Festival Favourite – Mads Mikkelsen

You may recognize him as hot mournful guy driving the getaway car in Flame and Citron, or the hot guy with the jacked up eye in Casino Royale or the hot bald guy in Pusher II, or the just hot guy from many many movies from Denmark. This year Mads and his hotness and his cheekbones and his deep dark eyes will be seen in Valhalla Rising. Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn who brought us the Pusher Trilogy (still kicking myself for not seeing it at the festival, but it was three movies in a row and I didn’t have the attention span) it features Mads as a shirtless warrior named One Eye. I still think that watching him play cards was the best part of Casino Royale, so I can’t see how watching him as a mute warrior circa 1000 AD wouldn’t be a good time.

Important Dates: August 20, 2009

The full film list should be online by 10 AM August 20th according to the TIFF site. Not sure how all the new content coupled with the additional images they have for films will be handled, but my money is on it being like a trip in the wayback machine to the world of dial-up. Hope I’m wrong considering that Bell is a lead sponsor – you’d think they could hook ‘em up with some extra bandwidth during peak times. I plan to wait until everything is up at TOFilmfest and start the Google Notebook shortlist on the weekend.

Another important date – August 21. The Entertainment Weekly Fall Movie Preview will be available. Yes Twilight is on the cover, get over it. It’s a good cross-referencing tool when you are choosing between two films. If a movie has a North American distributor with a recognizable name and a release date within a month of the festival, you have to ask yourself if you think the experience of the film is worth the extra 10 spot vs the possible agro of seeing it with a regular audience.

The Road

John Hillcoat and Viggo will be at TIFF again this year, with The Road. Based on the novel by Cormac McNoCountryforOld Men and featuring Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce and Charlize Theron. I want to see this, but I’m thinking this is an end of the day movie. I saw No Country at a 9:00 AM showing at the festival, and I spent the rest of the day feeling oddly unsettled and being freaked out whenever I saw someone with a bowl cut. Hillcoat’s The Proposition actually made me jump in my seat a couple of times when I saw it, partially because the sound mix was a bit off, and the gunshots were way loud, but mostly because the violence was so matter of fact and could occur mid-conversation.

Considering I haven’t read the book I may be jumping to conclusions assuming that the movie may be a bit dark and or violent, however according to IMDB there’s a character called ‘Baby Eater’. Nuff said.

Mmmmmm Meat

For all my rules about picking movies based on the programmer (I love you Jane Schoettle) or doing research on other blogs or festival sites or checking the Entertainment Weekly fall movie preview issue for North American release dates I usually end up having at least 20% of my choices made just by the title of the movie. And so I anticipate having Year of the Carnivore in my list of movies this year because…I like meat. According to the short summary it’s a story of unrequited love and the screenplay was written and directed by former VJ extraordinaire Sook-Yin Lee.

Of all the former Much Music personalities I would say that Sook-Yin is in my top 5. My love for Strombo is something I neither care to explain or investigate. When I met Denise Donlon at NXNE and told her she was the wind beneath my wings I think I may have scared her a little. Master T’s cerebral interviews of urban entertainers always brought the ‘edu’ to the tainment. But Sook had me from hello. The first time I remember being charmed by her was during a Christmas-themed show on Much Music where in one segment you see her leaving out a beer for Santa…and after a few videos Santa’s glass appears to be empty. That’s my kind of girl.

TOFilmFest

http://tofilmfest.ca/films/ is up for 2009 and it’s frakking fantastic this year.  The design is better, the iconography is fantastic, they have links to IMDB, trailers, the TIFF film page, external reviews, official movie pages, and the show/hide link is just…

Go there, click things and if you didn’t buy the programme book, don’t worry you won’t need it with this out there, this site wins at awesomeness.

2009 Reading Lessons

Last year I started to go through some of the common terms that you may see on the TIFF site in the summaries for the films as a way to help others learn from my past mistakes. I know one of the festivals former talented trained corporate communicators, an entertaining young man who in addition to his Masters in English took additional courses in learning how to use his words to seduce on behalf of The Man. This guy has the making of an old-tymey raconteur, and as such I know better than most that you can’t go by the summary no matter how good they make it sound. A great summary for a less than awesome film brings to mind the beautiful menu at the restaurant that gave me campylobacter jejuni. Once you’ve been fooled you have to just sit there and take it.

Today’s reading lesson:

Coming-of-age – These movies can go either way. You really need to look at the other details in the summary to find out if this is just another self-indulgent tale composed by someone trying to work out their adolescent issues with their parents/ex-lust object/high school bully/confused sexuality or is this something that is going to speak to you on a deeper level because the acting, story telling and set pieces come together to to transcend the genre. I know that if my cynical self were to read ‘the coming-of-age story of a young boy in a mining town who just wants to dance’ I would probably have some serious doubts, and end up missing out on Billy Elliot. For these films I can only suggest that you look at the other attributes to help make the decision. If I were to see that the coming-of-age story hailed from somewhere outside of the continental United States and was selected by Jane Schoettle then I would highlight that baby in the drop off selection book faster than you could say Persepolis.

Sold Out Package

Double date Gala package sold out.

Da Kink

Growing up before Google I would eventually get the question “why is your hair so…” This moment would be a milestone with any new friend, it meant they were comfortable enough with me to ask a question that would make me really uncomfortable. I heard about Good Hair when it was opening and Sundance and I’m really happy to have a chance to see it here.

When I was heading off to university I decided to cut my hair off. I was panicking at the thought of  leaving for school and being four hours away from the first, last and only hairdresser to ever apply relaxer to my head. I was not in the frame of mind to form another codependent relationship with someone that I paid to hurt me – with the results always being not quite good enough. My hair wasn’t good…but I learned to love the shape of my head after the clippers finished the trip around my ears.

Sweet Circular Chakram

A sexploitation homage from Rick Jacobson, who worked on Baywatch AND Xena. My cups runneth over. Thank you Midnight Madness, and thank you Colin for making it possible to see movies like these in a packed theatre with other serious film buffs. Bitch Slap is one of those movies I would have picked just based on the title and the program, but when you throw in Zoe Bell as the action director and my only regret is that I can’t see it in the Uptown at Midnight as the festival gods intended.

Best Served Awesome

Johnnie To is in the Special presentations program this year with Vengeance.