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Being sick would be awesome if one didn't feel like crap whilst staying in bed all day watching movies,  reading blogs, playing iPhone games, and snuggling with the cat. 

IndieWire has an interesting chart of which Toronto People's Choice Winners scored big at the box office after the fest. Adjusted for inflation American Beauty (1999) is still the champ. Or Slumdog Millionaire (2008) without any fancy maths. But those People's Choice winners sure do have a good track record at winning Oscar attention.
Parade has an interview excerpts piece up about Brad Pitt. I don't want to get too sentimental about it but I consider it a huge blessing when very famous and very rich celebrities actually reveals themselves to be good souls, too. The things he has to say about religion and federal government and affordable housing and adoption and all of these things... they are so spot on. I really don't get the bad rap that charitable celebrities often get -- is it just self-loathing turned outward when people realize they wouldn't be even a tenth as altruistic if they were wealthy? Is it jealousy of good fortune? I don't know. But my point is Brad & Angie: love 'em. 
Just Jared Bizarre contest alert. Seems you can enter/audition to be a voice in the animated musical Dorothy of Oz starring Lea Michele (first photos of characters are also present). The closer all these Oz movies get to theaters (I keep losing track of how many there are), the more naive the producers of the celluloid transfer of Broadway's Wicked look. How on earth do you sit on that golden goose property (which has already outgrossed most of the biggest blockbuster films ever) long enough to let an animated film --they take forever!-- beat you to theaters and live off, profit from and burn out the renewed Wizard of Oz fever that you yourselves stoked? Sometimes the Hare and not the Tortoise wins.

Speaking of Brad Pitt, somewhere in this past week I missed the Oscar Fever rise of his candidacy for Moneyball. It would be so weird if the Best Actor race was all hunky across the board: DiCaprio, Gosling, Fassbender, Pitt, DuJardin, and Clooney? 

Awards Daily snapped photos of Julianne Moore and Ed Harris in a Game Change preview. Disturbing it was (I saw the same one) with Julianne being so spitting image of that one celebritician
Ultra Culture opens the PR package for The Change-Up. Big LOLS ensue.
Nicks Flick Picks starts his beloved "Fifties" column, i.e. best of the year thus far. As always his choices and writeups make you rethink the work... which is what great critics do.
Empire Colin Firth, whose career is still giant-sized post A Single King Man's Speech, will next star in The Railway Man, a POW drama. That is after Tinker Tailor. 
Towleroad my latest movie column in which I order people around. Go see Drive.
Stale Popcorn remembers the character actress Frances Bay (RIP) from The Golden Girls to Twin Peaks

October News and Request For Reader Input
When I was reading this article on Everything I Know...  in which Mr. Caggiano who teaches courses in musical theater history and the neuropsychology of music (?!?) asks his incoming students to name the best musical of all time, I remembered that next month marks the 50th anniversary of my personal favorite (WEST SIDE STORY). The film version of West Side Story, which first hit the big screen on October 18th, 1961 went on to become a huge hit and one of the biggest Oscar champs of all time (11 noms, 10 wins losing only its screenplay nomination as musicals tend to.). On the classic movies note, I wondered, for younger readers especially (and please do speak up if you have feelings about this), if I use too much of a shotgun approach when discussing old movies here? I sometimes suspect you have too many titles flying at you all the time to really decide what to get familiar with (like in those huge "all time" lists). So perhaps we should focus more going forward? Maybe we should try Classic of the Month style loose themes? It would be boring to talk about the same movie -- any movie -- for an entire month but perhaps a loose theme could include all sorts of detours that tie in but aren't too much of the same thing (Oscar competitions, influences, actor careers.

Sound off in the comments... I guess I'm interested to know if you liked the previous theme weeks like Aliens or the films of Tennessee Williams or Moulin Rouge! this summer or if you had to already know and love the movies to enjoy those?

TIFF: A Funny Man, Love and Bruises,... Anatolia

Amir, here, back with more coverage of new TIFF films. The Toronto International Film Festival is winding down but luckily I have a couple of big name movies still scheduled. Here's a few from the last two days.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
This Cannes grand prix winner is a slow-paced police procedural in which a doctor, a prosecutor and a group of other police agents drag an alleged murderer along with them in the rural Anatolia region of Turkey so he can show them where he’s hidden his victim’s body. More than half of this gorgeously shot film is spent during the night and I for one wished the morning never came. Gokhan Tiryaki’s impeccable lighting and the varied range of shots he creates in the limitless but monotonous locale of the film easily tops my personal list of best cinematography of the year. 

There’s more to the film than the actual nightly search as Ceylan gives us indications that we should question the nature of the crime. Supernatural observations, spirituality and religious themes of guilt and faith all play a part in this hypnotic film. At two and a half hours, Anatolia won't be for everyone, but if you’re willing to go along with Ceylan’s delicate look into the social structure of Turkey and his humanistic approach to this crime tale, the end result is incredibly rewarding.

The cast of "A Funny Man" (Nikolaj Lie Kaas in the center)

A FUNNY MAN (dir. Martin Peter Zandvliet) 

The director’s follow-up to Applause (for which Paprika Steen was a medalist right here in Nathaniel's film bitch awards) is a biopic about Dirch Passer (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), one of Denmark’s best known comedians. Once again, Zandvliet has given us an insightful look into the troubled life of an artist, one who’s always faced with the struggle of transitioning his successful comedic career into that of a serious dramatic actor. Much of the film is similar to what we often see in biopics that cover the bulk of the protagonist’s life, but don’t let that throw you off. A Funny Man is an emotional film that can make you laugh, cheer and cry at the same time and there are truly great performances in it. Nikolaj Lie Kaas (of Brothers and The Idiots fame) is a marvel as the late Passer and embodies both his comic genius and his dramatic talents to the same effect. Even better is Lars Ranthe as his partner Kjeld whose subtle turn in this demanding role is sensational. Both actors would have been easy gets for Oscar nominations had this film been in English. The film’s real champ for me, however, is Sune Martin, whose soothing, gentle score is even better than the eccentric work he did for Applause.  

LOVE & BRUISES (dir. Lou Ye)

This was the beginning of my most disappointing day at TIFF. I was excited to see this for Tahar Rahim (Un Prophete) but my enthusiasm died down just a few minutes into the film. Ye’s hollow and underdeveloped love story between Hua, a Chinese teacher (played by Corinne Yam) and Mathieu, a French construction worker (played by Rahim) who meet by accident on the street of Paris was anything but lovely. One-dimensional characters, a sexist and judgemental view of relationships and an inconceivable plot make it one of the weakest scripts of the year.

Rahim tries but the script gives him very little to work with. Worse still, the film gives us a whopping total of ZERO reasons to like Hua’s character who’s inexplicably adored by almost every man she meets. Though, I'd add that my reasons for disliking Hua all relate to how flatly written the character is which is entirely different from the misogynistic reasons the film itself seems to hate her. Lest you think sexism is the film’s only fault, its on-the-nose depiction of social class division is surprisingly even more distasteful. I’d give this film a straight "F", but I’d probably listen to Peyman Yazdanian’s score out of context, so a "D-" would be fair. 

CUT (Amir Naderi)

I’d like to say it was the after-effect of the previous screening that made me abandon this halfway through, but Cut was no masterpiece either. The film opens with a sequence that begs for our sympathy as a cinephile walks the street yelling “they’re killing pure cinema. Today’s films are only for entertainment” into a megaphone. Then, in a contrived turn of events, he becomes a human punching bag for inexplicably violent men in order to pay his deceased brother’s debts. The film’s subpar production values and mediocre acting weren’t helping its cause but I shouldn't express opinions on a film I haven’t watched in full. Perhaps a miracle of improvement happened after I left?  

>Final Weekend: back-to-back screenings of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis follow-up and Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights which has just been picked up for distribution (albeit in 2012), actressy musicals and Joachim Trier still to come.

 

Ask Nathaniel...

I've had allergies or a cold or something all week so i'm slooooow with the writings and the thinkings and the typings and the abilities to do sentence endings due to my whiny hypochondria uncomfortableness. Drive is hard to write about without effusive drooling y'all... and drooling is uncomfortable when you have a sore throat unless your drool is made of chamomile tea. 

We haven't done one of these Q&As in a while so here goes. You ask the questions, I choose 10 or so to answer on Monday or Tuesday. (No cheating with multi-parters or questions that would require encyclopedic volumes to answer like "name the 100 fiercest hair whips in the movies"). Ready. Set. Go....

Cinema de Gym: 'Role Models'

Editor's Note: In Cinema de Gym, Kurt writes about whichever piece of whichever movie was playing while he cardio'ed. I wish my gym would play movies.

Kurt here. I've just moved from my suburban Philadelphia stomping grounds to a cozy new place in Brooklyn (yay!). Thus, no more weekly trips to the treadmill screening room, which, even if it had followed me here, would likely fall outside of my new monthly budget. But, fear not! I logged a lot of hours in that offbeat movie house, and though my scale might not reflect that (what gives?), I've compiled quite a lengthy list of gym films du jour. So, rather than bag the column, I'm going to burn through that Cinema de Gym queue, with a promise that my memory is sharp. 

Anyhoo, our title for today is Role Models, the 2008 Seann William Scott/Paul Rudd comedy about two dudes forced to mentor young kids as a means of community service. The segment I saw didn't reveal what crime led these guys to do the time, but it did feature a pre-Glee Jane Lynch as a characteristic ball-buster, her oppressive lectures showing more than just shades of Sue Sylvester. If not the probation officer of Scott and Rudd's characters (I couldn't tell), Lynch at least plays the woman running the role-model program, and she's rather candid about her history with drug addiction, the freedom from which has given her purpose, but hasn't much mended her social skills. Used to underscore a subversive tone that paints the legal system as bogus and chaotic, Lynch's slave driver seems wholly unequipped to work with kids, despite a constant assurance of her firm belief in the whole babysitting-as-rehab plan. She pairs Scott and Rudd with Ronnie (Bobb'e J. Thompson) and Augie (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), respectively, two kids whose lives are suffering from a lack of positive parental influence. Augie, specifically, lives with his small-minded mom and her smaller-minded boyfriend, both of whom take cruel, alternating shots at Augie's obsession with medieval role-playing.

However improbable, I liked the whole real-life world of warcraft the film cooks up as Augie's pasttime, a population of devoted, armor-wearing super dorks who turn a neighborhood park into their own Middle Earth, complete with duels, a king (Ken Jeong) and social hierarchy. It's a preferable second life for Augie, but his family's shortcomings render him defenseless when it, too, reveals itself to be a harsh place. Which is of course where Rudd comes into play, joining the club of tunic-wearing plastic sword wielders, and finally confronting Augie's troubles at the source. A dinner scene with Augie's parents has an appropriate, if obvious, gratification, with Rudd offering us vicarious jollies by telling the ignorant adults that they're deadbeats who don't have a clue who their son is. It's the scene in which everyone hears what they need to hear, including Rudd's character, who, if we're going by typical plot logic, fulfills his community service at that very point. 

I didn't get to see much of Scott and his foul-mouthed terror, who, as you may know, launched a mini-career as a go-to foul-mouthed terror following his performance in this film. Scott's current lack of work had me missing his presence (a recent stint in rehab offers some explanation for the career dip), and I'm sure if he'd appeared more often I would have had more laughs. The third feature effort from multi-hyphenate David Wain (Wet Hot American Summer), who's got a new one dropping in 2012 with Rudd and Jennifer Aniston, Role Models didn't strike me as all that funny, but it works in concept, and it suggests more emotional ambition than a lot of other titles of its ilk (which are legion, to be sure). Had the Lord of the Rings wagon arrived about eight or nine years earlier than it did (I was 20 when the last film stormed the Kodak), I maybe, just maybe, would have gravitated toward a Renaissance-Faire realm like Augie's, and if my parents were the sort who mocked it, I'm sure I wouldn't have minded having Paul Rudd go to bat for me.

Conclusions?

1. While she's done wonders for Jane Lynch's career, one could argue that Sue Sylvester also highlights how filmmakers have long been typecasting this gifted comedienne.
2. Speaking of typecasting, wouldn't it be interesting to see Mintz-Plasse in a non-geek role? 
3. Jerk parents who put their petty interests before those of their kids are pretty high on my list of love-to-hate characters.
4. I can't say I'm a fan of Rudd's career, but I think I'd get pretty weak in the knees if he stepped in to be my hero.

Who's your role model?

Downton Abbey Returns. The Emmys Are Coming.

Pssssst. Don't tell any Kate Winslet fans* but I'm secretly rooting for Downton Abbey to totally own Mildred Pierce this weekend at the Emmys.

*oops. That's like everyone reading. And me.

Whatever, Downton Abbey is primo tv, obscenely addictive. Closing Statement: Mildred Pierce doesn't have Maggie Smith. I rest my case.

P.S. I'll be live blogging and tweeting the Emmys this weekend so check in, won'cha?