Toronto 08. Mentions.

Anyone following the Daily last year may remember that coverage of the coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival got way out of hand. There were complaints, and those complaints were justified. This year, I concentrated on keeping the clutter to a minimum by trying to keep a cool head: not throwing up an entry every time a film I was excited to hear about was merely mentioned, but instead, waiting until it seemed that, for whatever combination of reasons, an entry for any particular film was well and truly warranted.

Below, then, is a collection of notes that might have eventually become entries - but didn't. They're arranged alphabetically, by program, though I should immediately add that all notes related to the Wavelengths program have been posted as updates to Michael Sicinski's excellent preview.

Contemporary World Cinema:

• At the SpoutBlog, Kevin Kelly talks with Bent Hamer about O'Horten.

• "Revanche [site] is the kind of taut, thinking-adult's drama that America stopped producing 30 years ago," writes Darren Hughes. "Highly recommended."

• "In a surprising turnabout from the Hollywood B-movie homage of Boarding Gate, Olivier Assayas offers up in L'Heure d'été (Summer Hours) a film that feels distinctly European, unquestionably French, imbued with refined, cultured nuance," writes Michael Guillén. "Assayas has rendered an evocative portrait of the turning of generations and the manner in which beautiful belongings return to the world." More from Noel Murray at the AV Club.

• "A radically different equine tale, Samira Makhmalbaf's punitive film is less horse opera than Dantean circle," writes Fernando F Croce, offering a first impression of Two-Legged Horse (site) at Slant.

Discovery:

• "Matthew Newton's drama 3 Blind Mice is a film about Australian marines en route to Iraq, but the war these boys are heading into could be anywhere and backed by any kind of ideology, so timeless are the film's ideas about camaraderie and duty," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "It's essentially a modern redo ofOn the Town, with ample fist fights in place of fancy footwork, a much more cynical attitude towards the notion of patriotism, and a completely credible sense of verisimilitude."

• "Although the right influences are on display here (Tarr most of all but also a bit of Angelopoulos), although [Kornel Mandruczo] sustains an admirable formal rigor throughout the film, and although there are individual moments of knockout beauty, Delta is starving for a purpose," writes Darren Hughes.

• "A rainy Monday night saw the world premiere of Gigantic, the debut feature by director Matt Aselton, who co-wrote the film with Adam Nagata," notes Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times. "Starring Paul Dano and Zooey Deschanel, with supporting work by John Goodman, Ed Asner, Ian Roberts and Zach Galifianakis, the film puts an oddball spin on what could be a much more conventionally told tale about a young man finding himself (there's a girl involved and not one but two quirky families)."

• "I can't imagine a more apt title for Lovely, Still than the one it has," writes Eric D Snider at Cinematical. "This sweet, surprising story about romance between senior citizens is uncommonly lovely, and a serene stillness rests over most of it. Of course, the title works the other way, too: The process of falling in love is lovely, still, even after all these years." IndieWIRE's Brian Brooks talks with producers Lars Knudsen and Jay Van Hoy (Wild Tigers I Have Known and Old Joy), who are "clearly on a roll." In Filmmaker, Cinematographer Sean Kirby talks about shooting the film.

• IndieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez profiles Medicine for Melancholy director Barry Jenkins.

Gala Presentations:

• "The fragrant aroma of magnolias is undercut by the distinct smell of mothballs throughout The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond (with Bryce Dallas Howard) an admirably earnest but curiously flat attempt to film a long-unproduced scenario by Tennessee Williams," writes Joe Leydon.

• Richard Eyre's The Other Man, with Liam Neeson, Antonio Banderas, Laura Linney and Romola Garai," is "just a twist-delivery machine, incapable of the emotion we humans call desire," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club.

• "There's a familiarity to Pride and Glory [site] that, depending on your perspective, could be either horrendously tiresome or part of the charm," writes Eugene Novikov at Cinematical. "By all accounts it's a middling film, an overwrought and occasionally laughable corrupt cop drama that you've seen countless times. But for me, going back to this world of divided loyalties, broken oaths, outraged good guys, and 'we protect our own' machismo was like settling into a comfortable recliner. An extremely comfortable one, actually: Pride and Glory is moody, attractive and well-acted. I think director Gavin O'Connor intended it to be grim and upsetting, but at best it's pulpy entertainment, a highly watchable series of well-worn, well-executed clichés."

• Patrick Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times on Public Enemy Number One (Part 1): "[Vincent] Cassel gives an incredibly charismatic performance, full of sex appeal and swagger, while [director Jean-François] Richet handles the action with aplomb, delivering some wonderfully tension-filled bank robbery and prison escape scenes. But the movie is undone by its willingness to wallow in every violent chapter of [Jacques] Mesrine's career." More from Scott Foundas: "While it isn't quite as DOA as some other starry, high-profile premieres at Toronto this year, The Death Instinct turns out to be a surprisingly paint-by-bullets gangster movie that relates Mesrine's exploits in enervating, one-thing-after-another fashion."

• Who Do You Love "perfectly captures the essence of Leonard Chess," blogs the Los Angeles Times's Patrick Goldstein. "He was one of those great American entrepreneurs who discovered a new cultural form - urban blues - and did his best to both celebrate and exploit it to the hilt."

• The Boston Globe's Wesley Morris talks with Scott Campbell about the experience of seeing his novel, Aftermath, which has yet to find an American publisher, adapted as Im Winter ein Jahr (A Year Ago in Winter), directed by Caroline Link.

Midnight Madness:

• "Take a quick glance at the synopsis for Jon Hewitt's Acolytes [site] and you'll think you've got the film all figured out," writes Todd Brown at Twitch. "Abused teens stumble across evidence of a killer and rather than calling the police opt to blackmail the killer into taking out their abuser. Seems simple, yes? Think you know where it's going, yes? You don't."

• "I never thought I'd utter these words, but Jean-Claude Van Damme gives an exciting, impressive performance here, careening between action that leaves him breathless and comedy that leaves us laughing, revealing not only the timing and charisma that made him the action star we know him as but also a human side we probably had never imagined." James Rocchi at Cinematical on JCVD (site). More from Kevin Kelly at the SpoutBlog and Noel Murray and Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

• "Martyrs [site], for those festival-goers who stay up for the naughty midnight screenings, is already proving to be legendary," reports Joshua Rothkopf for Time Out New York. Is director Pascal Laugier "a new Cronenberg? We'll see." More from Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

• Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation (site) "offers some amusing and eye-opening tales about what happens to a film culture when government censorship relents and government grants are ripe for the plucking," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "Suddenly an army of opportunists - some artists, some con men - grabs the money and runs.... Think of this as a vividly illustrated catalogue of astonishing smut."

Real to Reel:

• "American Swing is a documentary about Larry Levenson, a former wholesale brisket distributor who in 1977 started Plato's Retreat, the legendary New York City nightclub where - for a mere $35 membership fee - ordinary couples could meet other couples and have free, uninhibited, often very public sex," blogs the Los Angeles Times's Patrick Goldstein. "The hip celebrities of that era had Studio 54, the punk rockers had CBGB's, but the bridge-and-tunnel crowd from Jersey and Long Island had Plato's Retreat."

• "There will, one day, be an essential movie about Paris and her kind, a new La Dolce Vita," blogs Joshua Rothkopf for Time Out New York. "It will touch on everything: the lifestyle, the ravenous media hunger, the strange penchant for going commando. At root, it will analyze what Vanessa Grigoriadis called, in her Rolling Stone piece on Britney Spears, a 'disease created by fame, yet to be named.' Paris, Not France is not that movie." More from Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog, where she also talks with director Adria Petty, and Scott Tobias at the AV Club.

• "By far the most entertaining movie I've seen so far is Jeffrey Levy-Hinte's Soul Power [site], which captures James Brown, along with BB King, the Spinners, the Fania All-Stars and so many more, at a 1974 music festival in Zaire, now Congo," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Originally planned to coincide with the Ali-Foreman AO ScottRumble in the Jungle, the concert was, as Soul Power makes clear, a logistical nightmare and an artistic triumph." More from Bob Turnbull.

• Unmistaken Child "pulls back the curtain on the highly secretive process by which Tibetan Lamas are selected," notes curator Dave Filipi. "The film is visually stunning and is one of those rare films (not unlike Into Great Silence which we screened a couple of years ago) that truly exposes you to a culture or tradition you've never seen before."

Special Presentations:

• "Easy Virtue, an adaptation of an early Noël Coward play, is a droll and witty delight, a superb showcase for its cast, and a return to fine form for The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert director Stephan Elliott, who last turned in the unsettling but incomprehensible Eye of the Beholder nearly 10 years ago," writes Eugene Novikov at Cinematical. "Where most TIFF films seemed to glower at me from the screen, this one winked and smiled." More from the Hollywood Reporter's Steven Zeitchik: "It's all an amazing exercise in creating something no one tries to create anymore. Still, one has to ask why there was a need for a movie like this when things like Netflix subscriptions exist or, for that matter, when a trip to the library would satisfy the cravings of even most ardent comedy-of-manners junkie."

• "Paris 36 [site] tries to do a dozen different things, and does none of them well," writes Eugene Novikov at Cinematical. "But even that description may not be harsh enough, because it makes the film sound ambitious. It's not."

• "By far the most unclassifiable picture to emerge from the 2008 Toronto Film Festival, and no less fascinating for it, Plastic City nominally follows and is about a Chinese father (Anthony Wong) and his adopted Japanese son (Jô Odagiri) as they try and uphold a business of selling fake designerware in a huge city in Brazil," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. "But this is if 'follows' and 'about' were conventionally executed by [Nelson Yu Lik-wai] - who has made two movies previously and is best known as Jia Zhangke's cinematographer - and his fellow screenwriters, Fendou Liu and Fernando Bonassi. But Plastic City is as far from conventional in execution as is completely generic in its nominal attributes of rival gangster-like businesses, men brooding over ethics, family lineage, and retaliation, a strip club with a hooker going straight and a madame/singer dating the boss, jail time and government threats, corrupt politicians and new forms of business and gang warfare. If this sounds normal rest assured the movie is not."

• "The only real blasphemies in Bill Maher's anti-religion documentary, Religulous [site] are that it's not terribly smart and only sporadically funny," writes Jim Emerson. More from Karina Longworth (SpoutBlog), Noel Murray AV Club) and Jeffrey Wells - and James Rocchi in Cinematical, where he also interviews Maher. In the Observer, Peter Beaumont reports that "Maher and director Larry Charles have been accused of misleading participants."

• "Rithy Panh is a Cambodian-born filmmaker who pretty much knocked me flat at Toronto five years ago with his documentary S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine," blogs Joshua Rothkopf for Time Out New York. "Panh is back with a new film, the far more conventional The Sea Wall, from a novel by Marguerite Duras starring the steely Isabelle Huppert as a French colonialist fighting the power. Wish I could say I liked it more than I did (it's loads better than Indochine), but it did put me in mind of Panh's S21 and the fest's occasional, appreciated role as a home for the shocking."

• The Playlist on A Woman in Berlin [site]: "Based on a banned and anonymous and shocking account of women who were mass-raped by the Russians that overtook Berlin in the spring of 1945, the controversial German film, that humanized these female Nazi supporters (and their Russian perpetrators), was a bleak and harrowing conclusion to TIFF, but a super powerful and piercing one."

Visions:

• "In Lisandro Alonso's Liverpool, the longing to remember and to be remembered is so intense it measures as body's grief, moreso than the body of desire," writes Michael Guillén. Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Posted by dwhudson at September 21, 2008 12:13 PM