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The Toronto Star
April 13, 2005 Wednesday
Truth vs. Violence for film fest opening slot
Martin Knelman, Toronto Star
Opening night of the Toronto International Film Festival's 30th
incarnation is almost five months away, but we can already offer some
guesses about what might be on the screen at Roy Thomson Hall on
Thursday, Sept. 8.
It shapes up as a rematch between those longtime friends and
sometimes rivals, Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg. And for festival
CEO Piers Handling, 2005 could seem like a replay of 2002 - the year
Handling had to make a tricky choice between movies by these two
directors most closely associated with the festival.
That year the festival opened with Egoyan's Ararat, an ambitious but
rather academic look at the 1915 genocide in which Egoyan's Armenian
ancestors were the victims and the Turks were the oppressors.
Spider, Cronenberg's best movie in years, was given a gala slot
midway through the festival. It was a riveting portrait of a mentally
disturbed misfit wandering the drab streets of London. But the
thinking was that it was too dark and edgy to be palatable for the
glitzy, corporate crowd on opening night.
In 2005, Egoyan and Cronenberg both have movies scheduled to be
released in the fall. And good reports are coming back from early
screenings of both.
In this corner: Where the Truth Lies, a black comedy that its
producer, Robert Lantos, hopes will carry Egoyan into the mainstream.
It has to, given its $26-million budget. According to word from last
week's sneak screening for select industry insiders of an unfinished
version, it shapes up as a smart, entertaining audience-pleaser.
Formerly known as Somebody Loves You, Egoyan's movie tells the story
of a showbiz duo (played by Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth) who break up
for mysterious reasons. The plot - which veers between 1959 and 1975
- is set in motion by a celebrity interviewer (Alison Lohman) who
raises certain sensational questions. Sex, drugs and the Mafia figure
in the plot, and so does the discovery of a dead woman's body in a
hotel room.
In the other corner: Cronenberg's latest movie A History of Violence,
which its U.S. distributor, New Line Films, recently test-screened in
Pasadena. Viggo Moretensen plays an apparently charming, happy family
man living with his wife (Maria Bello) in a lovely small town in the
U.S. Midwest. But their life is shattered when another Mafia figure
(Ed Harris) turns up, mistaking Mortensen for someone else - and
plunging him into a violent struggle.
Cronenberg is already preparing for his next movie Painkillers, which
will be produced jointly by Lantos and his sometimes partner Andras
Hamori - the provocative Hungarian emigre who worked in Toronto
throughout the 1980s before moving to Los Angeles. There he has built
a new career as an independent producer of such edgy pictures as Max
(2003), in which one of the characters was the young Adolf Hitler.
Hamori, a Canadian citizen, is almost sure to be returning to the
2005 Toronto film festival with Fateless, a daring Holocaust drama
that created a stir in February at the Berlin Festival. Nigel
Andrews, film critic for London's Financial Times, wrote that the
jury should have given its top award, the Golden Bear, to this
Hungarian movie based on an autobiographical novel by Nobel
Prize-winner Imre Kertesz. Andrews also chose Fateless's Lajos
Koltai, a former cameraman, as the festival's top director.
The film tells the story of Gyuri, a young Jewish man who comes of
age amid the horrors of a concentration camp after being deported
from Budapest. When the camp is liberated, he returns home - only to
discover that he is not exactly welcome. Former friends and
neighbours react to him with shock, embarrassment and
incomprehension.
Trudy Desmond, the marvellous jazz singer who died five years ago at
the peak of her career, makes a posthumous return in a terrific new
CD, A Dream Come True: the Best of Trudy Desmond. It includes
material from earlier albums such as Make Me Rainbows, Tailor Made
R.S.V.P. and My One and Only. And it offers an opportunity for
connoisseurs of the great American songbook to discover Desmond.
Desmond was a funny girl from Brooklyn who landed in Toronto circa
1970 when offered a part in the revue Spring Thaw. Despite occasional
periods in New York or Los Angeles, she spent most of the next three
decades here. You may have seen her opening for George Burns at the
O'Keefe Centre. George should have been opening for Trudy, but she
never became the kind of star whose name sells a lot of tickets.
At one point, she quit show business and set up an interior design
business. It was successful, but she wasn't happy. Then in the late
1980s, she began appearing in spots like George's Spaghetti House and
the Montreal Bistro. But the perfect room for her was the Top o' the
Senator. She was at home there, the perfect cabaret singer. She
seemed to have lived the lyrics of every song she sang, and startling
sounds came out of her mouth.
It's a bit late for a comeback, but hearing Trudy's singing songs
like "The Best Thing for You" always raises my spirits.
April 13, 2005 Wednesday
Truth vs. Violence for film fest opening slot
Martin Knelman, Toronto Star
Opening night of the Toronto International Film Festival's 30th
incarnation is almost five months away, but we can already offer some
guesses about what might be on the screen at Roy Thomson Hall on
Thursday, Sept. 8.
It shapes up as a rematch between those longtime friends and
sometimes rivals, Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg. And for festival
CEO Piers Handling, 2005 could seem like a replay of 2002 - the year
Handling had to make a tricky choice between movies by these two
directors most closely associated with the festival.
That year the festival opened with Egoyan's Ararat, an ambitious but
rather academic look at the 1915 genocide in which Egoyan's Armenian
ancestors were the victims and the Turks were the oppressors.
Spider, Cronenberg's best movie in years, was given a gala slot
midway through the festival. It was a riveting portrait of a mentally
disturbed misfit wandering the drab streets of London. But the
thinking was that it was too dark and edgy to be palatable for the
glitzy, corporate crowd on opening night.
In 2005, Egoyan and Cronenberg both have movies scheduled to be
released in the fall. And good reports are coming back from early
screenings of both.
In this corner: Where the Truth Lies, a black comedy that its
producer, Robert Lantos, hopes will carry Egoyan into the mainstream.
It has to, given its $26-million budget. According to word from last
week's sneak screening for select industry insiders of an unfinished
version, it shapes up as a smart, entertaining audience-pleaser.
Formerly known as Somebody Loves You, Egoyan's movie tells the story
of a showbiz duo (played by Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth) who break up
for mysterious reasons. The plot - which veers between 1959 and 1975
- is set in motion by a celebrity interviewer (Alison Lohman) who
raises certain sensational questions. Sex, drugs and the Mafia figure
in the plot, and so does the discovery of a dead woman's body in a
hotel room.
In the other corner: Cronenberg's latest movie A History of Violence,
which its U.S. distributor, New Line Films, recently test-screened in
Pasadena. Viggo Moretensen plays an apparently charming, happy family
man living with his wife (Maria Bello) in a lovely small town in the
U.S. Midwest. But their life is shattered when another Mafia figure
(Ed Harris) turns up, mistaking Mortensen for someone else - and
plunging him into a violent struggle.
Cronenberg is already preparing for his next movie Painkillers, which
will be produced jointly by Lantos and his sometimes partner Andras
Hamori - the provocative Hungarian emigre who worked in Toronto
throughout the 1980s before moving to Los Angeles. There he has built
a new career as an independent producer of such edgy pictures as Max
(2003), in which one of the characters was the young Adolf Hitler.
Hamori, a Canadian citizen, is almost sure to be returning to the
2005 Toronto film festival with Fateless, a daring Holocaust drama
that created a stir in February at the Berlin Festival. Nigel
Andrews, film critic for London's Financial Times, wrote that the
jury should have given its top award, the Golden Bear, to this
Hungarian movie based on an autobiographical novel by Nobel
Prize-winner Imre Kertesz. Andrews also chose Fateless's Lajos
Koltai, a former cameraman, as the festival's top director.
The film tells the story of Gyuri, a young Jewish man who comes of
age amid the horrors of a concentration camp after being deported
from Budapest. When the camp is liberated, he returns home - only to
discover that he is not exactly welcome. Former friends and
neighbours react to him with shock, embarrassment and
incomprehension.
Trudy Desmond, the marvellous jazz singer who died five years ago at
the peak of her career, makes a posthumous return in a terrific new
CD, A Dream Come True: the Best of Trudy Desmond. It includes
material from earlier albums such as Make Me Rainbows, Tailor Made
R.S.V.P. and My One and Only. And it offers an opportunity for
connoisseurs of the great American songbook to discover Desmond.
Desmond was a funny girl from Brooklyn who landed in Toronto circa
1970 when offered a part in the revue Spring Thaw. Despite occasional
periods in New York or Los Angeles, she spent most of the next three
decades here. You may have seen her opening for George Burns at the
O'Keefe Centre. George should have been opening for Trudy, but she
never became the kind of star whose name sells a lot of tickets.
At one point, she quit show business and set up an interior design
business. It was successful, but she wasn't happy. Then in the late
1980s, she began appearing in spots like George's Spaghetti House and
the Montreal Bistro. But the perfect room for her was the Top o' the
Senator. She was at home there, the perfect cabaret singer. She
seemed to have lived the lyrics of every song she sang, and startling
sounds came out of her mouth.
It's a bit late for a comeback, but hearing Trudy's singing songs
like "The Best Thing for You" always raises my spirits.