The TIFF Tattler: September 15

SHOW AND TEL
The whole tempest over the selection of Tel Aviv for the first City-to-City program has likely peaked after the Declaration Group presser-and-protest went down yesterday. The conference seemed fairly well attended, though, as a self-professed flop sweater, they picked much too small a classroom in the Ryerson communications building. The event was half political talking points — with Osgoode Hall PhD student Mazen Masri ringing off a list of historical attacks on Gaza — and half self-defence, with panelists (including catalyzing director John Greyson) offering retorts to the growing list of celebrity detractors. “We’ve never called for censorship,” noted Toronto-based Israeli filmmaker Elle Flanders. She went on to decry “being lectured on artistic integrity from the guy who made Meatballs.” Oh snap! About 250 attended the protest afterwards, which carried on without incident.

Meanwhile, Jane Fonda has kind of recanted her signature to the original letter of protest, saying she didn’t read the letter especially closely. “Some of the words in the protest letter did not come from my heart,” said Fonda in a press release. I can’t help but wonder, what exactly did Jane Fonda think she was signing? Does she not read contracts either? Could this explain Georgia Rule?  

And this morning, the Toronto Star ran a tale-of-the-tape style cover weighing the various celebrity endorsements around the Tel Aviv program against one another, as if to ask which group of celebrities you would rather side with. Which begs the question: are we really thoughtless enough as a society to need Lisa Kudrow and Jerry Seinfeld’s opinions to help us form a position on Israel and Palestine?


LET'S MAKE A DEAL (FOR THE LOVE GOD ALREADY…)
After days of famine, the TIFF deals are starting to trickle in. The Hollywood Reporter says that distributors are starting “to circle” designer Tom Ford’s directorial debut A Single Man
and IFC announced this week they would be distributing Danish Film Valhalla Rising, starring the intimidating Mads Mikkelsen from Casino Royale and After the Wedding. IFC apparently won a small bidding war for the film, which they plan to release through their theatres-and-video-on-demand distribution model that they’ve recently been using to get docs and lower-budget films into smaller markets.

Also, The Globe has a profile on D Films, the upstart Canadian ‘specialty distributor’ who made a splash by buying up North American rights to festival opener Creation before its debut last week. The distributor is still having trouble finding a company willing to underwrite a US release for the Charles Darwin biopic, as studios worry the film will be received there with hostility. Can’t imagine why.

And in news from TIFF past, Richard Linklater’s film, Me and Orson Welles, has finally found a distribution deal, one year after its warmly received debut here. The movie’s backers have decided to ally with Freestyle Releasing, the gun-for-hire company who, for a fee, will get your movie into theatres (they were the ones who managed to get disastrous animated film Delgo onto 2,000+ screens, if that speaks to their abilities). Apparently, producers got tired of waiting around after receiving no studio offers last year, a fact many chalk up to Linklater’s recent commercial disasters Fast Food Nation and The Bad News Bears. One imagines the prospects for this picture, starring Zac Efron, are somewhat brighter.


AND NOW, YOUR OBLIGATORY CELEBRITY NEWS
George Clooney wrote a treatise on manners in The Daily Mail this past weekend, prompting a story about Mr. Clooney’s own alleged boorishness to come out of the woodwork. Jezebel reported that Clooney’s ever-so-witty retort to a woman berating his politics at a TIFF party included the words “those extra 35 pounds look nice on you.” Now, New York mag's Vulture blog is reporting that the whole thing is a hoax, though the story’s arguably not serious enough to call it that.

Otherwise, it seems like the peak celebrity sighting of the festival has passed, though Ed Norton was spotted last night at King West club Cheval for the Leaves of Grass after-party. And a friend of mine saw Chris Kattan on U of T campus yesterday. One assumes it was for the TIFF premiere of Kattan’s Mango film. I kid, of course.