The Pagan Agenda

To misquote William Shatner: it is a very… good… year. To commemorate it I plan to see more films then usual at the Toronto International Film Festival, upwards to fifteen, counting rushes. Some cursory observations: poor crop of documentaries, the Real to Reel tends to be a very strong category but this year something is missing; disproportionate amount of prospects coming from the United States in the Special Presentations category overshadowing the usually strong Contemporary World category, and with them an unusually strong showing of celebrities this year; despite TIFF creating its first independent website free of Bell it still remains behind the curve in many respects, in particular its MyTiff scheduling feature sadly does little to organize one’s picks, and the individual searches for films I have attempted tend to result in error messages (although I do like their use of randomizing thumbnails of the films in each category on one page for easy access so long as you know what category your film belongs in).

After a lot of waffling back and forth I am sticking with the following tentative shortlist going into the lottery system:

1st choices

Lust, Caution – Ang Lee (Fri 7th 9pm)

No Country for Old Men – Coen Brothers (Sat. 8th 6pm)

The Assassination of Jesse James... (Sat 8th, 9pm)

Deuxieme Souffle – (Sun 9th 4pm)

Into The Wild – Sean Penn (Sun 9th, 9pm)

Paranoid Park – Gus Van Sant (Tues 11th, 9:15pm)

Cassandra’s Dream – Woody Allen (Wed 12th, 11am)

Atonement – Joe Wright (Wed 12th, 2:30pm)

I’m Not There – Todd Haynes (Wed 12th, 8:30pm)

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead – Sidney Lumet (Thurs 13th, 9pm)

The Man From London – Bela Tarr (Fri 14th, 8:30pm)

Encounters at the End of the World – Werner Herzog (Sat 15th, 9am)

Blind – (Sat 15th, 7pm)

Rushes:

Silent Light – Malickian Mennoinite film

Nightwatching – Greenaway’s take on Rembrandt

Chacun son cinema – Collection of shorts on the pleasure of watching films

George A Romero’s Diary of the Dead – Midnight Madness with one of the masters

Run Fatboy Run – Simon Pegg comedy about jogging: The picture says it all

I am splitting up my envelopes this year… my first one is in box 30; tomorrow the other is handed in. I am going to do my best to write up all the films I see, I have been able to do that for the last two years, so hopefully age has not entirely diminished my abilities.

Let us see what Labour Day brings when the envelopes are returned and momentary chaos ensues.