View image Roger & Chaz Ebert, with Roger's second sidewalk star. (All photos by Jim Emerson. Thanks to Kim Robeson for the use of the camera on this one!)
View image Man Push Dog. Anyone will tell you that one of the joys of TIFF is the street food. I was inspired to take this after seeing "Chop Shop," Ramin Bahrani's second film after "Man Push Cart." Want green olives on that dog? I do.
On average, I saw two to four movies a day at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival -- and, incredibly, I didn't see a bad movie. That's nine days and 20-something pictures (less than one tenth of the total screened), but I don't think I've ever had a run of good movies like that in my life. No, I didn't write about everything I saw -- but I also liked Ira Sachs' "Married Life," Chaude Chabrol's "A Girl Cut in Two" (figuratively and literally), Gus van Sant's "Paranoid Park," and those other movies I saw, except for the one I walked out on (the third in a four-movie day) that was not so much bad as doleful and predictable. And there was the Woody Allen movie I accidentally half-saw, without knowing I was half-seeing it.
View image Toronto Film Festival Co-Founder Dusty Cohl with Roger Ebert. Ya got a coupla stars here.
View image Ingmar Bergman's Death (center, rear) welcomes ticketbuyers, lined up at the TIFF box office in the Manulife Centre, which is being remodeled (nice duct-work, eh?) and currently looks like something out of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil." The woman in orange (center, foreground) is one of the fest's fantastically friendly and organized volunteers.
On the other hand, I also didn't take all that many risks. Most of what I saw was by familiar directors I like, or came recommended by fellow critics or other film festivals. There were some movies I wanted to see just because they sounded interesting (not because I'd ever heard of the filmmakers), but I couldn't squeeze them in, and in that sense I did not have the full experience a festival has to offer.
View image They do love their celebs up in Toronto. Last year, air-polluting, environment-destroying Sean Penn smoked at a press conference and it was a huge scandal. The paparazzi couldn't wait to catch him with a cigarette this time. And when they did -- front page news!
Anyway, although I fear some of the films I saw even ten days ago are no longer as vivid in my memory because of the ones I've seen since, here were my ten favorite Toronto movies, in very rough order of preference:
"No Country for Old Men" (Joel & Ethan Coen)
"I'm Not There" (Todd Haynes)
"Chop Shop" (Ramin Bahrani)
"Secret Sunshine" (Lee Chang-dong)
"Eastern Promises" (David Cronenberg)
"Atonement" (Joe Wright)
"The Orphanage" (Juan Antonio Bayona)
"Persepolis" (Marjane Satrapi & Vencent Paronnaud)
"Les Amours d'Astrée et de Céladon" (Eric Rohmer)
"4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days" (Cristian Mungiu)
More photos after the jump...
View image Critics Kathleen Murphy, Richard T. Jameson and Dave McCoy between features. No, I don't know why he's doing that, either.
View image The Manulife Centre not a very distinguished building, really, but I'm fascinated by the different surfaces and lighting. This is where most of the TIFF press and industry screenings are held, so it is Mecca for many of us.
View image The ceiling of the grand old Elgin Theatre, from my seat on the main floor. Great place to see a BIG movie like "Atonement."
View image Best. T-shirt. Ever. In my travels around the world, I have found the three most popular commercialized images to be: the Marlboro logo, Bob Marley, and Che Guevera. (Coke and Pepsi are probably fourth and fifth.) Seen in a shop window on Yonge St.
View image He has one on Hollywood Blvd., too, but this one's on Dundas St. in Toronto -- thanks to Dusty Cohl and Barry Avrich.
Longtime reader, first-time writer. Love your stuff, Jim. Good photos of the TIFF too. One quibble, though. It's "Yonge Street", not "Younge".
Good to see that Roger could make it to the festival. I didn't want to assume he'd be here this year, since he's still in recovery mode. I keep watching Ebert & Roeper every Sunday night in the hopes that Roger will one day return to the chair on the left.
JE: Thanks, Ryan -- I'll fix that typo. My Canadian is just terrible, so I didn't even notice...
We DO add a U to a lot of words up here (colour, favour, and...uh, a lot of others). If you were being ironic, that zoomed right over my head.
I love that Che shirt too. I think the same could be done for the Malcolm X baseball caps.
TIFF screened 349 films in 10 days. It's tough to see more than about 30. So everyone truly has their own festival, but I'm still amazed that I only saw 1 of your Top 10 films - "Secret Sunshine" which I agree is quite impressive.
Unlike you, I did see a few bad films ("Redacted" chief among them), and only saw one film I'd truly call "great" but I still enjoyed quite a few movies.
My Top 10 (out of the 21 I saw) at TIFF:
My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin)
Secret Sunshine (Lee Chang-dong)
Operation Filmmaker (Nina Davenport)
Battle for Haditha (Nick Broomfield)
Sukiyaki Western Django (T. Miike)
With Your Permission (Paprika Steen)
Paranoid Park (Gus van Sant)
The Tracey Fragments (Bruce MacDonald)
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (Wayne Wang)
Encounters at the End of the World (W. Herzog)
Oh man. I wanna buy that Che shirt!
Come on, dude, you gotta tell us what movie you walked out on!
Terryt: Oh, OK: It was Allison Eastwood's "Rails and Ties." When a certain woman with terminal cancer who always regretted not having children went looking for a certain boy who had been orphaned by her husband... I decided my time would be better spent resting my eyeballs for the next feature. I felt I knew exactly where this one was going to go and how it was going to get there (later confirmed by some who stayed), but if I read something that indicates there's more interesting stuff going on in the latter part of the movie, I'll give it another shot.
Jim, did you see "Don't Touch the Axe," the new Rivette movie? I "only" saw 10 movies at the fest, but it was by far my favorite...