Ray Pride

The smell of Toronto in fall: turning leaves, newly decriminalized marijuana wafting along the streets, and freshly struck celluloid.

At this year's Toronto International Film Festival, the largest in North America, and a repository for the best work from festivals held earlier in the year (Rotterdam, Berlin, Cannes, Venice), many more-traveled critics, editors and programmers were ruing the year's perceived lack of quality, yet out of 350 programs, it's tough not to find a gem or three.

Toronto mingles Hollywood product with the best of European cinema, as well as devoting programs to documentaries and first time-directors. The year's biggest surprise, for many, was Richard Linklater's crowd-pleasing "The School of Rock," which puts substitute teacher Jack Black in the middle of a classroom of kids--"Daddy-O Day Care"? --and proceeds to teach them to "rawk." Linklater's empathy with the diffident and dawdling among twentysomethings is much in evidence, and Mike White's script is laugh-out-loud funny.

More curdled was the opening-night gala, Denys Arcand's "The Barbarian Invasions," a sequel of sorts to his bitter "Decline of the American Empire" (1986). Miramax has it for Christmas, and it'll be an uphill sell for this unlikable attempt at humor; there's also one of the first instances of September 11 footage in a fictional film, and its gratuitous use will be enough to drive many out into the open. One of Miramax's Oscar hopefuls, "The Human Stain," adapted from Philip Roth's novel and directed by the 70-year-old Robert Benton had viewers debating whether it was blunt or serene: is this mature, plain-spoken cinema or an acting platform for Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman? Tsai Ming-Liang ("What Time is It There," "The River") had perhaps the calmest, most peculiarly sedate film among the forty-five I saw. With "Goodbye, Dragon Inn," he compiles an ode to moviegoing in eighty minutes or so, taking in the activities of the handful of spectators on the closing night of a Taipei movie palace. There are only nine lines of dialogue, but the comic complications are often worthy of silent comedy.

Another kind of comedy grew out of the effortless pairing of Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson in Sofia Coppola's "Lost in Translation" (now playing), as well as from the burbling interviews with the 18-year-old "it"-girl about her aspirations after embodying yet another muse to an older man, that of Vermeer's "Girl With a Pearl Earring," in the film by Peter Webber. Webber's close-ups of Johansson's face were beautifully lit, but also a lot like watching someone watch paint dry.

Equally painterly, if more charged, was Jane Campion's adaptation of Susannah Moore's dark, sexual novel "In the Cut," the story of a New York woman in her forties (Meg Ryan) who's lived the death of romance but finds new sparks with an angry cop (Mark Ruffalo). While the narrative is shot full of holes, and the film's ending is ludicrous, there are many suggestive notions lingering just off-screen. The acting and atmosphere, however, are as perfumed and near decadent as one would expect from Campion.

No one expected the defenses that rose for Vincent Gallo's "The Brown Bunny," (pictured) but with half-an-hour lopped off its notorious Cannes version, its ranks of defenders grew. In this ultra-languorous road movie, Gallo loves the open road almost as much as his own mug. Or his own name: he takes credits at the film's opening for executive producer, producer, screenplay, cinematography, editing, production design, sound and music. And yes, it is from "Vincent Gallo Productions." An equally minimalist misfire, from the talented director of "L'humanite," was the shot-in-English sex-in-the-California desert "Twentynine Palms." Is anyone's sex life really as ridiculous as it almost always looks in the movies?

Neil Young weighed in with a ninety-minute version of his new album, "Greendale," and like Lars von Trier's punishing "Dogville," it suggests a more than passing familiarity with Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," with characters declaiming concerns in minimally appointed spaces. But the touchstone movie for films coming from all lands, it seems, is Robert Altman's "Nashville," shown as part of a master's series. Austrian Barbara Albert's "Free Radicals" made a spirited, cruel attempt to weave together a dozen characters with the most minimal of connections. Gus van Sant's "Elephant," about the moments before a massacre in a high school, rose above Columbine references to something more elusive, gathering shards of everyday experience in with cumulatively powerful repetition and overlapping point-of-view. Infuriating to some, it will be seen and discussed.

Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu's "21 Grams," his English-language follow-up to "Amores Perros" is another story where all the pieces are in the wrong place with purpose, taking a potentially melodramatic story of how a hit-and-run car crash affects three individuals (Sean Penn, Naomi Watts, Benicio del Toro) and turning it into something wrenching and memorable instead. Still, the great surprise of the festival for me was the Irish comedy of crisscrossed lives, "Intermission," in which theater veteran John Crowley and playwright Mark O'Rowe mingle fifty-four characters whose lives change because one character decides to dump his girlfriend to show how much he loves her. Profane, thrillingly absurd, often hilarious, beautifully observed and acted by the likes of Colin Farrell as a shiftless thug and Colm Meaney as a blustering cop, "Intermission" is a reminder that while all the stories may have been told; they haven't been told by the generation of filmmakers we have today.

The movies mentioned have commercial releases or will likely appear in the Chicago International Film Festival.

(2003-09-17)

Also by Ray Pride

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Helen Stickler's beautifully edited, years-in-the-making documentary is a snapshot of skateboarding culture in the 1980s
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With "Once Upon a Time in Mexico," the grown-up Rodriguez lovingly embellished the mythology he forged in the no-budget "El Mariachi," a $7,000 super-8 movie that cost $1 million to blow up to 35mm for theaters
(2003-09-10)

Tuning into Tokyo
A movie like this resists explanation, since its magical, melancholy moods are a triumph of image, music and performance, with plot and suspense a distant, superfluous concern
(2003-09-10)

Every time I see you falling
(2003-09-04)

Short Runs
(2003-09-04)

Tip of the Week
(2003-08-27)

Requiem for a teen
(2003-08-27)

Short Runs
(2003-08-27)

Chicago Underground Film Festival
(2003-08-27)

Tip of the Week
(2003-08-20)

Alienation
(2003-08-20)

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