The pluckiest celeb chasers didn’t mind seeing so many grey skies over the red carpets but I couldn’t be the only one who felt like the general vibe at TIFF’s midway point was lower than the Bell Lightbox’s unfinished sub-basement. On the industry side, an air of doom and gloom continues to emanate from the freshly marked graves of Paramount Vantage, Warner Independent Pictures and other studio subsidiaries whose recent demises may mark the end of the indie (pseudo-indie, really) boom that Miramax sparked with Pulp Fiction in 1994. The lack of a new movie with the same ready appeal to moviegoers and Academy Awards voters as Juno or No Country for Old Men amongst the current slate of selections inspired more pessimism. Though a few titles (like Danny Boyle’s ace Slumdog Millionaire) may have legs, many big items up for sale this week (like The Other Man, Richard Eyre’s dire follow-up to Notes on a Scandal) will go nowhere.
On the home front, an opening-night fracas sparked testy exchanges between TIFF and the Toronto Sun, with the paper’s Bruce Kirkland accusing the fest of becoming “an elitist corporate spectacle.” (Speaking as the new owner of a one-bedroom “Angelina Jolie” suite in the Lightbox’s condo tower, I must say I don’t know where he gets that idea.) The other dailies’ struggle to politely mention the shortcomings of Passchendaele without seeming unpatriotic was equally discomfiting. Add the chaotic lineups at the AMC, the egregious price hike for Special Presentations tickets and overcrowded parties with understaffed bars and you’ve got a particularly un-festive festival.
Times like these call for a hero to pull it all outta the fire. They might even call for two heroes, men with bruised, aging bodies and indomitable spirits. One was certainly Jean-Claude Van Damme, and even though the star was much-missed at the Midnight Madness screening of JCVD, the film attracted a remarkable amount of goodwill, becoming a staple in movies-I-liked conversations for critics and civilians alike.
Equally surprising and maybe even more moving is the collective surge of love for another comeback kid. Just as Van Damme shines in a role that fits him like a glove (yes, it’s easy to play yourself, but not easy to do it so well), Mickey Rourke is funny, touching and tragic in the guise of a golden-haired has-been wrestler who’s way down but not out in the latest from Darren Aronofsky. Fresh from its triumph at the Venice film festival, The Wrestler (****; last screening Sept. 13, 9am, Ryerson) arrived with the appropriate amount of swagger and proved to be pretty much as good as promised.
Rourke plays Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a self-described “old, broken-down piece of meat” who seeks to wrest a few ounces of grace from his remarkably sad-assed existence after nearly dying of a heart attack. While the scenes of his efforts to forge bonds with his long-neglected daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) and a stripper friend (Marisa Tomei) are tender and wrenching, the in-the-ring action is brutal, bloody and exciting. That both kinds of scenes are often accompanied by metal hits of the ’80s (Accept’s “Balls to the Wall” included) adds to the general state of awesomeness.
As a portrait of weathered machismo, The Wrestler also made Guy Ritchie’s latest boys-and-guns caper seem all the more infantile. A vapid attempt to resuscitate the Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels game plan, Ritchie’s Gala entry RocknRolla (**; Sept. 13, 2:45pm, Ryerson) proved to be too sloppy and self-indulgent to pass muster as noisy fun. The Gala hex has been particularly pronounced this year, raising the suspicion that a lot of people don’t care what happens on the screen provided that the stars look nice on the way into the theatre. Others will shed tears of remembrance for the $40 they spent to see the Coens’ half-assed Burn After Reading, the piss-poor cop flick Pride & Glory (Sept. 12, 2:45pm, Ryerson), the torpid infidelity melodrama The Other Man (*; Sept. 13, 9:30pm, Bader) or the thrill-less political thriller Nothing But the Truth (Sept. 12, 9pm, Elgin).
At least Slumdog Millionaire (Sept. 13, 7:15pm, AMC 10) is shaping up to be a worthy hit. This spirited and savvy Indo-British flick was also TIFF’s only movie to fully exploit the value of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire as an organizing motif.
I was also pleased to discover unsettling studies of bourgeois couples cracking up in various international locales. While Fabrice De Welz chose Thailand for the location for a marital meltdown in Vinyan (***; Sept. 12, 8:30pm, AMC 7), Kristian Levring and Fien Troch opted to stage their crises in their respective homelands of Denmark for Fear Me Not (****; Sept. 13, 12:45pm, Varsity 3) and Belgium for Unspoken (***; Sept. 12, 9:15pm, Varsity 5).
If you don’t like to travel but still like to see people go crazy and tear each other to pieces, Bruce McDonald’s Pontypool (****; Sept. 12, 5pm, Varsity 8) — completed just a day before its boisterous world premiere at the AMC last weekend — successfully imports a linguistically oriented apocalypse to the Kawarthas. During TIFF’s less fabulous moments, it was hard to fight the urge to flee somewhere in the direction of Bobcaygeon.
Indeed, the dark times make me wonder whether the fest has finally swollen to truly unmanageable and unfeasible proportions. Maybe Mickey Rourke could body-slam some sense into the situation.