The winner of the Toronto Public Award – and I was, in Ryerson Theatre on the 3th row one of them, this amazing, beautiful movie has a big chance to be also the public favorite in Rotterdam.
Overall I enjoyed the festival. The average quality is high, it’s a real public festival like Rotterdam and i saw some unpolished diamonds, even some polished ones. My highlights:
Slumdog Millionaire. For once I agree with the public’s choice – in Rotterdam I never do -, a fantastic, overwhelming happening;
The Burning Plain. had a rather critical welcome here in Toronto, but I am still fascinated by the marvelous plot and also here: the devil is in the detail (no spoiler, though);
A Year Ago in Winter, beautiful acting , I still hear the Bayern accent of Josef Bierbichler;
KathrynBigelow’s The Hurt Locker, a way to make – if possible – war imaginable;
But that’s only a small part of more, beautiful screenings: Snow, New York I love you, Disgrace, Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love, Three Monkeys, Plus tard tu comprendras, RocknRolla, Linha de Passe, Goodbye Solo.
So what about a disappointing festival like the below par Toronto blog of cinema.nl tells me, without persuading me that they have seen an lot of movies at all.
I had only two disappointing screenings: the Canadian movie Paschendaele and Radio Love, and the latter was rather a question of taste ( I did not like the sense of humour in the movie).
There is a, still a little inarticulated discussion about elitism at this Toronto Film Festival. See this blog and The Toronto Sun . My comment anyway:
As a foreign and first time visitor of the Festival I am a little modest in my own comment, but I hear around me a lot of negative comments of Festival ” tigers” – package holders like me with 30 or more tickets – , especially about the changed policy for the Visa Room Elgin screenings. Though I can not compare the difference with other years, I find the prices of the Elgin screenings ridiculous. Maybe I will blog later over simularities and differences between Toronto and Rotterdam, another big ” public oriented” Festival.
Le voyage du ballon rouge… an excellent movie. Not humorous, not suspenseful, just a view of “our” life, but what a master is this director, Hsiao-hsien Hou. And of course with Juliette Binoche, my most favorite actress.
Wednesday my notebook crashed, so I had a few days a problem with blogging, but tomorrow I will try to recoup my losses.
Yesterday i saw the Cameron Jamie with Melvins Trilogy “BB, Krankly Klaus and Spook House” in a really sold out – 917 people – Old Luxor. It was the combination that did it. Without the movie i should never be thrilled by The Melvins , and without the music I was probably walked out after half an hour. But now i was fascinated from start to finish. And also the movies were weird. Ok, last year i attented for the first time a Halloween party, but that was a very decent one comparing what you could see in the movie: no freyed eyeballs, no guillotines, no beheaded, no hanging, no graveyeard, as all you could see in this movie. And this Austrian Klaus was really krankly..
Mio fratelli e figlio unico; again an italian movie about the struggle between brothers, right and left and the holy family? Yes, again a italian movie about the struggle between brothers, right and left and the holy family; from the screenwriters of Il Meglio Gioventu and with that movie i was even crying in the theater (and not one time );
Alexandra, a masterpiece of Alexandr Sukurov, very realistic about the madness of (Chechnian) war, without even one gunshot, with a classic role of Galina Vishnevskaya, operastar and the wife of the late cellist Rostropovich;
Help me Eros, in the madness of Taipeh (Taiwan), when a bankrupt man freaks out completely in a world of sex and design, an I can assure you that the Animal’s Party in Taiwan does not have a member of parliament ;
The Mourning Forest; I always liked forests, as i grown up in the (green) East of my country and this forest looks like the Mother of all Forests; also touching about the power of elderness;
Bashing (2005), a terrifying story about mass hysteria, from Filmmaker in Focus Kobayashi Masahiro;
Hemel boven Holland, based on the story of Mohammed B., who killed Theo van Gogh, a first appearance of dutch filmmaker Rolf van Eijk, with a beautiful – strange word in this context – play of leading actor Sabir Al Haft;
I almost regret already that i have choosen to write this blog in a not native language. I am looking for the exact words to describe my very mixed feelings about this movie. But i will try.TBS is the dutch system for detaining criminal people with a psychiatric disease, in forensic centres for what in the old days used to be named “psychopats” . It is in The Netherlands a controversial system, mostly because of the escape with new crimes of some detainees in the last years. Many people in the Netherlands think about it as a very “soft” system, though in reality it can be very cruel, especially when prisoners are goiing to a longstay regime, in practice most times for the rest of their lives. Exactly this theme is the subject of the movie of Pieter Kuipers and i was very curious about this movie. But at the end of the movie I was very disappointed, even angry, because i found the movie completely implausible. In scenario, in facts and also in characters. Now i can’t find the exact words why, so that i will do later, without beiing a spoiler of the content of this movie.
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