TIFF movies build buzz

The Toronto International Film Festival opens next week, and that means the usual suspects will descend on the city: Oprah Winfrey, The Duchess of York, George Clooney, and that movie from Cannes about a woman who sexually mutilates herself with a pair of garden shears. That’s film festivals for you. They’re part celebrity, part art house, and part hiding your face in the popcorn.

Cameron Bailey, co-director of TIFF, says this is an especially good edition. "We’re thrilled," he says about the lineup of films and public events at TIFF, which runs from Sept. 10 to 19.

Among the thrills are Oprah, who will be there for the oddly titled Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, a drama about an illiterate African-American teenager who is pregnant for the second time by her father. It’s a subject that sounds as if Winfrey might have invented it and it stars the comedian Mo’Nique, who’s been getting Oscar buzz since the film debuted at Sundance.

Oscar buzz is one of the hallmarks of the Toronto festival, which has become a launch pad for Academy Award performances and films. "This is one of the best American films of the year," Bailey says. "It’s being positioned for attention for all the major awards that come at the end of the year."

Oprah, the executive producer of Precious, is regarded in celebrity circles as even more royal than The Duchess of York – that’s Sarah Ferguson, aka Fergie, ex-wife of Prince Andrew – who will be in Toronto for the closing-night gala of a movie she co-produced, The Young Victoria, about Queen Victoria’s romance with Prince Albert. Directed by Quebec’s Jean-Marc Vallee, it has not yet generated Oscar buzz, but you never know: Toronto is also a place of discovery, where virginal young films go, Victoria-like, to attract suitors.

There’s going to be a lot of that this year in Toronto: more than 100 of the festival’s 335 films – including 271 features, of which 242 are world, international or North American premieres – have no distributors yet. The list includes Creation, the opening night gala about the life of Charles Darwin, which stars Jennifer Garner and Paul Bettany, and the high-profile Canadian film Chloe, a sexual drama directed by Atom Egoyan and starring Liam Neeson: this is the movie Neeson was making when his wife, Natasha Richardson, had her fatal ski accident in Quebec. Neeson subsequently returned to Toronto to finish the movie and will be in Toronto to help promote it.

He and Clooney are among the horde of movie stars who descend on the festival every year to give interviews, attend parties, eat dinner at swanky Toronto restaurants and occasionally misbehave at the toniest clubs. Hang around the Avenue Road-Bloor Street area and stay up past your bedtime, and you never know what you’ll see: I was once at a party where Sir Ian McEwan was stuffing dollar bills into the G-string of a male dancer.

Clooney is in Toronto for the premieres of Up In The Air, a comedy about a corporate downsizing expert about to collect his 10 millionth frequent flyer mile, and The Men Who Stare At Goats, based on a true story of how the U.S. military planned to use psychic phenomena in combat.

Both sound custom-made for Toronto’s surreal mood of Hollywood-meets-hustle, and both arrive with the automatic buzz of Clooney, one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars. He is near the top of a heap that includes only-one-name-needed stars as Oprah, Fergie, Demi, Keanu, Snoop, Tilda, and Viggo, as well as two Colins (Farrell and Firth), two Jennifers (Connelly and Garner), four Michaels (Caine, J. Fox, Douglas and Moore), and such names as Bill Murray, Chris Rock, Christopher Plummer, Clive Owen, Drew Barrymore, Edward Norton, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey, Mariah Carey, Matt Damon, Megan Fox, Naomi Watts, Nicolas Cage, Penelope Cruz, Robin Wright Penn, and Woody Harrelson.

Missing is Lars, as in von Trier, the Danish director of Antichrist, who has a fear of flying, although apparently of little else. Antichrist is the garden shears film, an artistic horror movie in which Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg play a couple who go into the woods to recover from the trauma of a dead child and wind up in a landscape of terror and torture. It’s at once spellbinding, unwatchable, ridiculous, misogynist, and unforgettable. It caused a sensation at the Cannes Film Festival, where one journalist attacked von Trier for even making the movie in the first place.

"It’s difficult, and it’s going to divide audiences as it did in Cannes, but this is an important piece of filmmaking from one of the most interesting filmmakers working right now," Bailey says. "It’s a very personal film. He’s not just trying to shock or offend." Bailey adds that while Antichrist is partly a reinvention of the horror movie, "there are things in some of the torture films like Hostel that are much more disturbing than anything you’ll see in Antichrist."

In any event, TIFF has taken steps to deal with any controversy: following the public screening of Antichrist on Sept. 11, von Trier will be available on live video conference to answer questions from the press and the public on a big screen.

More down the middle are the blockbusters-in-waiting and the unheralded discoveries that form the backbone of TIFF. Anticipated titles include Capitalism: A Love Story, Michael Moore’s documentary on everyone’s favourite economic system; A Serious Man, the new Coen brothers movie, a family drama notable for its lack of movie stars; Whip It, the directorial debut of Drew Barrymore, with Ellen Page as a Texas teen who foregoes beauty pageants for roller derby; The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, a bit of whimsy from Terry Gilliam mostly notable as the final movie of Heath Ledger (three other actors – Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell – stepped in to fill out the role after Ledger died); Jennifer’s Body, a horror movie in the festival’s Midnight Madness series with Megan Fox as a high school cannibal who dines on unfortunate boys (sound familiar, guys?); The Road, the long-awaited adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel set in a post-apocalyptic world and starring Viggo Mortensen; and The Informant!, the Steven Soderbergh film with Matt Damon, looking very much like Philip Seymour Hoffman, as a deluded corporate whistleblower.

Nor is that all. TIFF has started a series of free outdoor events at Yonge-Dundas Square in the city’s downtown, and this year’s highlights include a special appearance on the evening of Sept. 14 by director Jonathan Demme in honour of film Neil Young Trunk Show. Young himself will be there, and Bailey says, "We’re told he may bring along a guitar, and we’re going to set up a microphone, and that’s all I can say."

A Neil Young concert would be appropriate because at the Toronto film festival, rust isn’t the only thing that never sleeps.