularly useful, it to find arbitrary unifiers or themes that can cross or connect otherwise unrelated films. For instance, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, fresh off of its Venice win for its actor/producer (who arguably gives the lesser performance here) surfaced in Toronto beautifully photographed but overly long. Much that fails to resonate in the movie could be solved with some trimming of unnecessary narration - sequences that feature the dodgiest imagery and the worst bits of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis's plaintive score. Werner Herzog's latest, Encounters at the End of the World, documents iconoclasts of the non-criminal sort. Throughout the southern-most point on the globe, the filmmaker ventures to various outposts of scientific research, speaking with a number of fascinating people that he finds along the way. While not consistently great, it is never tiresome and genuinely shows the continent and its few inhabitants without an overwhelming agenda. What thin thread holds this film to the other? Herzog and James were born on the same day. Granted, many years apart.

On the pseudo-doc front, Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg is a distillation of his last few films, as if Cowards Bend the Knee and Brand Upon the Brain! were run through a blender and anthropologically reconstructed. The results, narrated by the director himself, provide a necessary whimsy to this Freudian ode to small-town foibles and mass somnambulism. He sets out to disentangle himself from Winnipeg and, in the process, creates a personal history of his hometown that never ceases to fascinate. Its constant reference to Ann Savage as his actual mother, a well-placed musical cue from Ivan the Terrible and the unforgettable images of horses frozen in a lake will linger long after many other films in the festival are forgotten. Conversely, the less written about George A Romero's Diary of the Dead (or the inexplicably named The Death of Death in the film-within-the-film), the better. Another wasted opportunity, ripe with possibilities of post-Katrina social commentary but rotten with implausible circumstances and stale performances. Read Cormac McCarthy's The Road instead.

Still in the first third of the event, several remarkable literary adaptations are finding their way to these screens and will shortly find their way to theaters near you. No Country for Old Men, Into the Wild, Persepolis, When Did You Last See Your Father? and Lust, Caution, among many others, all show the advantages of starting with an existing work and yet, as great as the Coens' film admittedly is, the best of the bunch thus far is the impressive Atonement. Certain to pick up a heap of awards and, ideally, the adoration of audiences most everywhere (and equally likely to drive folks back to the source material), this is one of the few unreserved recommendations of the event.

Of course, in brief, I'll make a few more. The best work-to-date by several directors can be found in Toronto - the stunning Silent Light from Carlos Reygadas (with the most spectacular opening/closing sequences of any film this year); Grant Gee's insightful documentary counterpoint to Anton Corbijn's equally grand (even if it suffers from the usual bio-pic stumbling blocks) Control; Jason Reitman's solid Juno (any comedy that features a key deflowering to the music of Astrud Gilberto is certainly on the right track).

Granted, some of the worst work-to-date by a few directors is also on display, none more so than Julio Medem's Chaotic Ana, which, over the course of its two hours, takes you from mild dislike to gradual limited appreciation and then all the way to intense disappointment by its resolution. That it fails greater than Across the Universe says less about either film than I would otherwise wish. I will leave that to your imagination since it can create wonders than neither, seemingly, could reach.

Posted by dwhudson at September 10, 2007 10:02 AM