I got a call today from a friend of mine who told me about an upcoming event at the Revue Cinema in Toronto where he is on the board of directors… I have a lot of respect for the folks running the Revue, as they are really encouraging local independent filmmakers with their Drop Your Shorts series of screenings and, now, hosting the Zombie Short Film Festival on October 30th.
From the festival FAQ:
What are the criteria for submissions?
Your film must be shorter than 25 minutes long. It also has to involve zombies in some way.
I have a terrific zombie film, but it’s longer than 25 minutes. Can I enter it anyway?
Sorry…but we need to be firm on the running time, in order to accommodate the viewing needs of our jury and the logistics of the official screening. You are welcome, however, to split the film into shorter segments and enter them as separate submissions, if you wish.
What format should my submission be?
Please submit a DVD in NTSC format, so that it will be playable on a North American DVD player.
When is the submission deadline?
Midnight. October 1, 2009.
Submissions can be from anywhere (not just Canada).
…I’ll bet my friend Craig wishes he’d gone ahead with that zombie-LDS missionary film he’s been pondering for years. Perfect venue for it.
Toronto Star film critic Pete Howell takes an annual pre-festival poll of film critics, industry folks, festival programmers, bloggers, and buffs to get a feeling about which films are the most highly anticipated at the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival. He limits you to 3 films, and your justifications are limited to a single sentence for each.
This year’s fest starts today and runs to the 19th, and I’m heading to town from tomorrow ’til the 14th. Normally, my visit to the festival is planned around the films I wanna see. This year, however, my visit to the festival is planned around a concert I wanna see.
When Pete asked me for my 3 films, though, I chose them without regard to whether or not I would actually be able to see them at the festival. That was beside the point. The point was to choose 3 films I was really keen to see. Which I did. But, as it happens, I won’t be able to see any of ‘em while I’m there. Argh!!
A Town Called Panic
This puppetoon plays as part of the Midnight Madness programme. It is based on a Belgian tv show of the same name, created by Vincent Patar and Stéphane Aubier. As a kid, I was much more apt to pull the cowboys and indians and horses out of the toy box than the Barbies, so it really does look like my childhood toys got together to put on a show. It is stop-motion animation that is charming in its crudeness (I’ll post a couple eps of the show here so you can check it out yourself). In fact, it is, perhaps, that very “backwardness” of the look of it that makes it so appealing to me. Well, that and the absurdity of it.
Life During Wartime
Writer/Director Todd Solondz has made some films I love and when he describes this as being somewhat related to two of my favourites (Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness), I am curious to see what he does with the characters that recur. Darkly humourous (what some more gentle souls might call scabrous) satire is Solondz’s gift… the screenplays are so smart, the narrative structures so interesting, the honesty so startling.
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done
Well, you already know how I feel about Werner Herzog… He actually has two films appearing in this year’s festival. One of them makes me a little nervous–something called Bad Lieutenant, which may or may not have anything to do with Abel Ferrara’s film of the same title (it certainly appears to be related), starring the frequently execrable Nic Cage. It could be great or it could be horrendous. I can’t quite picture it being anywhere in between…
But Pete would only let us pick three films, remember, so I reached for the other new Herzog instead. I hadn’t even heard of it before it was announced for TIFF.
It is based on a true story (which will certainly not stop Herzog from inventing most of the story–on a search for the ecstatic truth, the real truth is just a starting point for him) about an actor who takes a role much too seriously.
David Lynch is the producer. Lynch and Herzog: now, there’s a match made in either heaven or hell, depending on your P.O.V.
After years of hoping for it, I am thrilled to see that the diary Werner Herzog wrote while he was making his epic Fitzcarraldo has finally been translated into English! The only way this could be better news would be if he had also released an audiobook version—I would love to hear him read it. The NY Times’ Janet Maslin has a review here and they have published an excerpt as well.
Do you need a daily fix of Cannes? The Toronto Star’s Peter Howell is doing a daily vlog from this year’s festival (which is more than I can say of my own coverage of Hot Docs, heh-heh!). I’ll post today’s vid here but I’m a bit slow on the uptake, as he began doing this yesterday.
Pete’s daily updates can be found here. You can be fairly sure he will be covering all the high profile films at the festival.
After much thought, I decided I would go down to Toronto for at least a bit of the Hot Docs film festival this year. For quite awhile, I have been trying to decide about it—not really feeling like I was in the mood for it this year, but thinking I’d regret it, later, if I didn’t make the effort. Plus, I’ve read that it can be good to not let grief stop you from doing what you enjoy even if you don’t think you feel like doing it. Apparently, chances are you’ll end up enjoying it despite everything, y’know? Now, normally, I go for the whole 10-day festival, but I decided I would just go for the first Friday-Monday (May 1-4 inclusive) this time. So I got a smaller festival ticket package than usual (10 films + I get in free to all the screenings after 11pm) and made a hotel reservation.
I really hadn’t paid much attention to the newsletters that I’d been receiving from Hot Docs over the past few weeks, so I was delighted to discover that two directors whose films were among my favourites at Hot Docs ‘07 are back this year with new films! And both of them are screening during the period when I’ll be there, hoorah! So I’ve reserved tickets for each screening.
A Hard Name is the new film by Alan Zweig–whose previous film, Lovable, I told you about a couple years ago. Based on that film, a ticket to the world premiere of A Hard Name on May 3rd was the first one I reserved.
I expect this will be very different from Lovable and its two companions in his “mirror trilogy”, Vinyl and I, Curmudgeon, however–this one’s not about himself. In fact, he doesn’t appear onscreen and I’m not sure if we will even hear him offscreen. It features interviews with eight ex-cons who talk about their lives inside and outside. I will go into this film with high expectations.
Unfortuately, I can’t find a trailer to post here. Booooo!
(Incidentally, if anyone reading this happens to have copies of Vinyl and/or I, Curmudgeon and/or Lovable, please let me know. I do have the latter, but only on VHS (!). And, seeing as I never even unpacked my VCR after I moved, the tape is little more than a paperweight.)
Objectified is the new film by Gary Hustwit–whose previous film, Helvetica, I have also told you about. This is the other screening that was important enough to me to make sure I had a ticket in advance.
Objectified is about the design–and the designers–of objects that surround us every day. Director Hustwit: ‘Objectified is a documentary about industrial design; it’s about the manufactured objects we surround ourselves with, and the people who make them. On an average day, each of us uses hundreds of objects. (Don’t believe it? Start counting: alarm clock, light switch, faucet, shampoo bottle, toothbrush, razor…) Who makes all these things, and why do they look and feel the way they do? All of these objects are “designed,” but how can good design make them, and our lives, better?'’
To be honest, though, the first film that caught my attention when I started to look through this year’s schedule was Cat Ladies. As a longtime fan of Cute With Chris, the sight of a film about “cat ladies” (the “crazy” adjective left unsaid) made me practically leap from my seat. It appears to be a relatively sympathetic portrait of four women whose cats fill some kind of emotional void in their lives. One household has only 3 cats… but another has hundreds of them.
I also hope to see Necrobusiness, a film by Swedish filmmakers Richard Solarz and Fredrik von Krusenstjerna. Set in Lodz, Poland, it features feuding funeral home directors, paramedic poisoners, murderous morticians… and it sounds very blackly humourous. Right up my alley, in other words.
I can only find a trailer with its Swedish subtitles but it at least conveys the tone of the film…
Over the Hills and Far Away looks really interesting to me, too. This film, directed by Michael Orion Scott, is about a family dealing with an autistic son who they discover has an unusual bond with horses, and their horseback journey through Mongolia in search of a shaman who can successfully treat him.
Last month, my friend Kelly and I took a drive over to Royal Oak to a special screening of Bruce Campbell’s new film, My Name is Bruce, and the first line of Variety’s new review of it exactly echoes my own comments about it to friends. I’d call it a love-letter to his fans: fanboys and fangirls will adore it; others will scratch their heads. The audience at the Main Theater swooned.
BC was at the screening we attended and did a funny Q&A afterwards. (That, technically, is when I was doing my swooning. Hubba-Hubba Ho-Tep.) People have posted clips of his post-screening Q&As from all over his mini-tour with the film at YouTube. While sound is good, picture quality is pretty iffy on most but here’s a decent one:
