Religulous movie’s festival film toronto

BRAD Pitt will drop in, as will Bryan Brown. Hollywood veteran
Jonathan Demme has a new film to show, the family drama Rachel Getting
Married; so does Melbourne actor Matthew Newton, who will present his
second feature behind the camera, Three Blind Mice.

If it’s early September, it must be the Toronto International Film
Festival, one of the largest, most respected and tightly run movie
bazaars in a world suddenly full of such events. The numbers are
startling: 312 films from 64 countries; 249 features, with three-
quarters of those billed world, international or North American
premieres (this is an important distinction in the world of film
festival bragging rights). Sixty-one are films from first-time
directors, and Australia will be represented by six features.

In all, the festival is promising more than 500 filmmakers, writers
and actors from across the world, on hand to present their work,
answer audience questions, participate in gruelling press interview
sessions and hobnob at exclusive parties.

Polling colleagues from across the world, one Toronto-based film
journalist has concluded the five must-see movies, based on buzz, are
Steven Soderbergh’s two-part revolutionary epic Che; Joel and Ethan
Coen’s CIA satire with Pitt, Burn After Reading; Canadian Bruce
McDonald’s zombie romp Pontypool; and Religulous, the documentary from
Borat director Larry Charles, in which comedian-commentator Bill Maher
traverses America in search of definitions of piety and faith.

Screenings run from 9am to well past midnight. Distributors and film
critics will jostle for seats with the Canadian public.

It’s a daunting 10 days. Depending on what business one has at TIFF,
it’s possible to see five films a day, or three times that number if
one is simply sampling the vibe by hopping from one cinema to the
next. At the other extreme, many festival-goers never set foot in a
cinema. Toronto has become a crucial stop for movie buyers and
sellers, with deals done in the members-only industry centre and on
napkins in upscale restaurants.

Programmers from festivals across the world — including Sydney Film
Festival executive director Clare Stewart — come to Toronto to pre-
screen movies for their events.

The festival, in its 33rd year, has had a torrid love affair with
Hollywood for the past decade. After Sam Mendes’s American Beauty
surfed its overwhelmingly positive 1999 festival buzz to a best-
picture Oscar win, studios in subsequent years have scrambled to get
their end-of-the-year award hopefuls into the Toronto schedule before
commercial release.

Studios are pruning their lavish budgets for travel, lodgings and
splashy parties to promote these films. As a result, Toronto is locked
in competition with the overlapping Venice film festival for high-
profile pictures and A-list stars. Sometimes films play at both
festivals, such as Burn After Reading. Often, films given a big push
in one city are conspicuously absent from the other.

In fact, as comprehensive as TIFF is, the list of films not showing is
also noteworthy. Oliver Stone’s W., with Josh Brolin as the incumbent
US president, apparently wasn’t finished in time, even though it’s
scheduled to open in the US scarcely a month after the festival
closes. Word has it films from prominent directors Darren Aronofsky
(The Wrestler, with Mickey Rourke) and Jim Sheridan (Brothers, with
Jake Gyllenhaal and Tobey Maguire) weren’t even submitted. (Unlike the
Cannes festival, where anyone with enough money can rent a screen and
show their film in the market section, Toronto screens only what
Toronto invites.)

Laurent Cantet’s high school drama The Class, which won the Palme d’Or
at Cannes last May, was scheduled to play Toronto but was pulled when
the film was selected as the opening-night gala by the New York
festival, which opens later this month. Toronto also apparently lost
Clint Eastwood’s Cannes favourite Changeling, starring Angelina Jolie,
to New York’s demand for exclusivity.

Director Steve Jacobs’s new Australian film Disgrace, adapted from the
novel by J.M. Coetzee and starring John Malkovich, will open near the
festival’s halfway point. Baz Luhrmann’s anticipated Australia is not
finished. Other Australian films in various sections of the festival
include the stop-motion animated $9.99, a co-production with Israel
and featuring the voices of Geoffrey Rush, Anthony LaPaglia, Joel
Edgerton and Ben Mendelsohn; the documentary Yes Madam, Sir, with
narration by Helen Mirren; and two films in the cult Midnight Madness
program, the horror thriller Acolytes and the Ozploitation documentary
Not Quite Hollywood. Brown co-stars with Sam Neill and Peter O’Toole
in writer-director Toa Fraser’s British-New Zealand co-production Dean
Spanley, from the novel by Lord Dunsany.

But in the end and beyond the hype, attending Toronto or any film
festival isn’t so different from checking session times on a Friday
afternoon: all anyone’s really looking for is a good movie.

From here you can use the Social Web links to save Toronto’s casts of
thousands to a social bookmarking site.

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Staff writers THE Australian competition watchdog said today it would
not oppose BHP Billiton’s proposed takeover of rival mining giant Rio
Tinto.

Andrew Colley IT took a few days but Hutchison 3 Mobile customers
finally have access to popular websites such as BigPond and Hotmail.

FAST food chain McDonald’s has consolidated its $65 million
advertising account with DDB, dumping rival agency Leo Burnett.

Bernard Lane THE University of New England may move to elect a new
chancellor as early as next month in the long-running leadership
crisis.

Michael Bloomberg will seek to overturn a term limits law so he can
run New York for another four years.

Mark Dodd AN Australian delegation visiting Croatia will today meet
its leaders to press for help in resolving the fate of Britt
Lapthorne.

Paul Kelly, Editor-at-large ROSS Garnaut’s report will be anathema to
the environmental lobby but it focuses on the achievable.

Avril Groom in Milan WITH couture taking a clobbering, shoes and
accessories are now at the pointy end of fashion

Religulous movie’s oct film festival

Our crystal ball for fall movie trends is actually a snow globe, which
we consult every year at the Toronto International Film Festival.
That’s where many of the more glamorous year-end releases are
previewed for the world’s critics. Last year, the festival was
the coming-out party for the eventual Academy Award winner for best
picture, the Coen brothers’ “No Country for Old
Men.” The Coens were back in Canada last week with their new spy
comedy “Burn After Reading,” just one of more than 300
features in the festival. It’s too early to predict whether any
of them will be Oscar’s date for this year’s homecoming
dance but, based on what we’ve seen, we can ascertain the
following trends in fall film fashions. Dim the lights!

In “Burn After Reading” (opened Friday), John Malkovich is
a malcontent midlevel CIA agent whose tell-all memoir falls into the
feckless hands of health-club employee Brad Pitt.

“Nothing but the Truth” (Dec. 19) is a lightly
fictionalized version of the Valerie Plame case. Kate Beckinsale plays
a reporter who goes to jail rather than reveal the source who leaked
the identity of the spy played by Vera Farmiga.

Jean-Claude Van Damme kicks his laughingstock status upside the head
in “JCVD” (TBD) in which “The Muscles from
Brussels” plays himself, a washed-up action hero who is thrust
into the middle of a real-life hostage situation.

Mickey Rourke is generating Oscar buzz for his poignant performance as
a has-been grappler in “The Wrestler” (TBD), which won the
grand prize at recently concluded Venice Film Festival.

The latter film also marks a comeback for director Darren Aronofsky
(“Pi”), whose time-travel fantasy “The Fountain” was
laughed out of Toronto two years ago.

(Another director who appears to have been resurrected is Jonathan
Demme, the Oscar winner for 1991’s “Silence of the
Lambs.” Since his poorly received remake of “The
Manchurian Candidate” in 2004, Demme has made only a couple
documentaries, but the recovery drama “Rachel Getting
Married” (Oct. 24) has sparked awards buzz for himself and star
Anne Hathaway.)

Two new movies with similar sounding names in the title introduce us
to couples who are clearly made for each other but are wary of taking
the leap. In “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist”
(Oct. 3), Michael Cera (“Juno”) and Kat Dennings are teens who meet
and bond on a nightlong search for their favorite band’s secret
gig in New York City.

Far racier is Kevin Smith’s new comedy “Zack and Miri make
a Porno” (Oct. 31), in which Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks play
penniless roommates who consider filming a sex video to raise some
quick cash.

Two upcoming releases feature sculptures with magical properties. In
Spike Lee’s World War II drama “The Miracle of St.
Anna” (Sept. 26), an American GI believes that the marble head
he finds in Florence and lugs onto the battlefield will protect him
from harm.

In “The Secret Life of Bees” (Oct. 17), a fist-raised
statue of a Black Madonna that is scavenged from a shipwreck provides
spiritual sustenance to beekeeper Queen Latifah.

Strife in the Middle East was covered last year in several Hollywood
dramas, most of which fizzled at the box office. Only two are coming
in the months ahead, and neither directly addresses the political
underpinnings of the war.

“The Hurt Locker” (TBD), the long-awaited return of action
auteur Kathryn Bigelow (“Point Break”), is a thriller about a bomb-
disposal unit in Iraq.

In “The Lucky Ones” (Sept. 26), Tim Robbins, Rachel
McAdams and Michael Pena are furloughed soldiers on a cross-country
road trip, with a significant stop in St. Louis.

It seems that every year, at least one star has multiple movies on the
calendar. This season it’s Greg Kinnear. In “Ghost
Town” (Friday), he plays a philandering husband who is killed in
a bus crash and then haunts dentist Ricky Gervais to set things
straight.

In “Flash of Genius” (Oct. 3), Kinnear stars in the true
story of the inventor who waged a lengthy battle against Detroit
automakers over the patents for the intermittent windshield wiper.
Honest.

Two of the most talked-about films of the fall season are, in a sense,
about distorted vision.

“Blindness” (Oct. 3), adapted from a novel by Jose
Saramago by director Fernando Merielles (“City of God”), is about a
mysterious plague that robs the populace of its sight – and unleashes
the beastliness in human nature.

In “Happy-Go-Lucky” (Oct. 24), Sally Hawkins is a young
London schoolteacher who sees the world through rose-color glasses.

Maybe it’s contagious, because we’re looking forward to
some other autumn movies sight unseen, such as the Western
“Appaloosa” (Oct. 3), Bill Maher’s documentary
“Religulous” (Oct. 3) and Keira Knightley in the bodice
ripper “The Duchess” (Oct. 3).

The religulous movie film toronto festival

(CNN) — A mere film festival cannot compete with the Academy Awards’
grip on the public imagination, but the 33rd Toronto International
Film Festival (which begins Thursday) comes pretty close — in part
because it has become the first important bellwether for the onslaught
of Oscar hopefuls.

Spike Lee’s World War II drama, “Miracle of St. Anna,” is one of the
hot tickets at the film festival.

Last year’s bumper crop of contenders included “Into the Wild,” “In
the Valley of Elah,” “Atonement,” “I’m Not There,” “The Assassination
of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” and the eventual best
picture winner, “No Country For Old Men.” After 10 days in Toronto, it
was obvious that 2007 would go down as an exceptionally strong year
for American film.

According to pre-festival buzz, 2008 will struggle to match it. The
studio specialty divisions that produced many of last year’s quality
pictures — including Paramount Vantage, which co-produced “No Country
For Old Men” and “There Will Be Blood” — have been cut back or
eliminated entirely, incorporated into their corporate parents.

And American movies mostly have been absent from this month’s Venice
and Telluride film festivals amid whispers that Hollywood’s
submissions just weren’t up to grade.

For better or (frequently) worse, the prefers to operate a more open-
door policy with the studios, which at least guarantees glamour-
starved Canadians a steady stream of celebrities trotting down the red
carpet. More than 500 are expected this year, including Brad Pitt,
Jennifer Aniston, Dakota Fanning, Jeanne Moreau, Ricky Gervais and
Charlize Theron. (Pitt and Aniston will not be together.)

Hot tickets — and at nearly $40 for gala screenings, they better be
— include the Coen brothers’ latest, “Burn After Reading,” which also
screened in Venice; Spike Lee’s World War II drama, “Miracle of St.
Anna”; and new films from Jonathan Demme, Darren Aronofsky and Richard
Linklater.

Toronto also will provide North Americans their first chance to see
many of the most talked-about films from May’s Cannes International
Film Festival, including Steven Soderbergh’s two-part epic “Che,”
brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s “Silence de Lorna” and Terence
Davies’ highly praised “Of Time and the City.”

With a lineup of 249 features from 64 countries, there can be no
shortage of potential, and talk is enthusiastic about a number of
films.

“Borat” director Larry Charles is back with a satirical documentary
fronted by Bill Maher, “Religulous,” which threatens — or promises —
to put a cat among the doves.

There are hopes Ed Harris can pull off a grand Western in the old
style with his film of the Robert Parker novel “Appaloosa.” A cast
headed by Viggo Mortensen, Jeremy Irons, Renee Zellweger and Harris
himself certainly makes the prospect appetizing.

Last year’s spate of Iraq-themed pictures failed to ignite the box
office, but Kathryn Bigelow’s bomb-disposal thriller, “The Hurt
Locker” (with Jeremy Renner, Ralph Fiennes and Guy Pearce), could be
the first to buck the trend. According to Toronto Eye critic Jason
Anderson, this one has “real breakout potential.”

Meanwhile, Telluride reviews for Danny Boyle’s true-life fairy tale,
“Slumdog Millionaire,” have been little short of ecstatic. Can a movie
really be both “Dickensian” and “a blast,” as Variety proclaims?

The religulous movie up maher stars

“Blindness” – The blind literally lead the blind – to hell and back –
in this pretentious, preposterous allegory. An unnamed disease
afflicts the unnamed citizens of an unnamed city, all of which is too
precious. The victims are left sightless but they see white instead of
black, a sensation one character compares to “swimming in milk.” Once
they’re rounded up by soldiers and quarantined in a grubby, abandoned
mental asylum, their worst primal instincts emerge: urination and
defecation in the hallways, theft, assaults and, ultimately, rape. The
physical and moral deterioration calls to mind the situation in the
Superdome after Hurricane Katrina, but director Fernando Meirelles, in
adapting a novel by Nobel Prize-winner Jose Saramago, is clearly
trying to suggest that society similarly could collapse anywhere,
anytime. Rather than being thought-provoking, though, the whole dreary
exercise feels like an overlong beat-down – as if we’re being scolded
just for showing up. Even Julianne Moore can’t liven up this slog,
despite a typically strong performance as the one person who can still
see (which is never explained, probably because it’s an arbitrary plot
device). She pretends she’s blind, though, to stay with her husband
(Mark Ruffalo), who is an eye doctor. Other victims include a little
boy, a hooker with a heart of gold (Alice Braga) and an elderly man
(Danny Glover), all of whom were the doctor’s patients, and a
bartender (Gael Garcia Bernal) at the hotel where the prostitute
worked. One and a half stars out of four.

“Rachel Getting Married” – The cinematic equivalent of a wedding that
just will not end. The movie features a powerful performance from Anne
Hathaway but the story is undone by the self-indulgence of director
Jonathan Demme, who loiters interminably on some scenes. Demme’s
detours into documentaries serve him well as he crafts a loose,
docudrama style that infuses great authenticity into this anguished
reunion tale. But Demme did the reflect-real-life thing almost too
well. Many moments are genuine to the point where you feel trapped in
a room with someone else’s relations in a marathon session of picking
and clawing at old wounds. Hathaway stars as a woman out of rehab to
come home for the wedding of her sister (Rosemarie DeWitt). While the
family tries to leave at rest its ample unspoken heartache, Hathaway’s
prodigal daughter dredges everything up, threatening the shaky peace
everyone hopes will prevail through the wedding weekend. Hathaway’s a
marvel for the depths she explores, but Demme and screenwriter Jenny
Lumet overload the story with strife and boring excess. Two stars out
of four.

“Religulous” – Bill Maher is preaching to the choir with this
documentary that dissects organized religion, but he’s doing it in his
laceratingly funny, typically sardonic way. The comic has touched on
this topic often in his standup act and on his HBO talk show “Real
Time With Bill Maher,” but here he goes on a full, focused attack, and
pretty much no one emerges unscathed (except those who practice
Eastern religions, for some reason). If you’re an atheist or an
agnostic, you’ll be completely on board and happy to tag along with
Maher as he travels the globe asking people about their faith –
everywhere from Jerusalem and the Vatican to a truckers’ chapel in
Raleigh, N.C., and a Holy Land theme park in Orlando, Fla. If you’re a
true believer, though, you’ll probably be offended. Then again, Maher
is surely smart enough to realize that his movie will convert no one,
but he seems to get off on the thrill of the challenge nonetheless.
“Religulous” comes from director Larry Charles, who teamed up with
Sacha Baron Cohen for “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make
Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” and it has a structure
reminiscent of that 2006 comedy, as well as similarly uproarious
laughs. The ones on the receiving end of Maher’s Socratic-style
questioning are often humourless – they don’t get that he’s toying
with them – which makes the results even more absurdly amusing. Quick
cutaways to movie clips that illustrate his points, from “Scarface” to
“Superbad,” keep the energy and hilarity high, as do subtitles
commenting on the conversations, similar to “The Word” segment on “The
Colbert Report.” But Maher undermines his arguments at the end when
the tone turns sharply serious: He tries to make a connection between
religion and all the wars and violence in the world, and he does it
with the same kind of certitude he just got done condemning others for
having. Three stars out of four.