Toronto International Film Festival 2005

The daring director Abel Ferrara (Bad Lieutenant) has a North American premiere of Mary, a complicated tale of an independent director (Matthew Modine) who casts himself as Jesus Christ in his film, while the actress (Juliette Binoche) who plays Mary Magdalene travels alone to Jerusalem after her shoot to continue her spiritual quest. A year later in Manhattan, a superstar network journalist (Forest Whitaker) investigates the life and times of Jesus Christ. His show receives high ratings, but he and his wife (Heather Graham) reach a relationship boiling point.

Let the star spotting begin

Programmers straddle big-bang commercial fare and serious cinema as festival reveals its Hollywood trump cards

By GAYLE MACDONALD
Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Seventeen star-studded titles were added to the lineup of the Toronto International Film Festival yesterday, with casts that include the mega-watt talent of Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Joaquin Phoenix, Anthony Hopkins, Charlize Theron, Frances McDormand, Reese Witherspoon, Kate Winslet and Kirsten Dunst.

While those celebrities are not yet confirmed as bona fide attendees at this year’s 30-year-old fete, chances are good that many of these marquee names will sashay down the red carpet.

As in years past, festival programmers managed to neatly walk that fine line, catering to both the respectably commercial and more intellectual cinematic interests. TIFF audiences, therefore, will get to sample a big-bang Hollywood offering like Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown, starring Bloom and Dunst in a quirky romantic tale set in Kentucky. But they’ll also be able to grapple with Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, which is based on Laurence Sterne’s almost-impossible-to-adapt autobiographical book, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. The U.K. director’s recent film, 9 Songs, had British cinemagoers in an uproar over its racy sex scenes set to rock music.

Depp is appearing, voice only, in Tim Burton’s anticipated stop-motion, animated feature set in small-town Europe, in the 19th century. It’s the story of Victor (Depp) who is spirited away to the underworld and wed to a creepy Corpse Bride (Helena Bonham-Carter) while his real, earth-bound bride (Emily Watson) pines away for him back home.

Other deliciously off-beat entries include the basically actor-less Bubble from Steven Soderbergh, a bizarre love triangle set in a doll factory in a down-on-its-luck town. Soderbergh (who alternatively likes to cater to the main- and not-so-mainstream crowd with films as diverse as Ocean’s Twelve and Sex, Lies and Videotape) employs a cast of non-professional actors from Ohio for this picture.

Canadian-born director Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol) has a world premiere for her film, The Notorious Bettie Page, which stars Gretchen Mol as a successful pin-up girl whose religious faith is at odds with her day job.

Harron’s father is Don Harron, better known as our farcical nationalist, Charlie Farquharson.

In two of this year’s entries, established actors switch roles and take on director’s duties. With Everything Is Illuminated, Liev Schreiber (known to fans as Cotton Weary in the Scream films) tells the story of a young man’s (Elijah Wood) quest to find a woman who saved his grandfather when his Ukrainian town was wiped off the map by the Nazis. As well, the Italian-American actor John Turturro directs Romance & Cigarettes, a musical love story in which Nick (James Gandolfini) fools around on his long-time wife Kitty (Susan Sarandon) with the flame-haired Tula (Kate Winslet).

The daring director Abel Ferrara (Bad Lieutenant) has a North American premiere of Mary, a complicated tale of an independent director (Matthew Modine) who casts himself as Jesus Christ in his film, while the actress (Juliette Binoche) who plays Mary Magdalene travels alone to Jerusalem after her shoot to continue her spiritual quest. A year later in Manhattan, a superstar network journalist (Forest Whitaker) investigates the life and times of Jesus Christ. His show receives high ratings, but he and his wife (Heather Graham) reach a relationship boiling point.

In Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, Robert Downey Jr. returns to Toronto in a role as a petty thief who stumbles into an audition for a Hollywood detective movie. To prep for his screen test, he’s teamed with a tough-guy private-eye played by Val Kilmer.

Playwright Phyllis Nagy makes her directorial debut with Mrs. Harris, the story of Jean Harris who killed her lover Dr. Herman Tarnower, author of The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet. That film starts Annette Bening as the murderess, and Ben Kingsley as the good doctor.

The festival will host world premieres of Irish director Neil Jordan’s (The Crying Game) Breakfast on Pluto, a coming-of-age tale (of sorts) starring Cillian Murphy, Liam Neeson and Stephen Rea; Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s Bee Season, based on Myla Goldberg’s novel about a young spelling whiz (Flora Cross) whose prowess upsets the family groove; first-time director John Gatin’s Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story, about a father’s love for a daughter and an injured horse with Kurt Russell and Dakota Fanning; James Mangold’s Walk The Line, a seven-year effort that recounts the early career of country legend Johnny Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) and the woman who saved him, his wife June Carter (Reese Witherspoon); Niki Caro’s North Country stars Charlize Theron as a single mom in a Norma Rae-like role in which she inspires her female co-workers (Frances McDormand, Sissy Spacek) to rally against sexual harassment and other abuse at a local mining company; Udayan Prasad’s Opa!, a love story about an American archeologist (Matthew Modine) who lands in a local Greek island in search of a lost Biblical artifact likely buried underneath a village taverna owned by the beauteous Agni Scott; and Roger Donaldson’s The World’s Fastest Man, in which Anthony Hopkins stars in the true story of New Zealander Burt Munro, a motorcycle fanatic famous in the sixties.

Source: GlobeandMail.com

Posted on August 11, 2005 by Stef under Film News & Reviews

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