Thompson On Hollywood

Toronto Film Fest: More Pics Announced

The Circuit has the latest additions to the Toronto Film fest line-up.

Redacted at the NYFF: Mark Cuban Vs. Brian DePalma

When I first interviewed Brian DePalma on Redacted, his super-indie HD anti-Iraq flick produced by Mark Cuban's HDNet Films, I was surprised that DePalma was so angry at Cuban, who gave him carte-blanche and $5 million to make his film. DePalma said that Cuban had censored his film, "redacting" the photo montage at the film's end, and that his lawyers had made it impossible for him to make the movie he wanted to make.

I feel strongly that DePalma's movie in its fiction form is much watered down and less powerful --it is, on some level, finally, fake--than it would have been if he had followed his initial conception through and made a documentary instead.

When I saw DePalma in Toronto, it seemed like he was regretting the film's selection by four major fall film fests. He was feeling beat up, and it wasn't over yet. While the director was feted in Venice by the Europeans, he was grilled less mercifully in Telluride, Toronto and New York. I don't think DePalma had any idea what sort of maelstrom he was walking into.

Here's the New York Film Festival press conference:

Cuban has gotten his share of attacks as well. Here he defends himself on his blog.

UPDATE: Premiere's Glenn Kenny intelligently parses these issues.

Terror's Advocate: Barbet Schroeder Talks

Barbet Schroeder is one of those brainiac filmmakers, like Werner Herzog, who moves effortlessly between docs (General Idi Amin Dada), features (Reversal of Fortune), studios (Murder by Numbers) and indies (Barfly), in whatever country (Maitresse) or language (Our Lady of the Assassins) that suits him. He's a global opportunist. And like Herzog he's not a bad actor; he does a memorable cameo in Darjeeling Limited as a bemused auto mechanic.

When I saw his ambitious new documentary Terror's Advocate in Cannes, I knew nothing about it. I sat in the huge 4000-seat Lumiere crammed with journalists from all over the world, entranced by this stranger-than-fiction tale of a French lawyer, Jacques Verges, who starts out championing the Algerian war for independence and winds up defending the world's nastiest criminals, from Nazi Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, to Carlos the Jackal. He also had fascinating relationships with Algerian resistance fighter Djamila Bouhirid, whom he married after he rescued her from prison, and Carlos's gorgeous revolutionary wife Magdalena Kopp. And he completely disappeared from view for eight years. Talk about dropping out! The movie speculates about whether he was hanging with his old school chum Pol Pot in Cambodia.

Every documentary is as compelling as its central character, and Schroeder did well by picking the charismatic and complex Verges, who offers the filmmaker a great vehicle for navigating the global network of world terror. Verges is a familiar figure in France, which may explain why the audience seemed to like him so much, laughing heartily when he suggests he'd even be willing to defend George Bush--if he pleaded guilty. I was more uncomfortable with this guy. He is not on the side of the angels. But like someone who has made a pact with the Devil, he is entertaining as hell. And through him we meet some of the crazier criminal characters in the world.

Schroeder suggested that we do our interview via video Skype. So I signed up my MacBook at home and we tuned in at 5:30 PM my time in L.A., 9:30 AM his time in Japan. It worked well: my only regret is that I didn't realize that I could have taken a screen grab of our conversation. Just for illustration's sake.

What are you doing in Japan?
I'm doing the craziest project I have ever attempted since Our lady of the Assassins, Inju, by the famous Japanese writer Rampo Edogawa, the Edgar Allen Poe of Japan, who died in 1965. It's a very extreme and perverse kind of thriller. It's a rivalry between two writers. A French writer comes to Japan. He is copying a very famous Japanese writer. It's psychic plagiarism. His book is doing better than the mysterious Japanese writer. Some crimes have been committed using his book. This one is quite special, with Japanese actors. Only I am French. I'm doing it with a crew of 90 people; less than 10% are from Europe. We're shooting in about two weeks. The French and the Japanese are funding. I use Skype a lot in Tokyo for casting.

Like Werner Herzog, you seem to believe that fiction and documentary are much the same thing?
Obviously there is an exciting part of reality that feels like fiction. There is no reason not to go with it. I consider the movie as much a documentary as fiction. I want to treat it as if it's some sort of mystery unfolding and you don't know 'til the end. This movie suffers as much from spoilers as a thriller.

Eastern Promises: Cronenberg Talks

Eastern Promises was one of the best received movies in Toronto, both by critics and by audiences, who raved over their favorite son, director David Cronenberg. Much as I admire the film--especially Viggo Mortensen's subtle and muscular performance-- I still wonder how the movie will fare in wide release. It's a total smart-house play, much like A History of Violence, which topped out domestically at $31 million, but it's just as violent and not nearly as accessible.

Here's Desson Thomson's interview with David Cronenberg.

[Photo by Jeff Vespa, WireImage]

TIFF: Jimmy Carter, Man from Plains

Jonathan Demme got amazing access as he followed former president Jimmy Carter on his recent promo tour for his book "Palestine, Peace Not Apartheid." And yet throughout the film, Carter remains admirably in control. While he's sharp and smart and chatty, he never really lets down his guard. He knows how to play his persona, which he does almost all the time.

Demme catches little cracks in Carter's genial exterior, hints of annoyance at some of the tough adversarial interviews on this grueling national book tour. But Carter maintains a steely tenacity. While many people are brought around to his strong point on view on Palestine, his insistence on using the word "apartheid" in the title of the book--to spark controversy and debate, he says--may have hurt more than it helped. Too many people were turned off by that. It's fascinating during Demme's doc to see the implacable faces that question Carter, with respect, but with the determination to prove him wrong. Here's Ted Johnson's review. And an interview with Newsday.

TIFF: Toronto Picks and Pans

Here's one last whack at my short week in Toronto (having missed Juno and Into the Wild, both of which I'll see this week):

Ten Twelve best films at TIFF (alphabetical):
Across the Universe (Julie Taymor, USA)
Atonement (Joe Wright, UK)
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (Sidney Lumet, USA)
Boy A (John Crowley, UK)
The Brave One (Neil Jordan, USA)
Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg, USA)
I'm Not There (Todd Haynes, USA)
In the Valley of Elah (Paul Haggis, USA)
Into the Wild (Sean Penn, USA)
Juno (Jason Reitman, USA)
Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach, USA)
Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy, USA)

Great Cannes Holdovers:
The Counterfeiters (Stefan Ruzowitsky, Austria/Germany)
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel, USA/France)
No Country for Old Men (the Coen brothers, USA)
Paranoid Park (Gus Van Sant, USA)
Terror's Advocate (Barbet Schroeder, France)

Great Sundance Holdovers:
King of California (Mike Cahill, USA)
The Savages (Tamara Jenkins, USA)

Also good but not great:
The Jane Austen Book Club (Robin Swicord, USA)
Cassandra's Dream (Woody Allen, USA)
Death Defying Acts (Gillian Armstrong, UK/Australia)
Fugitive Pieces (Jeremy Podeswa, Canada)
Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains (Jonathan Demme, USA)
Married Life (Ira Sachs, USA)
Redacted (Brian De Palma, USA)
Reservation Road (Terry George, USA)

Disappointments:
Elizabeth: The Golden Age (Shekhar Kapur, UK)
Run, Fat Boy, Run (David Schwimmer, UK)

Here are my picks for Toronto's:
Best director: Joe Wright (Atonement)
Best actress: Jodie Foster (The Brave One)
Best actor: Viggo Mortensen (Eastern Promises)
Best supporting actor: Javier Bardem (No Country for Old Men)
Best supporting actress: Cate Blanchett (I'm Not There)
Best screenplay: Noah Baumbach (Margot at the Wedding)
Best movie moment: In I'm Not There, Bob Dylan romping Richard Lester-style with the four Mop Tops
Best soundtrack: Across the Universe
Two most uncannily similar movies: Cassandra's Dream and Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

TIFF: Iraq Movies

Todd McCarthy sampled a few too many anti-Iraq movies in Toronto.

UPDATE: Great minds think alike: Here's David Carr in the NYT. And the WSJ . And Ted Johnson points out that In the Valley of Elah's weak opening does not bode well for the coming onslaught. This is a movie that did not build a critical consensus going in, which it desperately needed. (On the other hand, Oscar-winner "Crash" was not a critics' picture.) I found the film powerfully moving, as did Richard Roeper, but he was unable to mount much of a defense when the emboldened Robert Wilonsky challenged him on the film. (Now the mutual admirers are going after each other.) There's a dark, sad change in Jones' ex-soldier father when he realizes what the war has done to his son. It's not the usual damage that any war inflicts; it's the disillusionment and corruption brought by this particular war.

I do think the Saudi Arabia film The Kingdom will do better, at a somewhat further remove. It's more commercial. (Here's John Anderson's Variety review.) And I suspect the Afghanistan-set The Kite Runner, which is a close adaptation of the bestselling book, has a good shot too.

[Photo: Tommy Lee Jones in In the Valley of Elah]

TIFF: Audience vs. Critics

Three tracks of movies screen in Toronto: high-brow innovative cinema to intrigue critics and cinephiles, movies with news content for the hungry media, and pics that wow the film fans in theaters. The most fortunate--breakouts like Jason Reitman's Juno, Joe Wright's Atonement, Craig Gillespie's Lars and the Real Girl, and Sean Penn's Into the Wild--do it all.

While I've mostly parked myself at the Varsity press screenings, it's more fun to check out the Toronto crowd reaction, even though you have to account for a litte Toronto inflation: audiences here are notoriously friendly.

The mainstream fest crowd-pleasers were Neil Jordan's The Brave One, starring Jodie Foster as a vigilante; Tony Gilroy's Michael Clayton, starring the perfectly cast George Clooney as a conflicted corporate clean-up lawyer; Robin Swicord's chick lit flick The Jane Austen Book Club; Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro's passionate Iraq protest doc Body of War; and David Schwimmer's directing debut Run, Fat Boy Run, a hit UK slapstick comedy starring the inimitable Simon Pegg, which critics couldn't have been less interested in. (Schwimmer found himself returning to the fest on the second anniversary of his last visit here on September 11, 2001, to accompany Mike Figgis's Hotel. Schwimmer watched the World Trade Center disaster unfold on CNN; the film never screened.)

Reviewers, on the other hand, salivated over movies like Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, Todd Haynes' I'm Not There, Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the Coens' No Country for Old Men, the Rumanian abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, The Visitor, Tom McCarthy's follow-up to The Station Agent, and Boy A, John Crowley's follow-up to Intermission. The latter two films both found buyers here this week (Overture and Weinstein Co., respectively.)

An enormous batch of modestly good movies were embraced by some and not others, but yielded few passionate supporters. In that category were Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding, Paul Haggis's In the Valley of Elah, Ira Sachs' Married Life, Brian De Palma's Redacted, Alan Ball's Nothing is Private, Woody Allen's Cassandra and Gillian Armstrong's Death Defying Acts, a period romance starring Guy Pearce as Houdini and Catherine Zeta Jones as a flirtatious con woman. Her daughter and partner in crime was played by Atonement's breakout star, Saoirse Ronan (who also stars in Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones).

Several movies were admired in part but not in full, because, many argued, they could have been edited with more discipline. That list includes Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James, Penn's Into the Wild, Julie Taymor's Across the Universe and Todd Haynes' I'm Not There.

Taymor and Haynes would have been wise to cut some of the weaker parts out of their musical extravaganzas. But it was impossible for them; too much heavy lifting and expense went into creating these ambitious undertakings crammed with visually rich invention. I was captivated by both.

Across the Universe and I'm Not There each hang their structures on the music of rock icons. And they each showcase the color and flavor and style and dissent and politics of the period. But Taymor uses Beatle songs to reveal character and tell a simple story in the form of a movie musical. Haynes uses Bob Dylan's music and six different actors to reveal different aspects of Dylan: the man, his art and his time. The sequences with Cate Blanchett (who won best actress at Venice), Christian Bale, Heath Ledger and Marcus Carl Franklin integrate well; on the other hand, Ben Wishaw and Richard Gere are stuck in the film's two least successful sections.

Haynes is working deep inside the arcania of Dylan. His complex structure is designed to work reflexively, intellectually, to spark recognition among the cogniscenti. The movie will be tough to parse for anyone not very familiar with Dylan's life and work. (There's one hilarious bit when Blanchett's Dylan romps, Richard Lester-style, with the four moptops.)

Taymor on the other hand is more accessible as she spins a universal love story that has nothing to do with the life of the Beatles. She makes their songs specific to her tale. Where her approach and technique are transparent, Haynes' is opaque. It will be fascinating to watch how critics and audiences diverge on these two pictures. I celebrate their artistry. But would it have killed Taymor and Haynes to consider their potential viewers? Their boxoffice will certainly be curtailed because they both protected their vision.

TIFF: Magnolia Acquires In Bloom, Starring Thurman

2929 subsid Magnolia Pictures has picked up North American rights to the 2929 production In Bloom, starring Uma Thurman, which debuted at the Toronto International Film Fest this Saturday. The film, directed by Vadim Perleman from Emil Stern's adaptation of Laura Kasischke's novel The Life Before Her Eyes, was repped by Cinetic Media and CAA.

While Magnolia releases films from 2929's HDNet Films, this is the first collaboration between 2929, owned by Wagner/Cuban Companies, a vertically integrated group of entertainment properties co-owned by Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban, and its specialty arm.

Set in a Connecticut suburb, In Bloom is Perelman’s follow up to his Oscar-nominated House of Sand and Fog.

TIFF: Visitor Goes to Overture

New distrib Overture has picked up its first art film, Tom McCarthy's fest hit The Visitor, starring actor's actor Richard Jenkins in what could be a breakout role. Where was Tom Wilkinson before In the Bedroom? Now he's ubiquitous.

A lot of people wanted the picture but weren't willing to overpay for it. Overture stepped up for what will surely be a marketing challege. But they needed to send a message: we're in the business of releasing this sort of festival film. They have to get started somewhere. You can stop overpaying when you have a decent track record and some pictures stocked in your larder.

Team Variety Toronto checks out the current levels of this fest's sound and fury. As does Mike Jones in Variety's Festival blog, The Circuit.

TIFF: Margot at the Wedding

Noah Baumbach's writing is so precise and well-observed in Margot at the Wedding. The actors deliver the goods with wit and humor. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jack Black are strong and funny, but Nicole Kidman's complicated smart unhappy bitch-woman is reminiscent of Aurora Greenaway in Terms of Endearment, and she runs with it. You do feel sympathy for her, partly because she loves her family even as she tortures them.

It's my old growing up milieu--East Coast writers in high dysfunction. So I loved it. Every minute of it rings true. It reminded me of Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty, which was roundly booed at Cannes but which I completely identified with. Smart people sitting around drinking and talking, with sex and neurosis and fraught relationships hovering. Press reaction here is in the 'yeah, I liked it, but' category. It's a modest fall art-house movie. Which is fine.

TIFF: Piling on Across the Universe

I ran into Glenn Kenny tonight at the Varsity--I was shut out of Lars and the Real Girl, which has terrific word-of-mouth, especially for Ryan Gosling--I'll see it tomorrow instead. Anyway, Glenn was sitting at the bottom of the escalator giggling as he wrote a scathing pan of Across the Universe. I knew it would get laughed at and skewered in just this dismissive way. There's something about an earnest go-for-broke woman director like this that brings out the vitriol, especially when beloved music is involved. Women will like this much better than men--it's basically a romance.

Needless to say, while I thought there was a better movie inside this film---a lot of what Taymor insisted on not cutting was stuff she added to the original script, the filler with Sadie and Jo-Jo and Prudence that is the least effective material--for Taymor to admit that it needed cutting would have been to deny much of her contribution. But she did a great job executing so much of the material.

Either you buy the idea or you don't. Joe Anderson's bad American accent doesn't help.

TIFF: Atonement, Elizabeth: The Golden Age

It was a Working Title double-header today. First, the Oscar contender: Atonement is breathtakingly assured. During Joe Wright's Pride and Prejudice, I smiled at the screen with pleasure. He took you through these people's rooms, their lives, their conversations, hopes, dreams. He made you care about them. The emotions were believably large within an intimate space. He didn't let the moviemaking overwhelm the story, he kept the cuts coming, moving fast, the dancing was spectacular. It felt modern, up-to-date, not stuck in some deadly stuffy period past. And Keira Knightley gave a winning, Oscar-nominated performance. (Here's her interview in the London Times.)

So, Atonement is a confirmation that Wright has the right stuff. Having done well in British TV, when he took on Jane Austen's classic, there was some question about whether he should be taken entirely seriously. The answer is, yes. Wright seems to have that gift for making his stories utterly accessible. Christopher Hampton's adaptation of the Ian McEwen novel is close (Richard Eyre was going to direct, but when he was committed to Notes on a Scandal, there was an opening for another director). Wright gets the info across efficiently--at the same time letting the warmth of summer play out slowly, so that you feel the little girl (well-played by Saoirse Ronan) running through the grass, Knightley's half-clothed plunge into a cool fountain on a hot day, and the loss of something that could never be again. The movie recalls bits of The Go Between, The Garden of the Finzi Continis, or Smiles of a Summer Night. But then it goes somewhere else, to a stymied romance playing against the backdrop of war, like Brief Encounter or Reds or Dr. Zhivago.

As for James McAvoy (here's his Guardian profile), while I've admired many of his past performances, he has never delivered a full-on leading man romantic role like this. He's masculine, robust, and he nails the nuances. He and Knightley are well-matched, you root for their star-crossed romance.

And Wright indulges in a complex tracking shot which is up there with some of the most breathtaking long shots ever--it's over 5 minutes long--across an enormous military encampment after the retreat from Dunkirk. It takes a while before you realize there hasn't been a cut. It's breathtaking. And justified. Not just a stunt. The movie breaks your heart. It's about love and loss and disastrous mistakes on all fronts.

As for the sequel to Elizabeth, there is always a tendency, even at Working Title, which tends to work on a modest scale, to inflate a sequel into something bigger than it needs to be. So Shekhar Kapur has fashioned Elizabeth as a big bombastic swirling camera costume drama on a 60s period epic scale. He brings on the CG Spanish Armada and has Clive Owen as a swashbuckling Sir Walter Raleigh swinging rather foolishly from a ship's rigging. (He's fine the rest of the time.) There's a shameless overwrought quality about this movie that is very Bollywood. (The music is deafening.) Luckily Cate Blanchett, as Todd McCarthy points out in his mixed review, is worth watching. And yes, you can put costumes and makeup on your Oscar ballot.

And Universal will push for Blanchett, who I thought had a shot at winning for the first Elizabeth eight years ago. She's a bigger star now and has won a supporting actress Oscar as Katharine Hepburn. More likely: another supporting actress nom for her channelling of Bob Dylan in I'm Not There.

At the Elizabeth after party, which was packed with members of the Hollywood foreign press, Working Title's Eric Fellner and Tim Bevan (right, with Blanchett) were glowing from the heat generated by Elizabeth (which should play commercially) and Atonement. They've had a very good year, with Hot Fuzz and Mr. Bean, which were international hits.

TIFF: Setting the Buzz

There are two main hubs of activity at the Toronto fest. At the press and industry screenings at the Varsity cinemas, you can move from one line to the other all day and all night; people requiring fuel line up for sandwiches and coffee at the small cafe at the bottom of the escalator.

Just walking between one and the other along Bloor or Cumberland, you bump into folks you know. ThinkFilm's Mark Urman was looking chipper today, having nabbed the Helen Hunt film Then She Found Me, which was deemed too tricky to be commercial enough for the studio specialty distribs. (Fox 2000 had initially developed the project, but let it go.)

The Four Seasons Hotel, or Hollywood Toronto, is lined with onlookers hoping for glimpses of the likes of Juno star Michael Cera, who was toting his bag out to the limo en route to Berlin. He looked happy to be heading for some quiet time: Jason Reitman's Juno is quite the festival hit, which makes the Superbad star the next "It Boy" after Shia La Beouf.

The Four Seasons lobby is the place to ask folks like producer Ted Hope what's happening with the acquisition of Alan Ball's controversial pedophile drama Nothing is Private, which is challenging for distributors and needs some press support to give it some traction. A sampling of non-distrib folks I've spoken to liked it but felt pummeled by its clear-eyed look at some difficult material. One studio marketing exec commented that she had never thought to see so much discussion of girls' periods in two movies in one year. (The other is Superbad.)

Still in the works is a deal for Groundswell/Participant's The Visitor from director Tom McCarthy, which has gone over well in many quadrants.

TIFF: Flying into Toronto; Eastern Promises

It's nuts to take a 7 AM flight; it means nobody gets any sleep. But I was not the only industryite flying Air Canada early Saturday morning.

Catherine Keener was heading to Toronto to perform promo chores on Sean Penn's survival tale Into the Wild, which built good buzz out of Telluride. Bill Maher slept soundly in the row ahead of me; he's joining director Larry Charles (Borat) to talk up their documentary Religulous, in which Maher interviews various folks around the world about God and religion. Ziggy Kozlowski and Rebecca Fischer of Block/Korenbrot PR sat behind me with a hunky young actor from Paul Haggis's anti-Iraq pic In the Valley of Elah, Jake McLauglin. Warner's exec Kevin McCormick was thrilled that Brad Pitt won Best Actor out of Venice for The Assassination of Jesse James. (Lust, Caution grabbed the big prize.) Does it help? It can't hurt. Jesse James debuted in Toronto Saturday night. (Here's the Toronto Star review.) Brad Pitt and George Clooney did back to back press conferences Saturday.

At the press check-in at the Sutton Hotel, Toronto chum Martin Knelman offered me a ticket for the gala screening of David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises. So I changed into a proper suit at my digs at the tres chic Hotel Le Germain, which is just two blocks from Roy Thomson Hall.

Cronenberg kissed each cast member on the stage, from Vincent Cassel and Naomi Watts to Viggo Mortensen. They all give strong performances, along with Armin Muhler-Stahl, but Mortensen dominates in a charismatic star turn in this tonally dark Grand Guignol tale about the London Russian mafia. There's humor, and in-your-face violence--there's a brilliant set piece set in a steam bath where Mortensen, whose lean muscled body is covered with tattoos, fights to the death with no clothes on. But I'm a tad tired of Cassel playing the same old the feckless drunkard lout. Todd McCarthy raves.

This is yet another movie about people trying to hang on to their humanity and morality in the face of a darkly corrupt world. And it's another case, like Michael Clayton or The Brave One (two films generating widely divergent responses) where the movie keeps the audience guessing as to the morality of its central character. Eastern Promises is more complex and challenging than Cronenberg's A History of Violence, which I thought was perfect, so Focus can't be expecting enormous want-to-see on this. Hope I'm wrong.

The annual Sony sit-down dinner at the Cumberland courtyard is always a civilized way to catch up with friends and meet new people--last year I fell in love with The Lives of Others Star Ulrich Muhe, who is no longer with us. This year Sony celebrates their record nine movies here. Scribe-turned-director Robin Swicord confessed to some opening night jitters ahead of The Jane Austen Book Club's public premiere Sunday night; producer John Calley and husband Nick Kazan offered support, along with cast members Kathy Baker, Jimmy Smits, Amy Brenneman, Maggie Grace and Kevin Zegers. The movie should play well for women who read.

Listening to Rex Reed talk shop is a hoot. So far he's high on Foster's The Brave One and down on Clooney's Michael Clayton, and absolutely refuses to go see Julie Taymor's Across the Universe (I talk to Taymor here), on the grounds that she's a theater, not film director. That POV amazes me. All three films should be checked out, because clearly, everyone reacts to them differently. According to David Poland, the indefatigable Roger Ebert is clocking four or so flicks a day.

Oscar Watch: Searchlight Sends Screeners

As Hollywood ramps up to Oscar season, Joe Wright's Atonement (Focus Features) won rave reviews in Venice.

Telluride delivered two adult audience hits: Tamara Jenkins' The Savages (Fox Searchlight) and Sean Penn's Into the Wild (Paramount Vantage). (Searchlight's other crowdpleaser, Jason Reitman's Juno, will play to younger audiences.)

And before Toronto even gets under way Thursday, the first Oscar screeners have arrived in the mail. On September 4, no less.

Here's Peter Howell's advance buzz round-up for Toronto, although his gang's fave pick, Ang Lee's Lust, Caution (Focus) has been tarnished in advance by Venice reviews. That doesn't mean we shouldn't all check it out for ourselves! (I honestly picked three that I was looking forward to seeing, not ones that I had already seen and therefore knew were good.) On that basis, the following are Toronto must-sees, on several levels: Tony Gilroy's psychological legal thriller Michael Clayton, Neil Jordan's Jodie Foster starrer The Brave One and Julie Taymor's Beatles musical Across the Universe. (Not that I'm advocating mind-altering drugs or anything, but that movie calls for being watched in an altered state.)

De Palma Defends Redacted From Venice

Count on Brian De Palma to drive people crazy.

His latest polarizer, Redacted, debuted in Venice on Friday to sustained applause and divergent reaction--see Reuters, Premiere, THR and Variety--and then met a mixed response stateside in Telluride on Saturday. (See Todd MccCarthy's fest wrap and GreenCine.)

De Palma wanted to bring attention to the War in Iraq, 18 years after his own similarly-themed Casualties of War. What he got was a debate about his filmmaking methods. Some admired his high-concept low-budget agit-prop mash-up of different video POVS, from a Marine's video diary to Iraqi insurgents planting IEDs at night to surveillance cameras and a glossy French documentary about a Samarra checkpoint.

And four festivals scheduled De Palma's $5-million indie docudrama with an anti-war message: Redacted now moves on to Toronto and finally, New York. Now 66, De Palma faces his first NYFF. And it may not be altogether pleasant.

The doc hybrid movie is nothing new. Filmmakers are always looking for something fresh and real, a new way to convince moviegoers that what they are seeing is not fake. Michael Moore uses the doc form to sell a political message in an entertaining way. And filmmakers Paul Greengrass, Kevin MacDonald and Michael Winterbottom have taken the art of verisimilitude to new heights with guerilla indie filmmaking techniques in docudramas like United 93, Touching the Void and A Mighty Heart. They throw actors into real situations with real people, they follow them with multiple portable cameras, they make you believe they are showing you something close to reality. They also set an awfully high standard.

De Palma cites United 93 as inspiration. It is understandable that an established studio filmmaker like De Palma would relish an opportunity to skip out on the hazards of making movies inside the big Hollywood machine. The director's first stab at returning to his indie roots, last year's moody film noir The Black Dahlia, achieved mixed results. But he enjoyed being the master of his universe on a modest budget in Eastern Europe; he had fun playing around with novelist James Ellroy’s dark materials.

But during the filming of Redacted, De Palma discovered that indie filmmaking has its own hazards. A brainy filmmaker who likes to provoke people with such films as Carrie, The Untouchables, Scarface and Carlito’s Way, De Palma is no stranger to controversy. He called me Sunday morning from Venice to explain what he was doing with Redacted, which in some ways harks back to his early indie years in New York shooting Hi Mom, Greetings and Home Movies.

Last year during his traditional tour to the Toronto fest to see films, De Palma went out to dinner with some old pals and met Laird Adamson from HDNet Films, the low-budget digital film division run by 2929 Entertainment czars Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner. Standing on the street after dinner, Adamson planted the idea that De Palma could have some fun on high def video, like Steven Soderbergh did with The Bubble. "We'll give you $5 million and you can make whatever you want," he told the filmmaker.

De Palma thought about what would lend itself to that format. He was impressed by HBO's Baghdad ER, which brought back his own memories of haunting the ER when his father was on duty, of "sorrow and suffering. I said to myself, 'boy some people will see this and think hard about what we're doing over there.' HD has intimacy on TV; it's more vivid than film."

The De Palma found a shocking event, the March, 2006 rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl and her family in Mahmudiya; five U.S. soldiers were charged; four were sentenced to five to 110 years. Redacted was "inspired" by that horrific episode, a word that De Palma has been told to use by HDNet Film's lawyers.

"It was almost the exact same incident we did in Casualties of War," he says. "You can't tell the insurgents from the people they're supposed to be protecting. In Casualties of War they were abducting a farm girl. There was the usual frustration trying to tell someone about it. It was impossible to get justice. Everyone wants it covered up and forgotten. I wanted to tell that story again, about Iraq."

The filmmaker is no stranger to documentaries: back at the start of his career in the 60s, The Responsive Eye was about Op Art, while Show Me a Strong Town and I'll Show You a Strong Bank was about the NAACP and the Legal Defense Fund. "I was shooting everything myself in those days," De Palma says. "I was brought up in the new documentary era of the Maysles brothers and Richard Leacock."

But since then De Palma has become a Master of the Universe who directs massive tentpoles starring Tom Hanks (Bonfire of the Vanities) and Tom Cruise (Mission Impossible). How was he going to squeeze himself down to $5 million?

TIFF: Final Lineup Includes Oscar Hopefuls

There's a lot to catch up with in Toronto, which marks the official start of the Oscar race. Countless awards season hopefuls will come out of there either dead or alive.

I've already screened Julie Taymor's audacious Beatles musical Across the Universe (a must-see, no matter how far out it gets); Tamara Jenkins' Sundance hit The Savages, which should get noms for Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laua Linney; Neil Jordan's smart psychological actioner The Brave One (which should earn Jodie Foster serious Oscar buzz for her performance as a vengeful victim of violence); Terry George's intense drama Reservation Road, which pits Mark Ruffalo against Joaquin Phoenix; Julian Schnabel's exquisitely crafted French-language The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; Paul Haggis's In the Valley of Elah (a strong Oscar contender thanks to a fierce performance by Tommy Lee Jones); the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men (also starring Jones, it should last through the entire Oscar season; Javier Bardem will score many kudos, no matter what).

I'll see Michael Clayton and fest opener Fugitive Pieces before I go, and will miss other Toronto screenings because yes, I am going on vacation next week. Peter Debruge will fill in.

Oscar Watch: Tommy Lee Jones Sees Double

We tend to take Tommy Lee Jones for granted. Here comes the fall award season again, with two more great performances from this veteran actor. Oscar voters will have to pay heed to both the Coen brothers' Cannes fest hit No Country for Old Men as well as Paul Haggis's tough gem of a picture, In the Valley of Elah. In both films, Jones conveys depths of sadness, grief and disappointment in the darkness that is extant in today's world.

For the moment Miramax will likely campaign for supporting actor for Jones' honest sheriff in No Country for Old Men (as well as the extraordinarily villainous Javier Bardem), while WIP will pursue best actor for Jones in Elah, which he carries easily. While Charlize Theron is exemplary in Elah as a local cop who helps Jones investigate the death of his soldier son after his return from Iraq, Susan Sarandon in a smaller role as Jones' wife carries the movie's emotion.

Both films will play Toronto, which will prove their Oscar launching ground.

Weinstein Thinks Small with Dylan Film I'm Not There

The Weinstein Co. is setting a very limited release for Todd Haynes' I'm Not There, reports the NYT. At least Harvey knows better than to use the many stars who play Bob Dylan in the movie---Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger et al-- to push it into wider release than the film can sustain, as Paramount Vantage did with A Mighty Heart.

The movie will likely play Telluride over Labor Day weekend as well as Toronto, I hear.

TIFF: Foreign Slate Preview

Kim Voynar at Cinematical digs into the foreign film selection in Toronto.

Jodie Foster Talks The Brave One

Jodie Foster knows how to pick her roles, and she scores with Neil Jordan's The Brave One, which is likely to inspire Oscar talk when it debuts at The Toronto International Film Festival next month. It's also going to generate some controversy for Foster's role as a victim of violence who picks up a gun and starts to use it.

I talked to Foster before she left for Australia to shoot Nim's Island, co-starring Abigail Breslin. (She'll return to do press in Toronto.) We talked about "The Brave One," not her personal life.

Toronto Film Festival: I'm Not There Does Dylan and Across the Universe Does Beatles

I am curious about Todd Haynes' Bob Dylan movie I'm Not There, starring Cate Blanchett and Heath Ledger and others as different incarnations of the folk singer, which will screen in Toronto. Shawn Levy has the film's
music list.

As a youngish Boomer I am all-too susceptible to the music of my youth. I'm also looking forward to another Toronto musical selection, Julie Taymor's Across the Universe, which features 30 Beatles songs performed by U2's Bono ("I Am The Walrus," "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds"), Joe Cocker ("Come Together") Eddie Izzard ("The Benefit Of Mr. Kite") and others.

Friday night I had a fabulous time at the sold-out Hollywood Bowl as Cheap Trick performed Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, with help from guest singers Aimee Mann and Joan Osborne. Cheap Trick really rocked, even accompanied by an orchestra and a sizeable sitar section. (Within You Without You was probably the most dated song.) I know every Beatles album so well that I remember the order of the songs. But there are plenty of others just like me.

On the other hand, I Am Sam, which boasted an entire soundtrack of Beatles covers, completely bombed.

Toronto Film Festival: Final International Line-up

The Toronto International Film Festival has announced the final international line-up. New news: Gala Presentations of Alexi Tan's Blood Brothers, and Rituparno Ghosh's The Last Year; Special Presentations of Julio Medem's Chaotic Anna, Jan Schütte's Love Comes Lately, Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, Sergei Bodrov's Mongol, Hans Weingartner's Reclaim Your Brain, Milcho Manchevski's Shadows, and Cannes Festival favourite Chacun Son Cinema. The 32nd Toronto International Film Festival runs September 6 – 15, 2007.

Here's the total sleection, organized by country:

Argentina

THE PAST Hector Babenco, Argentina/Brazil Masters

Australia

UNFINISHED SKY Peter Duncan, Australia Contemporary World Cinema

Austria

LOVE COMES LATELY Jan Schütte, Germany/Austria/USA Special Presentations

RECLAIM YOUR BRAIN Hans Weingartner, Germany/Austria Special Presentations

THE COUNTERFEITERS Stefan Ruzowitzky, Austria/Germany Contemporary World Cinema

FOREVER NEVER ANYWHERE Antonin Svoboda, Austria Contemporary World Cinema

Bangladesh

ON THE WINGS OF DREAMS Golam Rabbany Biplob, Bangladesh Contemporary World Cinema

Belgium

ANGEL François Ozon, France/UK/Belgium Special Presentations

L'AMOUR CACHÉ Alessandro Capone, Italy/Luxembourg/Belgium Visions

Brazil

THE PAST Hector Babenco, Argentina/Brazil Masters

Toronto Discovery Titles on Fest Central

Variety has a new blogger: indie maven Mike Jones (Filmmaker Magazine). He's in charge of our film festival site and its blog, Fest Central, which will be redesigned and ramped up in time for Toronto.