Indie Film Blog Group Hug: TIFF 2007 Edition
Filed under: Festival Reports, Film Blog Group Hug, Toronto International Film Festival, Cinematical Indie
The Toronto International Film Festival is winding down, and of course the Cinematical crew on the scene provided you with fabulous, fabulous coverage. But it turns out there were other journalists there, too, writing about the fest at other websites. Who knew? So let's take a spin around the ol' Interwebs and show you what our fellow bloggers have been up to in a special TIFF edition of the Film Blog Group Hug:- GreenCine Daily has provided a lot of TIFF reviews and features. I particularly enjoyed the thoughtful and intelligent dispatches from David D'Arcy (about the festival's war-themed films) and Michael Guillén (following the fest's Masters and Discovery sections).
- RogerEbert.com editor Jim Emerson writes on his own blog, Scanners, that the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men "is one of those movies I think provides a critical litmus test. You can quibble about it all you like, but if you don't get the artistry at work then, I submit, you don't get what movies are. Elsewhere, he writes amusingly about the fun of seeing movies without knowing anything about them beforehand.
- Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere can always be counted on for entertaining prose, rants, and diatribes, and he blogged extensively throughout the fest. I love his dismissal of the rockumentary Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who: "I left in an angry huff [after] 25 minutes.... The limited footage I saw told me that [the directors] are hacks, propagandists and bald-faced liars. By all means see this foggy-minded doc when it turns up on DVD, but you'd do well to inject a heroin-cocaine speedball at the same time." Not a mincer of words, that Jeff.
- Wells also made two Oscar pronouncements: Atonement definitely will be a serious contender (our Ryan Stewart seems to agree), and Elizabeth: The Golden Age definitely will not.
- Pretty much everyone who saw Jason Reitman's Juno loved it (including our own Scott Weinberg and Kim Voynar), and /Film's Peter Sciretta takes it a step further: He lists all the songs included in the film's indie-folk soundtrack. Lots of stuff by The Moldy Peaches (and the group's singer, Kimya Dawson), as well as Belle & Sebastian, The Drop, Sonic Youth, and others.
- Variety's Anne Thompson posted a few insightful entries, notably this one, in which she talks about the three kinds of films at TIFF: the crowd-pleasers, the headline-makers, and the critical darlings. Some of the best movies, of course, are all three. Meanwhile, over at The Circuit blog on Variety, new Film Fest Managing Editor Mike Jones has some great end-to-end coverage of the fest.
- Nerve.com's Phil Nugent offers some concise reviews in the ScreenGrab blog; check out this one and this one, especially.
- Over at Movie City News, David Poland provides what few other bloggers do: video and photos (and more photos)!
