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The Brown Bunny, Wonderland, Pieces of April, and more at the 28th Toronto Film Festival
BY GERALD PEARY
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Some of the best movies at the 28th Toronto International Film Festival, September 4 through 13, were offered also by their distributors to the Boston Film Festival. Shattered Glass, Japanese Story, The Fog of War, and The Triplets of Belleville all screened at the BFF and will open here soon. But whereas our celebration remains a small-time, unfestive affair that attracts a pittance of guests and is at the mercy of what distributors make available, Toronto has hundreds of fascinating films, long and short, selected by curators who have traversed the world to find them. There are parties all over the city and lines around the block for sold-out screenings, morning till midnight. And there are hundreds of guests — actors, directors, producers — in town supporting their films. "The poor Hub citizenry," I say sorrowfully every year. "If only they could experience Toronto!" Did Beantown, for example, get a peek at the revamped The Brown Bunny? Torontonians came out in droves to see Vincent Gallo’s notorious movie, the one that Cannes laughed off the screen last May. I was among the nay-sayers, jeering at the vanity scenes in which Gallo directed himself: going into a motel room and, for many screen minutes, washing his face (or was he shaving?); stopping at a gas station and, for many screen minutes, filling up his auto. And then there was the infamous blow job, Chloë Sevigny going down on Gallo while he unhappily muttered and moaned. In Toronto, I talked with students of the film who had perused both Brown Bunny versions. Gallo seems to have heeded some of the criticisms, since he’s trimmed away at the most self-indulgent sequences. The gas pumping is practically gone. The melancholy blow job remains. Many Torontonians championed the new Brown Bunny. An elated Gallo reported in the press that he’d witnessed only four walkouts. At a half-hour shorter, the movie is surely better now. Also, those seeing it in Toronto were determined to be hip and cool and embrace it, creating a backlash to the unhip at Cannes. "Well, I was part of the backlash blacklash," Canadian actor and filmmaker Don McKellar told me. "I went to the movie expecting Canadians in backlash to love it, and I would resist. But I really liked it. The Brown Bunny is a really good film." So what replaced The Brown Bunny at Toronto 2003 as "The Movie You Love To Loathe?" Hands down, it was the messy, execrable Wonderland, a creepy, crawly, unneeded telling of the 1981 LA murders of a roomful of swarthy drug types that were set up by ex-porn star John "Wadd" Holmes. The Rashomon-like question dominating the James Cox–directed movie (it’s due to open in Boston October 17) was whether Holmes himself participated in the killings. Depends whose flashback version you found credible. But as bored journalists kept muttering at the screening, "Who the hell cares?" A bearded Val Kilmer does what he can playing the seedy Holmes. The most arresting performance is given by Kate Bosworth, far afield from Blue Crush, as Dawn Schiller, Holmes’s adoring, heroin-shooting, sometimes-hooker 19-year-old girlfriend. I sat in on a press round table for Wonderland at which Bosworth was remarkably poised amid zealous junketeers. In the course of developing her role, she became bosom friends with the real Dawn Schiller, who’s now in her 40s, having outlived Holmes (he died of AIDS complications). Bosworth said, "I’d thought that Dawn was addicted to drugs. I realized she’d been addicted to John, and he was addicted to drugs. I’m 20. When I shot the film, I was 19. It was the weirdest thing to play this character, who was also 19. I’d say, ‘I’d never do this stuff! My God!’ After 21 days of that intensity, I said, ‘Next project, I’m doing a romantic comedy!’ " Someone had to ask; I beat the junketeers to it. "Did you talk to Dawn about living with Holmes’s legendary-sized member?" "It’s one of the first things you think of," Bosworth admitted. "Was it really [that big]? . . . I felt really weird asking. Dawn told me . . . I don’t know how to say it . . . that she couldn’t get it . . . " Boswell faltered, visibly flushed. My paparazzi question! I was all politeness, however, in interviewing Katie Holmes, star of the likable, humanist Pieces of April (also due to open here October 17). I’d done my homework, reading on-line talks with the former star of the WB’s Dawson’s Creek about her caring, functional upbringing in Toledo. That’s the person I met in Toronto: a sincere, ingenuous Midwesterner who seems, at 24, pretty modest for all her fame. Refreshing! In Pieces of April, Holmes plays a punkish young woman living in NYC who tries to reconcile with mom, who’s dying of cancer, by cooking a family Thanksgiving dinner in her tenement flat. "We used an actual apartment on the Lower East Side, an eighth-floor walk-up," Holmes said. "I shot my part for 10 days in a row, 17-hour days. It was shoot, go home, crash, shoot, go home, crash. There was zero set-up time, no trailers, no space for ourselves. For this movie, they were taking away the perks, the money. Let’s see how I’d like it? I did. We were working for a greater cause. We loved the script, loved the director, Peter Hedges." The Thanksgiving feast brings together black and Chinese families with April’s suburban white one. April has an African-American boyfriend (Derek Luke). "What I got from this movie is the beauty of human kindness, how lovely when all these people of all nationalities come together. With April and her boyfriend, Derek and I tried to create real love and care. Their interracial relationship is so real. Coming from a suburban family, April has really evolved." Katie Holmes is that peach-pie nice. And April’s crazy, wobbly, erratic family? "It makes me cherish my family even more. At the end of a day, I want to give my mom a hug and thank her for nice memories." Other films of note at Toronto: Noi Albinoi. Alienated youth suffer everywhere, as attested by this tale in which out-of-synch Noi (Tomas Lemarquis) stumbles about a snowbound, claustrophobic village on an Icelandic fjord. He struggles to get along with his moody, alcoholic father, fights with the narrow-thinking authorities at his high school, pines for the pretty girl who works at the one-pump gas station. Filmmaker Dagur Kári walks a fine line between Kaurismäki deadpan minimalism and Truffaut adolescent yearning. Loving Glances. Former Boston University filmmaking professor Srdjan Karanovic (Petra’s Wreath, The Fragrance of Wild Flowers) was among the important Yugoslav directors in the 1970s and 1980s before coming to teach in America. Back home in Belgrade, he became a vociferous opponent of the Milosevic regime. Making his first feature in 15 years, Karanovic takes the opportunity to show his hatred of nationalist tendencies, but through a gentle, pensive, humanist comedy. It’s 1996 in Belgrade, and a Croatian-born Serbian is among the refugees. He’s searching for his lost girl; then he finds a new one through a computerized dating service. But his every step toward happiness is watched over by family ghosts — are these on-screen apparitions real or imagined? — who want him involved with someone ethnically pure. Osama. The first feature production in post-Taliban Afghanistan, Siddiq Barak’s story takes place when the Taliban are still in power. It’s the tragic tale of a teenage girl who, disguised as a boy, is drafted into the Taliban army. Her identity discovered, she’s married off in punishment to an aging mullah who already has a household of veiled wives. This movie was given financial aid by the Iranian Ministry of Culture. Despite its extreme relevancy, it feels too derivative of an Iranian-made polemic by Samira or Mohsen Makhhmalbaf. Tom Dowd & the Language of Music. Mark Moormann’s film was the most joyous at Toronto, a love-in homage to sound engineer Tom Dowd, who for decades orchestrated the recordings of the giants of American music, including Ray Charles, Les Paul, Otis Redding, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Ornette Coleman, Aretha Franklin, and the Allman Brothers. In the rotten music-business world, Dowd was the nice guy’s nice guy. There’s great music played here, and testimony after testimony — from Ray Charles, Eric Clapton, Greg Allman, etc. — to his musical genius and his worth as a human being. End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones. Directed by Michael Gramaglia and Jim Fields, this is a mesmerizing, troubling documentary about the rise and stumble of the legendary three-chord punkers from Forest Hills, New York. They were all called Ramones, but how could any three people be more different than the off-stage unrelated Joey, Johnny, and Dee Dee? The key interviews here are with the fascistic, control-freak Johnny and the drugged-up, tattoo-covered Dee Dee. Just as he agreed to talk, the hippyish Joey went into a hospital for the last time. Soon after being interviewed, Dee Dee OD’d. This is the best record you’ll ever get of the real-person Ramones. Festival failures? The Girl with a Pearl Earring, a stodgy, stillborn adaptation of Tracy Chevalier’s overrated novel about the mysterious girl in the Vermeer painting. Lost in Translation’s Scarlett Johannson is okay as the gal, but Colin Firth seems damned uncomfortable claiming to be the master Dutch painter. The Human Stain. Philip Roth’s novel about a light-skinned black man hiding out as a Jewish professor strains credibility on the page. It’s worse when the Afro-American in the movie proves to be Anthony Hopkins. Nicole Kidman is beautiful and sexy, but she’s hardly right for the part of a little-educated worker and cow milker. This one’s down for October 3 in Boston. In the Cut. Why did Jane Campion bother to adapt Susanna Moore’s dank, ugly literary potboiler? Nobody liked this movie, and who can believe Hollywood’s Meg Ryan as a New York intellectual? However, she does, as she did playing Sally, do well faking a couple of orgasms. It’s due to open October 24.
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