FEW DEALS IN TORONTO

By Kevin Lally

FJI correspondent Daniel Steinhart reports on acquisition activity from the Toronto International Film Festival.

There seems to be a heightened sense of uncertainty at this year's Toronto Film Festival, as the future of independent film distribution looks primed for some kind of transformation. In the last year, Warner Bros. shut down its specialty divisions Warner Independent and Picturehouse. Paramount restructured its Vantage division. New Line has been downsized. And a number of boutique distributors, such as ThinkFilm, have been plagued by financial troubles. While there are still numerous specialty labels out there, fewer players and company cutbacks point to reduced acquisitions at the festival market. So it is with great interest that industry analysts, producers and distributors watch the business dealings in Toronto. What follows is my own cursory look at some of the films that have generated deals and interest at the festival.

The festival kicked off last week with a spurt of acquisition announcements for a handful of films playing in Toronto. Regent Releasing picked up the North American rights for Brillante Mendoza's Serbis, a Filipino film about a family-run porn house. Like Tsai Ming-liang's Goodbye, Dragon Inn, which centers on another shambolic movie theatre, the main point of interest is not the films playing on the screen, but the action taking place off-screen. The theatre is alive with hustlers cruising in the shadows, a wild goat on the loose, a purse snatcher chased by a cop, a projectionist tending to a festering boil on his rump, and the management family, who are suffering from the strain of adultery and personal missteps. A melodrama of sorts, the film has great kinetic camerawork, which seems to take its cue from the bustle of the theatre's encroaching Manila neighborhood.

Another welcome acquisition was Cinema Guild's securing of U.S. rights for Jia Zhang-ke's part-documentary, part-fabrication, 24 City. Jia conducts a series of interviews with workers�both real and invented�of the state-owned Factory 240, which is being shut down to make room for a new housing community. Like some of the director's previous films, 24 City details the effects of the modernization of China, but in this film, he accomplishes the task mainly through direct talking-head interviews. While there are some elegant shots of industrial spaces, the film spends most of its time with the interviewees, recording life stories that are rich and moving.

The other documentary distribution deal was Strand Releasing's pickup of Terence Davies' Of Time and the City. (See previous TIFF post for my brief assessment of the film.) Cinema Guild and Strand should be commended for acquiring these challenging works, but how extensively they'll be distributed remains to be seen. Unfortunately, this burst of acquisition activity didn't seem to carry into the rest of the festival. Reports of new deals died down until early this week.

The big news in Toronto came on Sunday, when Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler won the top prize, the Golden Lion, at the Venice Film Festival. By the time of the film's packed press and industry screening on Monday, word was already trickling in that Fox Searchlight had inked a distribution deal. As I watched the film, I couldn't help but wonder why the Venice jury had awarded the film. (Perhaps, it's more telling of this year's competitive lineup at Venice.) While it's actually a pretty good movie, it's far from a top-tier festival winner. The film concerns an aging pro wrestler named Randy "The Ram" Robinson (Mickey Rourke), whose fame has faded and who must scrape by on the independent fighting circuit. The movie seems to be at once an ironic take on the kind of underdog he-man vehicles that Sly Stallone produced in the late '70s and '80s and very much of a piece with that cycle of films. A fight is presented out of sequence, denying us the kind of sympathetic alignment that the Rocky fight sequences excelled in and instead focusing our attention on the bodily destruction that The Ram puts himself through. But the film also aims directly for the heart, in no small measure through Rourke's performance. Rourke delivers a strong emotional portrayal, but it is also a great bodily show. We see his character either lumbering around, protected by a uniform of threadbare parka, baggy jeans, work boots, and tangle of long blond hair, or else strutting around the ring showing-off his roided-out, battle-scarred body. Fox Searchlight is aiming for a December release, so expect an aggressive awards campaign for Rourke.

A couple of other films have drummed up interest, but so far no deals. The Burning Plain from screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel) was highly anticipated but didn't seem to attract any buyers. (Unfortunately, I missed the film to nurse an oncoming cold. Yes, four films a day and moving from air-conditioned theatres to rainy streets can take its toll on the body.) Also, Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles met with general approval but no deals. The film takes up a much-fabled event for movie and theatre lovers: Orson Welles' staging of a fascist-themed Julius Caesar at the Mercury Theatre in 1937. I found the film very likeable, with a spot-on performance by Christian McKay as Welles.

There are still four more days left in the festival and so many films here that deserve to be seen by more than just festival audiences. Let's hope that for the good of the market and film culture, business picks up.

Perturbed by Disturbia

By Sarah Sluis

Disturbia, last year's knockoff of Rear Window, a fact mentioned by every critic to review the film, Film Journal's included, has just been smacked with a lawsuit alleging that it ripped off the short story used for the plot of Rear Window.  DreamWorks (including its co-founder Steven Spielberg), its parent company Viacom, and Universal were named as defendants.  Given the similarity between the two films, it's embarrassing that this was just noticed.  In fact, a similar lawsuit was brought to court in 1998 by Sheldon Abend over television rights to Rear Window, so it's not as if this property has been lying unnoticed since 1954.  Abend, executive producer of Rear Window and owner of the rights, died in 2003, leaving Sheldon Abend Revocable Trust to do the job�and apparently the lawyers are sleeping on the job.

Mean Girls sidekick turned Mamma Mia! star Amanda Seyfried has taken a cue from her other Mean Girls co-star, Rachel McAdams (The Notebook), and signed onto a Nicholas Sparks adaption.  The film, Dear John, chronicles the romance between a do-gooder college student and a soldier on leave.  They fall in love the summer before 9/11, but their romance receives the ultimate test when John goes back overseas after the terrorist attacks.

Up in Toronto, the big news was Fox Searchlight's acquisition of The Wrestler.  With a nod to Mickey Rourke's has-been star persona, he plays a fading semi-pro wrestler who tries to connect with his daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) and a similarly aging stripper (Marisa Tomei) as his success in the ring diminishes.  The film, which won the Golden Lion at Venice, will release in the U.S. this December.  Just in time for Oscar season�could this be another De Niro in Raging Bull?

Worst Weekend Box Office in Eight Years

By Sarah Sluis

With stale and meager offerings, America pretty much stopped going to the movies last weekend. They made the right decision. No film broke $10 million, making this the worst domestic box office in eight years. The one new release, Thai remake Bangkok Dangerous, barely beat the existing offerings, and came in at number one just ahead of Tropic Thunder. This star-studded comedy has shown surprising legs, and is approaching the $100 million mark�if only that wasn't also the production budget. No doubt word-of-mouth has helped extend its run. The Tom Cruise cameo as a studio exec apparently is worth checking out, and the trailer always got a smattering of chuckles from the audience when I saw it in theatres earlier this summer.

Bangkok Dangerous belongs to a subset of English-language remakes of South/East Asian action film.   With a B-list budget and effort, the underwhelming $7.8 million take only prompted a disappointed shrug from execs. I don't think the lackluster performance of this film speaks to a softening of the remake market, but rather that with the success of films like Oscar-winner The Departed (a remake of Infernal Affairs), and the spate of Japanese horror films, producers have gotten less picky in choosing what films to remake.

Overseas, Mamma Mia! came in number one at the box office, speaking to the transcontinental appeal of European group ABBA. While ABBA might have sold tickets, along with familiar music comes gorgeous visuals: a saturated-blue Mediterranean sea and perhaps the most cinematic use of fabric in recent memory, surely inspired by some Bollywood viewings. I heartily endorse this film's success, and am willing to ignore the awkwardness of the unchoreographed moments in the film. 

Next week finally brings some box-office draws: The Coen brother's Burn After Reading, and the remake of The Women. Look for more information Friday as I delve deep into next week's box-office outlook.

U.K. SCORES IN TORONTO

By Kevin Lally

FJI correspondent Daniel Steinhart files the first of several reports from the busy Toronto International Film Festival.

One of the most daunting tasks facing any dedicated festivalgoer is arranging a screening schedule. With 409 features and shorts (by my count) at this year's edition of the Toronto International Film Festival, this is a task that requires military-like strategizing. You need to consider running time, if a film will have more than one screening, and how you want your day to flow. Difficult art films in the morning when critical faculties are sharpest? Or livelier genre fare to rouse you from the morning daze? Fortunately, geography is rarely an issue, since most press and industry screenings are clustered at the Manulife Centre, making it easy to slip out of one screening as the end credits roll and saunter across the hall into another screening just as the opening credits come on. Certainly, this can make for jarring juxtapositions. I left the screening of Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir with images of Lebanese refugee camp massacres seared into my brain, then immediately sat down for the cartoon violence of Kim Jee-woon's kimchi-western The Good, The Bad, The Weird. Such are the challenges of navigating the film festival world!

So where to begin with such a massive offering of films? There are high-profile U.S. films, such as the Coen Brothers' Burn After Reading and Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married, which will make their fall bow in the coming weeks. There's new work in the Discovery, Vanguard and Visions sections, which showcase emerging filmmaking talents from around the world. In the Wavelengths section, there's new experimental work from old masters such as Nathaniel Dorsky, Pat O'Neill and James Benning. My strategy is to go eclectic�a sampling of everything. But to start off, I felt compelled to catch up on the films that made a stir at this year's Cannes Film Festival and now make their appearance in North America. Perhaps it's a good way to get a sense of the movie trends that will unfurl over the next year.

If we are to look to any region for new exciting work, we should look to the U.K. In the first three days of the festival, I've seen three stellar films from there. Most formidable was visual artist Steve McQueen's Hunger, a film of intensity, brutality and formal precision. Set in 1981 during the IRA's deadly attacks and the Thatcher government's repressive response, the film charts the events that occurred at Maze Prison outside Belfast. Denied political status, IRA prisoners are stripped of basic human rights. In reaction, the prisoners protest through every unthinkable action. And in turn, the prison guards resort to all-out torture. This is a film of few words and it takes time for the main player to emerge: the prisoners' leader Bobby Sands (impressively played by Michael Fassbender). In the film's centerpiece, a daring long take (I lost count at about 15 minutes) captures Sands laying out the rationale for going on a hunger strike to a Catholic priest. What follows is a graphic and near-wordless depiction of Sands' bodily degradation that demonstrates the physical and psychic limits that the strike leader was willing to push himself to.

Far less brutal, but no less aesthetically forceful is Duane Hopkins' Better Things. Set in England's rural Cotswolds, the film follows various interweaving storylines of drugged-out teenagers and declining seniors, all experiencing the loss of or estrangement from loved ones. Hopkins, another visual artist, exploits the expressive possibility of the medium to link the various characters. Instead of structuring the film with a cause-and-effect flow of action, the scenes are strung together using an idea, a gesture, a repeated pattern, or an overlapping sound. This is the kind of micro-level storytelling one finds more often in experimental film, but here, this approach gives the film a poetic charge and serves to visually connect characters who can't seem to make those human connections themselves.

Fresh from a newly inked U.S. distribution deal with Strand Releasing, Terence Davies' Of Time and the City is both an essay film and memory piece. The city of Liverpool commissioned Davies to make a film in commemoration of its selection as the 2008 European Capital of Culture. What he produced is at once a celebration of and acerbic broadside at his birth city. Over stock footage of Liverpool throughout the 20th century and recently shot footage, Davies dwells on cinema, music, soccer, religion, community, nationalism, and the strange land that his city has become. The filmmaker is generous and erudite in his remarks and recollections and one emerges from the film feeling well nourished. Kudos to Strand for picking this one up.

And then there was the film Liverpool, which actually isn't even a British film and really doesn't have much to do with the titular city, but it deserves mention. I would make the case that this Argentine film from Lisandro Alonso is part of a trend of contemporary international art cinema marked by long takes, de-dramatized performances, loose plotting, glacial pacing�and I eat this stuff up. On the surface not much happens in this film: A seaman takes shore leave at the tip of the South American continent in order to visit his ailing mother. The film follows his arduous journey to his small village, where few people recognize him. Then he departs, leaving only the audience to witness the village's quotidian routines. There's little action and little dialogue, but the film's real interest seems to lie in its attempt to convey the seaman's estrangement from his surrounding in nearly every shot, either through composition, landscape, or the juxtaposition of actions. This is a film that requires patience, but I think that patience is rewarded with a work of great beauty.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. So many more films to consider. More to come�

del Toro snags Hobbit; Universal Resurrects more Monsters

By Sarah Sluis

Making good on the adage "when it rains, it pours" Guillermo
del Toro has not only snagged the directorial duties for The Hobbit, which will tie him up for the next four years, but he
also has managed to keep Universal committed to the four projects they had been
planning with him: Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Slaughterhouse-Five and upcoming novel Drood.

Putting up with a four-year setback on these projects marks
a pretty big commitment for Universal. In a statement to Variety,
production president Donna Langley said the decision was made after some "tough
conversations," which sounds like a pretty juicy understatement.

Universal also admitted that it's willing to be patient in
order to have the right vision, citing upcoming film Wolf Man (grainy, leaked trailer here) as an example where it paid
off to use an experienced director. The
film, helmed by Joe Johnston, who started out working on special effects in Star Wars and has since directed Honey, I Shrunk the Kids! and Jumanji, is scheduled for a June
release, and will likely be a Universal tentpole.

If plans to develop Universal monster properties Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll come through, the studio will be well on their way to
remaking most of their monster franchises. Its reincarnation of The Mummy
(although not in a plot sense) has already spawned its third sequel. Looking at their other properties, I would
not be surprised if we see another Invisible
Man or Creature of the Black Lagoon
in development a few years down the line.

Fall Releases: 'The Reader' and 'Slumdog Millionaire'

By Sarah Sluis

While we are still several holidays away from the Oscars, Halloween costumes are already in stores, and studios are starting to make their programming chess moves for Oscar season. Documentaries have already made their move, quickly squeezing in a barely advertised week-long run in order to meet the documentary submission deadline of September 2, 2008.

The Weinstein Co. hopes to move up their film The Reader, starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes, to a December release, in hopes that the film can rack up some nominations. The film, which covers that Oscar-friendly subject of World War II, war crimes, and the Holocaust, is also a high-profile literary adaptation (Translated from Swedish and featured on Oprah's Book Club). The whole package screams Oscar�but can it deliver?

Slumdog Millionaire, while not an Oscar contender, has also received a marketing boost through a
change in distribution. Previously planned as the last release of now-shuttered Warner Independent Pictures, the film is now being distributed by Fox Searchlight and Warner Bros.. The film centers around a Hindi boy hustler suspected of cheating on a "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?"-type show (pictured on the right). Director Danny Boyle, whose films encompass every genre imaginable (horror, romantic comedy, kid pictures), has had some hits and misses. I didn't care for his previous kid-oriented picture, Millions (which incidentally also covered a boy stumbling into wealth) but Slumdog Millionaire might be different�it was the buzz winner of the Telluride Film Festival.  The film will release in the United States on November 28, 2008.

In other topical news, photoshopped posters of last year's Oscar nominee for Best Picture, Juno (retitled as Juneau, get it?), have been circulating the internet, showing up on Cinematical, Defamer, and NYMag, so check them out for some mid-week entertainment/political commentary.

Tropic Thunder Continues to Rumble

By Sarah Sluis

With no significant new releases to challenge its action-comedy dominance, the big news today was Tropic Thunder's ability to hold on to the top spot for the third week running, with just an 11% drop in revenue.

Among new releases, Babylon A.D. managed to come in second with a $14.3 million take, despite abysmal reviews, including a 4% rating on critical aggregator RottenTomatoes. Traitor, the other action release, picked up $10 million at #5.

Of the three teen-oriented pictures, only one, Disaster Movie (#7), made the top ten, with College and Hamlet 2 settling in at spots #15 and #17. With most teens and college students already back on campus or gearing up for the start of the school year, low teen turnout comes as no surprise.

Mamma Mia! was able to boost its take slightly (2% over the weekend) by adding a sing-along to 299 of the 1,968 theatres playing the Meryl Streep musical. Last year this approach was tried by competing studio New Line with Hairspray. This tactic has long been used on the small screen with Disney original movies, including the much-hyped High School Musical series.

Woody Allen's Vicky Christina Barcelona also increased its take over Labor Day, and looks to be a financial success on par with Scoop. Hamlet 2 opened in wide release over the weekend, increasing its take, but with a per-screen average of only $1k, it will likely cut down on the number of theatres in release. With only one wide release this Friday, Nicolas Cage thriller Bangkok Dangerous, most of these films will remain in the top ten through next week.