Day 9: Agree to Disagree
The end is nigh. The intersection of Bay and Bloor streets — directly in front of the multiplex known as the Varsity Cinemas — has already returned to a reasonable level of pedestrian traffic. But as Toronto 2005 winds to a close, the only thing people seem to be able to agree on is that, more so than almost any other film festival, this one is what you make of it. Which is to say that there are so many films shown here, over so many days, that no two people risk experiencing the same event. Unlike Sundance or Cannes, there's no official competition to follow, no one particular lineup of screenings around which everything else is built. So it comes as no real surprise that, as the experts began to weigh in on the festival that was, doomsday scenarios jostled for position with proclamations of an annus mirabilis. "Too many movies!" was a consistent refrain among those whose moviegoing choices had yielded something other than the cream of the crop. Meanwhile, in the pages of the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert declared, on the basis of his Toronto experience, that "this is the best autumn movie season in memory."
I suppose my own take falls somewhere in-between those two extremes. In the luck-of-the-draw departm
ent, I too came up short a few times, never more so than in the case of the festival's Closing Night Gala, Edison, a ludicrous (and then some) police corruption drama starring Justin Timberlake as — brace yourself — a cub reporter for a Jewish community newspaper who stumbles on to a police corruption cover-up involving an elite team of super-cops known as F.R.A.T. That would make a fine premise fora Zucker brothers parody of a Sidney Lumet movie. But the lead-footed and gratuitously violent Edison asks to be taken seriously — and that is no laughing matter. When Pauline Kael noted that some movies are so bad that they drain you of the energy required to get up and walk out before they are over, surely she had Edison in mind.
Still, a quartet of discoveries like October 17, 1961, Sketches of Frank Gehry, Regular Lovers and Entre la mer et l'eau douce is more than enough to make any festival seem justified in its endeavors. And there were other outstanding works on display that I simply have not yet gotten around to discussing, including two of the festival's best and most provocative movies, Dear Wendy and A History of Violence, both of which open in Los Angeles theaters this week and are reviewed at length in the current issue of this paper.
Michael Almereyda's documentary William Eggleston in the Real World is a study of the acclaimed American photographer who has described himself as being "at war with the obvious," a
nd much the same can be said about Almereyda's film, which is at once one of the most casual and most revealing portraits of an artist at work that I have ever seen. Actively suppressing the urge to "explain" Eggleston or to put his photographs into some kind of artistic "context," Almereyda instead approaches his subject in much the same way that Eggleston does the things before his own camera lens — which is to say stealthily, from a cautious distance, and yet with extraordinary intimacy. There are long scenes here of Eggleston at rest, which some will call voyeuristic or pointless, when they are in fact among the most remarkable things in the film — snapshots of the artist as an ordinary man, as vulnerable as the rest of us, but capable of seeing uncommon beauty in the seemingly everyday as few of us can.
Eggleston's "democracy of objects," and of people, could also be seen to s
trong effect in Stranded in Canton, the distillation of an epic video project begun by the photographer in the 1970s and never finished. Using one of the world's first portable video cameras, Eggleston captured family, friends and total strangers in moments of pantomime, storytelling and drunken confession. All the more remarkable is how unawares they all seem, making Stranded, among many other things, an invaluable record of perhaps the last moment before reality television and the camcorder revolution insured that we would never be less than ready and willing for our close-up.
There are movies that still haven't been mentioned and others that merit further consideration, but Toronto has now officially ended and my own real world is beckoning. Until next year.
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Though it officially kicked off last night, the 30th Toronto International Film Festival really began today, with more than 100 films unspooling at nine different screening venues, some starting as early as 9:00 in the morning and the last commencing at 11:59 PM. By comparison, the New York Film Festival, which starts just after Toronto ends and runs one week longer in duration, will show only a fraction as many films in its entire program as Toronto does in a single day. 















