See our other Toronto Film Fest posts, including:
*Cloud Atlas, by the Wachowskis
*Threesomes at the Fest, Including James Franco + Vanessa Hudgens
*Joaquin Phoenix in P.T. Anderson's The Master

As the summer of self-plagiarism comes to a close, add Terrence Malick to the list of those accused of this debatable crime: The auteur's quick follow-up to last year's The Tree of Life, To The Wonder, is a romance set in present-day Paris and rural America starring Ben Affleck as an American man who has relationships with a French single mother (Olga Kurylenko) and a local rancher (Rachel McAdams). The film literally and figuratively recycles material from that Cannes-winning, dinosaur-conjuring Best Picture nominee.

Malick cops to using actual footage from Life in the new film's credits, but I think the critics who allegedly booed Wonder in Venice last week, and/or the many members of the press who walked out of the Toronto screening I attended before the movie ended, were probably more aggrieved by Malick's unofficial self-appropriation.

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See our other Toronto Film Fest posts, including:
*Cloud Atlas, by the Wachowskis
*Threesomes at the Fest, Including James Franco + Vanessa Hudgens
*Joaquin Phoenix in P.T. Anderson's The Master

For maybe the first hour of Yellow (written and directed by Nick Cassavetes, the man responsible for the national treasure that is The Notebook), I kept thinking about another film premiering here in Toronto, Frances Ha, co-written by and starring Greta Gerwig, and co-written and directed by Noah Baumbach (Kicking and Screaming, The Squid and the Whale).

Frances Ha is a jazzy, black-and-white microbudget comedy of awkwardness about a drifting 20-something (Gerwig) who falls from limb to limb when her long-time best girl friend (Mickey Sumner) de facto "dumps" Frances to move into a swanky neighborhood and hook up with a boring boyfriend. Yellow is a magical realist technicolor drug movie about a pill-popping aging beauty (Heather Wahlquist) who burns her last bridge in L.A. and must return to the hick town where she's been storing her skeletons.

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There's something startlingly noncommittal about many of the initial reviews of The Master that leaked out following the impromptu screenings writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson organized in 70mm-equipped houses across the country, and later in response to the film's official bow at the Venice Film Festival. This is perhaps the natural, if not the most productive, response to a film that, like the central character played by Joaquin Phoenix, resists conforming to any preconceived template of what it could or should be.

In admitting that "Master" Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman, offering a new twist on the roiling vulnerability Anderson has always highlighted in their collaborations)--the figurehead of a growing faith movement in 1950s America--was inspired by L. Ron Hubbard, Anderson set up expectations of an exposé of the origins of Scientology that would satisfy everyone who clucked approvingly when Katie swept Suri from the snatches of the Sea Org. Instead, Anderson has delivered a free-form work of expressionism, more room-size painting than biopic, star vehicle, or even traditional character study, mirroring Hubbard's story when convenient while strenuously avoiding direct representation. As with Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood, Anderson takes what he needs from history to recast his own story, yet he has never made a film so elusive.

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The best, most daring and form-defying documentaries in the world right now are being funded by the Danish Film Institute, and so it goes that the nonfiction knockout of TIFF thus far is The Act of Killing -- made with Danish support and directed by American Joshua Oppenheimer, executive produced by Errol Morris and Werner Herzog.

Hot on the heels of the US premiere of The Ambassador, like Mads Brugger's film Killing uses performance and fictionalization to lay bare shocking truths about the flow of power in a third-world state, but Oppenheimer's moving, horrifying, ethically problematic film couldn't possibly have higher stakes. A testament: one of the producers and co-directors, and most of the Indonesian production staff, are listed in the credits as "Anonymous."

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One man's ambitious, iconoclastic, like-nothing-ever-before-seen passion project is another man's Battlefield Earth, and so it goes that for some of us who saw the film's world premiere in Toronto last night, Cloud Atlas -- written and directed by Tom Tykwer and Andy and Lana Wachowski from David Mitchell's novel -- is a truly stunning misuse of talent and resources, and for others, it's the film of the festival, if not the year.

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Spring Breakers

See our other Toronto Film Fest posts, including:
*Cloud Atlas, by the Wachowskis
*Joaquin Phoenix in P.T. Anderson's The Master

This is a blog post about two movies that were screened for the press within the first 24 hours of the Toronto Film Festival, both of which feature three-way sex scenes. In Spring Breakers, characters played by James Franco, Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Benson "do it" in a swimming pool; in Do Not Disturb, a French remake of the 2009 American indie Humpday, a bisexual couple played by Asia Argento and Charlotte Gainsbourg seduce a drifter played by François Cluzet.

I am mentioning these facts at the beginning of this blog posts in order to attract people who search the internet for information about movie sex scenes -- a segment of the human population which, Google Analytics suggests, far outnumber the segment which actually, like, cares about cinema. To the sex scene searchers, I say, welcome! We will get to what you came here looking for in a moment. But first, a brief primer on French cultural theory.

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"It's hard not to be romantic about baseball," admits Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics played, in career-best form, by Brad Pitt in Bennett Millers' Moneyball.This line, from a screenplay by Stephen Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, happens in the home stretch of a film about the push-and-pull between traditional methods of baseball team building and player evaluation, and the experimental methods Beane put into practice beginning in 2002, after a heartbreaking pennant series loss to the Yankees -- a team with a payroll four times the size of Oakland's.

Tired of being beaten and having his players poached by wealthy bigger-market franchises ("We're organ donors for the rich," he complains, with Pitt giving the middle-aged former player a touch of brass tacks anti-establishment swagger reminiscent of his Tyler Durden from Fight Club), Beane hires Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) to shake up the A's with the aid of math.More »

Greta Gerwig in Whit Stillman's Damsels in Distress

Tragic romance is a big TIFF theme this year. Soured love tied to death and/or suicide and/or beautifully-lit misery has popped up in eight of the nine films I've seen since I last blogged. At the festival midway point, I've seen so many movies hinged on mad/bad romance, rejection and infidelity, that they all threaten to blur into one massive, incredibly melancholic scare campaign. You have been warned: open your heart at your peril.

Some of these films (like Philippe Garrel's That Summer, or the long-awaited Whit Stillman romantic-musical-comedy Damsels in Distress) really deserve more careful consideration than I can give them whilst under the scheduling demands of a film festival. Others (like, say, Alexander Payne's The Descendants) don't. With that caveat, and the promise that I'll dig deeper into few of these movies when time allows, here's a notebook drop from my last 48 hours in Toronto.
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Werner Herzog

Friday was Foreign-Born Documentary All-Stars Tackle Powerful Symbols of America day at TIFF. The scarily prolific Werner Herzog (whose first foray into 3-D, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, premiered at this festival last year before its blockbuster theatrical run this summer) is back with another new feature, Into the Abyss, which considers the different fates of two young men accused of collaborating on a murder: one was sentenced to 40 years in prison, the other to die at age 28 via lethal injection.

The press screening of that Texas-set story preceded Sarah Palin: You Betcha!, an attempt by British documentarian Nick Broomfield (whose work has long circled infamous American women, from Heidi Fleiss to serial killer Aileen Wuornos to Courtney Love) to "find out about the real Sarah from the people who know her best."

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Jafar Panahi and Igi in This is Not a Film

TIFF 2011's opening night festivities were emblematic of the Festival's sometimes chaotic diversity. While a press screening of the highly-anticipated Moneyball and the world premiere of Davis Guggenheim's U2 doc From the Sky Down thrilled the red carpet media at other theaters, one of the larger screens at TIFF's flagship venue, the Bell Lightbox, hosted a free screening of This is Not a Film, the 75-minute video diary documenting a day in the life of Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi.

Panahi has been under house arrest in his apartment in Tehran since May 2010, after spending nearly three months in Evin Prison. The internationally celebrated director (a neorealist who works often with non-actors and real locations, his most recent film was 2007's Offiside) spent nearly three months in prison last year, and is currently appealing a sentence of six years in prison and a 20 year ban from filmmaking on charges of "assembly and colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country's national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic." (Panahi's wife has said her husband, an outspoken supporter of the opposition movement who was initially arrested near a gathering at the grave of slain protester Neda Agha-Soltan, had been working on a film that "had nothing to do with the regime.")

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