I’ve been back from Toronto since Wednesday, but haven’t been blogging because I needed to catch up on sleep and a lot of other things — like writing my annual Oscar-oriented Toronto piece that’s running in Monday’s print edition (which I just updated with a reference to the Weinstein schmaltzfest “The Silver Linings Playbook” winning the coveted audience award, which, alas, is often an Oscar harbinger). Overall, this struck me as the strongest lineup I’ve seen in my 12 trips up north. It was certainly one of the toughest for me to schedule — lots of high-profile films were press-screened opposite each other, and even after catching some at public performances, there were titles I very much wanted to see (like “The Place Beyond the Pines”) that I just couldn’t work in, even after foregoing all but one foreign-language film (I saw a couple pre-fest in New York) and documentaries (ditto).
The festival also reported brisk business among the many films that came into the festival seeking distribution — 29 titles have been bought for the U.S. alone so far, and typically more will close in coming months when sellers accept more realistic deals than their original asking price. Among the higher profile titles that sold were the aforementioned “The Place Beyond the Pines” as well as such star-driven filmsas “What Maisie Knew,” “Thanks for Sharing,”’ “Much Ado About Nothing,” “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” and the intruiging-sounding closing night film, “Emperor,” starring Tommy Lee Jones as Gen. Douglas McArthur, which screened well after I left Toronto.
Variety reports the highest-profile title not yet acquired in Terence Malick’s “To The Wonder,” which has reportedly been shunned by U.S. distributors since it was sold to potential buyers during the Cannes Film Festival. While it was an apt choice for 9/11 showing in Toronto, Malick’s quickly-made followup to “The Tree of Life” is even less commercial, despite the presence of Ben Affleck in the lead and Javier Bardem and Rachel McAdams in supporting roles. Basically it’s a plotless, beautifully shot (of course) and fairly tedious tone poem about the impossibility of love (or something like that) with snippets of dialogue that are even more inscrutable than those in its predecessor. Don’t worry, you’ll definitely get a chance to see this eventually; foreign pre-sale contracts for high profile usually require U.S. distribution; it’s just a matter of striking a deal that won’t lose somebody here too much money.
Other disappointments I saw in Toronto that didn’t really warrant a full blog post included: “The Iceman,” a sketchy profile of a notorious New Jersey contract killer of the ’60s and ’70s that largely wastes a fine performance by Michael Shannon, Winona Ryder, Ray Liotta and even Chris Evans; “Arthur Newman,” a plodding road dramedy starring two of my favorites, Colin Firth (with one of the strangest American accents I’ve ever heard) and Emily Blunt, as strangers trying to escape their pasts; and Mike Newell’s new version of “Great Expectations,” utterly forgettable except for Helena Bonham Carter’s splendid Miss Havisham and the many closeup of Jeremy Irvine’s Pip that suggest 19th-century English dentistry was far more advance than previously suspected. As far as I know, none of these has been sold to a U.S. distributor.