Crackie is a beautiful film. I'm not sure how else to begin this article. It's beautiful to look at and beautiful to experience.

Set in a tiny coastal town in Newfoundland, the film is, at heart, a love story, or a lack-of-love story, between a girl and her dog.

Mitsy (played with complete naturalism by newcomer Meghan Greeley, a Newfoundland theatre student) lives with her overbearing, tough-as-nails grandmother, Bride (played with a terrible force by Canadian comedy queen Mary Walsh, breaking down every typecasting wall). Mitsy dreams of becoming a hairdresser, of escaping her world of hand-me-downs and fried chicken dinners, of fleeing Newfoundland to live with her mother in Alberta. Her mother, an alcoholic and a woman of rather loose sexual morals, left her when she was a child.

Mitsy's relationship with Bride is shaky at best. Her resentment for her grandmother's sometimes cold exterior and eccentricities (it seems that there is always a strange man in her bed, and she trolls the local dump in search of products to sell in garage sales) runs deep, as does her need to be loved. This need leads her into a relationship (emotional for her, sexual for him) with the town's bad bay (played with delightful sleaze by Joel Hynes) and to adopt a crackie, an old, useless dog named Sparky, saving it from euthanasia. But the dog's life has been just as hard as Mitsy's, and as in every other area of her life, the mutt can't offer her the affection that she so desperately seeks.

This dysfunctional relationship, according to the film's director and writer, the charming, well-spoken Sherry White, is where the heart of the film lies.

"It's been so long that I've been writing the script that I can't remember what the original genesis of it was," White explained during an interview earlier this week, perched on a couch in the lobby of the Hazelton Hotel in Yorkville.

"But definitely the relationship with the girl and dog is where it began. The idea of a character who doesn't get the kind of love that she wants, or much love, for who love is hard to come by, and thinks that she has an opportunity to save a dog, and the dog has also not had much love and so doesn't know how to love back. It began with that idea."

Mitsy's life becomes even more complicated when her mother returns to her hometown, as outwardly glamorous and distant as ever.

I can't promise that the film is feel-good, and more-often-than-not it tends to weigh the spectator down with its heaviness. But its strength lies in its honest, completely believable characters. And despite its slightly-grim appearance, there is beauty to be found in Mitsy's hometown. The film is shot in rich colour, and shots of Mitsy's red coat against white-panelled buildings, and of the kitsch, warm, gaudy, over-crowded interior of Bride's cabin, and of the wild fields and expanse of ocean just beyond the decaying wooden fence of her property would make anyone eager to pack up and visit Newfoundland.

"I never intended for it to be a grim small town," White said of the film's location.

"Many small towns are kind of grim in a way. They're beautiful too, which I think this town is."

But the film's location meant more to White than to serve as a back-drop for her film. She said that while she didn't necessarily set out to write a Newfoundland-centric story and feels that the story could speak about anyone, anywhere, that her characters had to come to life in a small-town setting.

"In any rural town, no matter how small, you're going to find people who live on the outskirts of it, geographically and socially," she said.

"And there are always rejects. And I find, in smaller towns, those people...Bride might be a street person if she lived in a big city. She might be one of those people. But if she lives in a small town she can actually keep her house. It's easier for her to live, but she still lives on the outskirts of society."

As for her decision to place her characters in her home-province (she hails from Stephenville), White admitted that Newfoundland has always inspired her, and that coming from there, it's hard to forget one's origins.

"Most people who live on islands, your feet are rooted there, more than people who live in a big place," she said.

"So I feel very connected to the place, and it gives me a point of view, in a way. Maybe because I'm way out there in the Atlantic Ocean, that I am an outsider in that way, and that's my point of view, that's why the characters that I write are outsiders."

Crackie is terrifically acted. Greeley is perfect as Mitsy. Her long brown hair hangs over her eyes, a curtain that physically separates her from the people around her. Her lack of confidence is evident in her slouch, in the way that she allows herself to be swallowed up by her hand-me-down coat, and her pain bursts forth from her shrieks when Sparky refuses to conform to her will. White says that Greeley "came out of [her] head when [she] met her" and was "a gift from God."

Kristin Booth (Young People F***ing) is Greeley's polar-opposite, playing here her optimistic hairdressing professor. She adds to Greeley's life and to the film the infusion of positivity that Crackie's other characters lack.

"I really loved her energy," White said of her decision to cast Booth, with whom she worked on CBC's MVP.

"She just has this quality that this character needed. I just wanted her to be bubbly and happy and positive, and just a joy to be around, because I felt that would work in contrast with the other characters, who had a heavy quality to them, a darker quality."

But it's truly Mary Walsh as Bride who shines in the film. Gone is Walsh's penchant for over-acting and flair, as we know her in sketch comedies from This Hour Has 22-Minutes. Instead she gives a minimalist, harrowing, hard performance. Bride is hardly classy: she kicks, she screams, she swears, she claws, she pushes her breasts up to her throat with ridiculous slips and bras.

White says that her decision to cast Walsh came out of knowing the actress personally.

"It's not that different from her type of roles, it's just that the tone of film is slightly different," she explained.

"Mary's tough-as-nails and she's got a heart of gold and she's incredibly emotional...and that's Bride."

For underneath that exterior, is a deep caring. And even after Mitsy is dragged through the mud by everyone who matters to her, the film does not leave its audience with only despair, as it easily could. Rather, even with every odd stacked up against our heroine, at the heart of the film is the sense that familial devotion can save any soul, however ensnared in fog.

"What I would hope is that people get drawn into the movie, and that they feel something," White said.

"That they leave feeling not heavy, but hopeful, despite a rough ride."

As I waited in the lobby of the Marriott Hotel on Bay Street earlier this week to meet with Quebecois auteur Denis Côté, I was filled with no small amount of trepidation. I had just finished watching Côté's entry in this year's festival, Carcasses, and I was terrified that the man behind the film, which was both beautiful and enigmatic, might be pompous or speak in some language of art house cinema that I'm not well versed in.

I was thrilled to discover that Côté, from Montreal, was anything but some art house snob. He emerged in the hotel lobby with disheveled air, and tattooed arms to speak candidly with me about Carcasses and about his role in the cinematic world.

Carcasses is not a film that is easily defined, and Côté admits that he meant for it to be that way. It straddles the line between documentary and fiction, cinema vérité and a formalist love letter. If one had to find a plot within the film, one could say that it follows the day-to-day life of Jean-Paul Colmor, the owner of a car cemetery in Quebec. Colmor's world is one piled high, floor-to-ceiling, with carburetors, toy cars and records. He spends his days visiting neighbouring towns, flea markets, auctions and garage sales, acquiring more and more...stuff. This stuff he repairs and attempts to sell, but ultimately his need to collect, to work to restore junk, is a disease.

Côté films Colmord in his cluttered, isolated world, most of the time from a distance, his camera watching him work. Colmor is a natural subject. He seems completely unaware of Côté's presence, except for when he faces the camera directly, answering questions about his "vie quotidienne" and his peculiarities.

Côté met Colmor several years ago, when he needed to shoot on-location in a scrapyard for another film. He said he never forgot him, but more significantly, he never forgot his property. When he was offered funding from an arts institute in Montreal to direct a new film on a minimalist budget, he decided that that property deserved a whole film of its own. And that's what Côté claims the film is about: that place, rather than about Colmor himself.

"Of course this guy is there, but it's more about getting to the soul of a place," he explained.

"It's a very chaotic and trashy place, but I wanted an elegance. That's why I used framed, very fixed shots."

Midway, the film shifts gears with the arrival of four youth with Down syndrome, who treat Colmor's property like a sanctuary. They arrive with their knapsacks and campfire materials and set up a sort of utopia among the carcasses of cars, playing, preparing meals, loving one another with innocence and tenderness. These scenes have the feel of a children's fairytale, where the children escape their schoolteachers and non-understanding parents to form their own "royaume."

According to Côté, this shift in tone was entirely intentional.

"Some people, like Jean-Paul, he decided by himself to get out of society, outside the rules of normal society," he explained.

"But on the other hand, we have people like the young adults with Down syndrome and we take them and put them outside of society by ourselves. So that place was like a haven for all the outcasts of the world, a place where they could meet outside the rules of society. On paper, I wanted to make a fairytale, an homage to all marginals. It's a twisted fairytale about friendship."

I can't pretend that the film moves at an exciting pace. It's not meant to. What's most striking about Carcasses is what it has to offer spectators on the visual level.

Certainly, close-ups of Colmor's face, with him staring unflinchingly toward the camera's lens, are striking. It's rare to be able to study the lines of someone's face so unabashedly, and for so long. But it's the long takes of Colmor's surroundings which are most striking. Despite the seemingly random shelves and piles of one man's junk, there is an order and a beauty to Colmor's house and scrapyard. There is no shortage of detail to soak up from panning or long shots.

I must admit that I'm slightly worried, finally sitting down to write this article, because Côté said during our conversation that he is tired of being written off by journalists and critics as a mere director of art films. He laughed that every time he picks up an article about one of his movies - Carcasses is his fourth film - the writer always adds a warning.

"Everyone says 'you're such a hard filmmaker; you make no concessions,'" he explained.

"It's hard to hear that. 'When are you going to do this? That? You're not an easy filmmaker.' And every time someone writes about my film it's always 'this film is probably not everyone's cup of tea.' I keep hearing that. Of course, but we've seen much more experimental films than Carcasses."

But the fact is, not everyone will be able to appreciate a film like Carcasses. This isn't a Hollywood blockbuster. While it's characters, real and fictional, are intriguing, it's not a film about character or plot.

Côté concedes that not everyone always "gets" what he's trying to say in his films. He said that many critics and spectators take Carcasses to be a commentary on society's general obsession with possessions, things. While he admits that that metaphor can be seen in Colmor's obsessive collecting, that message was never explicitly on his mind while filming.

"People talk about that metaphor," he said.

"'The place as a metaphor for consuming society.' But the film wasn't made in that sense. You can see it like that. It's like people seeing images and symbols and metaphors in every film - sometimes it's very unconscious, for the filmmaker. But [Colmor] has a disease. He's collecting absolutely everything and he's absolutely convinced he can re-sell that shit. He has a disease. It's a cute image, that place is a microcosm of our consuming society, but the film, it's not heavy-handed."

Rather, what it's more comparable to is a moving work of art. And when one appreciates it as such, as a cinematic art installation, something visual, rather than narrative, it is beautiful.

Côté is very frank about his films and about what sort of audience he would like them to reach. He is well aware that Carcasses screened at only one cinema in Montreal, for only fifteen days. He labels himself a "festival guy," a director whose films travel around the world and screen to critical success at film festivals, but which are not necessarily commercially or popularly successful.

"After four films I can see where I stand," he said.

"It's film festival material and I know it. You know, I'm not very commercially inclined. I just assume it and admit it: it's for film festival people, it's for cinephiles, it's art house. So it's always funny when I make a new film and I read my blurb in Variety and it's always 'this film screams 'art house' and nothing else.' Yeah! What do you want me to say?"

Côté said that, this said, sometimes he can't help but get defensive about his work, something that he joked he needed to stop doing in order to keep the media on his side. Without being prompted, he set about defending his decision to cast the four teen-aged actors with Down syndrome in his film. He admitted that while he had qualms about casting them, worrying that he might be exploiting them in some way, he quickly realized that that wasn't the case, regardless of what harsher film critics might be saying.

"After one day [of filming] I was feeling very weird because they could not understand what I was doing," Côté said.

"And even if you sit with them and you try to explain, they don't understand, they don't care, they don't have the capacity to necessarily understand what you're trying to do. I felt very bad. And one mother asked me, 'you feel bad...why?' And I said, 'I don't know. They're like puppets and I feel like I'm exploiting them and I don't feel good about that.' She said, 'listen, my kid is 18 years old. He's been conscious about his difference for 18 years and he feels inferior to everybody, and for the five-six days you're shooting with him now, it is the most important experience of his life, because he feels he's somebody now. So you don't need to care about explaining to him what you're doing. It's so rewarding for him and for us as parents. We don't care about your film, somehow. He's just making a film and it's good for him.' So she said, 'you go to your film festivals, you talk to your journalists, you intellectualize what you want. You did your job for my son and that has no price.' So from that moment on all the weight I had on my shoulders was gone. So that's why I feel comfortable with the film. I don't feel I'm exploiting these young people."

Côté said that the first screening he had of the film, for his stars and their families, including Colmor's 14 children, was an incredible experience. He said that everyone involved was smiling and laughing and that it didn't matter how much of his meaning was or was not understood. The one criticism that he faced that night, he explained, was that Colmor's children found his representation of their father too idealized. They said that his eccentricity, and his faults, like the fact that, though he's in his seventies, Colmor just married a 21-year-old Cuban woman who speaks no French, are not even touched upon in Carcasses. But Côté never set out to produce a documentary of Colmor's life.

"The film you're watching is very cold, very cerebral, very formalist," he said.

"It's a formalist piece of cinema, but the film on Jean-Paul Colmord needs to be done. You could sit with him and film with him for six months and the story of his life would be an incredible documentary saga. That's not my film. It's not that guy's bio. It's about a place. It's more of a fantasy and a poetic exercise. I wanted to do a dialogue between fiction and documentary, of course, because you think you're watching a documentary and then it spins and becomes a fiction. I like to play with those genres."

Still though, there are undoubtedly moments of truth on Carcasses. Côté has the tendency to script very little of his films, and to let the camera simply roll. This means that sometimes his lens catches moments of touching realism, from the twitch of Colmor's withered cheek when a fly buzzes close to him, to moments of stolen tenderness between his young actors.

"I like to put myself in danger," he said of this filming style.

"Anything can happen! You film it and anything can happen. I really like doing a film like Carcasses. You come in in the morning and have no idea what will happen in the day, and that's great. And at the editing table you have no clue what to do with all that material. Everything has to be done in the editing room. Nothing is set before. Nothing is controlled."

Carcasses screens today at 3:00 pm at Varsity Cinemas.

Last time I visited the intersection of Yonge and Dundas Streets, the dead had risen and were saluting their venerable leader, none other than George A. Romero. Last night, something just as out-of-the-ordinary happened.

 

In honour of the TIFF screening of Mao's Last Dancer, an Australian film about the life of Li Cunxin, who risked his family and country for the freedom to dance the Western style of ballet he loved, the National Ballet of Canada took to the Young-Dundas stage to perform a snippet of a show from their upcoming season. It is very rare for an audience to be able to get so close to a ballet company of that calibre.

 

Whereas a night at the ballet is usually a dignified, classic affair, the performance was very intimate, with performers warming up, laughing and joking on-stage before their curtain call and performing their number in matching American Apparel sweats.

 

And, yet again, although I've beaten this point to near-death, this performance was completely free. Amazing.

 

After the spectacle, which was just beautiful to watch, a pleasant blend between classic ballet lifts and a strange, jerky movement style that looked strobe-light-induced, I headed backstage to speak with the show's choreographer, Aszure Barton, a former dancer who is pretty much "it" in North American choreography right now, about the upcoming premiere of the work just previewed, and about the movies.

 

She said that her show, which will have its world premiere at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in November, is about community. Working with forty dancers, often all on-stage, far more than is typical for a ballet production, especially since each is given at least a minute of showcase or solo dance, she wanted to explore the possibilities for group creation.

 

"What I'm really interested in is building a work with a collective of people" she explained.

 

"The most important thing for me is creating a safe and positive, creative atmosphere that's inspiring for everyone. Participating in it, on this path, together. So the work then becomes moments of creative process, but ultimately it is hopefully going to take the audience on a journey to a completely different universe. These dancers have created a world that has boundaries, without boundaries. You have a structure on stage that is four walls and brings our focus in... But it really is about the community, about the dancers, and this journey that they take you on, from their own personal experience to the power of the group."

 

As far as previewing her work at TIFF goes, Barton said that she has always been very cinematographic in her choreography, and insists that film and dance are more similar than people think. She hopes that the release of a film like Mao's Last Dancer and last night's showcase will bring a whole new audience out to the Four Seasons when their season starts later this fall.

 

"It's really important that we do things like this to make work more accessible," she said.

 

"Not just to people who can afford to go to the ballet, or would be interested in going to the ballet. So it's really good to open people's eyes up to different forms of art, to dance. People ask me 'what choreographers inspire you?' And for me it's really what directors and what films [inspire me.] I'm really, really excited about movies and about film. I would love to direct film, ultimately, one day. So my work is cinematic in that way...the individual artists are actors. They're themselves, but at the same time they're method actors. I hope to bring a film audience into the Four Seasons."

 

Mao's Last Dancer will screen for the public on Saturday, Sept. 19 at Scotiabank Theatre at 12:45 am. Photos of yesterday's performance and choreographer Aszure Barton on-stage by Michelle O.

I've been meaning to say this since my very first public screening:

Props to the first person who decided to "arrrrrrrrrrrrr!" like a pirate when the anti-piracy slide shows before all TIFF screenings.

I'm new to the festival, so maybe that's old-hat tradition, but I still get a chuckle out of it every time that slide shows and the entire audience lets out their inner swashbuckler. That cult-ish pre-screening tradition (and the fact that real-time audiences whoop and clap along with the on-screen audience when the "thanks to our festival volunteers" preview plays) seems to bring TIFF audiences together and break down the walls between spectators and their next-seat-neighbours. I don't think we'd be laughing or crying or screaming at the screen so unabashedly without that initial ice-breaker.

So props to you, whoever you are!

Atom Egoyan's newest film, Chloe, which premiered at the festival last night as a gala presentation, is a sexy psychological thriller about a woman, Catherine, who begins to suspect her husband of infidelity. In order to prove her suspicions correct she hires the young Chloe, an escort, to seduce him, orchestrating their encounters and insisting that Chloe spare no detail in her reports on them. But slowly things begin to spin out of Catherine's control, as Chloe moves away from her scripts and as their own relationship takes a transgressive turn. Soon obsession and jealousy threaten to consume everyone involved in Chloe's game of passion.

The film is a remake (or rather, as Egoyan defines it, a reinvention) of French film Nathalie... (2003).

"I love the basic principle of the story," producer Ivan Reitman said of his decision to reinvent the film, although it was released less than a decade ago.

"The underlying idea of what happens when suspicion takes over a long-term relationship."

Reitman approached writer Erin Cressida Wilson to write a screenplay based on Nathalie.... They worked closely together, bouncing ideas back and forth, drawing on their individual strengths and weaknesses.

"I tend toward being a little bit more like Adam," Wilson said of the process.

"Being more of a veiled, mysterious writer who doesn't want to say what this is about. So it was very exciting to work with Ivan, who knows the commercial world and who knows how to make something accessible. So we could combine and make it serious, erotic and hopefully subtle, and commercial, or at least readable to a general public."

Egoyan's body of work can be seen as enigmatic, but he has always worked with similar themes: obsession, the mysteries of storytelling and the blur between fiction and reality. When the script emerged from their collaboration, they said, it was clear that Egoyan would be the perfect director to tackle it.

Once Egoyan became involved and the film was cast (no easy task; while Wilson wrote the script with Julianne Moore as Catherine in mind, and while Liam Neeson happened to be working with Egoyan on a stage show while the film was in pre-production and would eventually read for the part of Catherine's husband, David, Reitman said that they had to audition "everyone who spoke modern English" until they lucked upon a pre-Mamma Mia! Amanda Seyfried for the part of Chloe), everyone involved began to work on character development. Something that, according to Egoyan, was not a quick process. He said that the inter-relations of the film's characters is incredibly complex.

"It was very important that these two women be attracted to one another for inexplicable reasons that they don't even understand completely," he explained.

"That Chloe, from the moment she sees Catherine, is reminded of someone who might protect her, who might be able to understand her, might be able to watch her and attend to her. And all sorts of histories that we can't even imagine. I wanted it to be something very powerful for her that she did not understand, and in the same way, with Catherine, she is at a point in her life where she feels that she is losing her attraction, and that her husband is surrounded by young women. And so this idea of hiring a young woman to flirt with her husband... There's a panic that both women are experiencing and they are both soothing each other in ways they don't understand, but also torturing each other for reasons they don't understand. And that was very exciting to me in terms of casting and developing the screenplay and the rich possibility that this had as a psychological genre."

"Chloe is in a bad place in her life, she doesn't like what she's doing, and she gets to then create a story around it for this woman who is listening to her, and it endows her experiences with a certain dignity and an artfulness that she doesn't really feel, and it makes her feel more special than she is at that moment," he continued.

"That's a very complex motivation. I'm not someone who likes to go off and try different things. I'm quite specific."

Moore, who first met Egoyan at the festival in the '90s, said that she believes he was the perfect director to handle this sort of "loaded material." She said that it was the idea of working with him that initially drew her to the film, but that she was also excited to play such an emotionally complex character, "a woman in crisis."

"The interesting thing about this character's exploration, to me, was that she was using this girl as a conduit to her husband," she said.

"There was something kind of fascinating in that. Instead of turning to him she thought she was going to take this girl and ask this girl to show her what her husband was feeling. It started to be a way for her to feel what he wanted and what he liked. And it was fascinating and deliberately cruel and there was a power thing that was happening and also a real sense of access and intimacy that was thrilling, and it allowed the relationship between the two women to grow. So in her efforts to find out what her husband liked, she found out what she liked."

One of the most striking things about the film to a Canadian is that it is unabashedly set in Toronto. Whereas most films filming in the city will avoid backdrops that refer explicitly to this city's landmarks, Chloe embraces the AGO and Yorkville. Wilson is from San Francisco and had initially set her script there, but Egoyan quickly found that he felt like a tourist there and could not achieve the intimacy with the city that filming there would require.

"There was a very specific social milieu that the film was examining and there was also a class structure that it was looking at and I understood that in this city very well," he said.

"The challenge was trying to convince Ivan that Toronto could be as alluring, as sexy and romantic as San Francisco. Even Torontonians... Like that archway. We pass it every day, but we don't see it with a long lens, and with the lights and the camera, suddenly it becomes something else. It's kind of interesting to reinvent."

Wilson had no problem with the change. She said that a script is meant to pass from the writer's hands to the producer's to the director's to the actors', and get reinvented and personalized according to each piece of the movie puzzle along the way.

"It becomes a person's and then you hand it over and it becomes someone else's and hopefully that collaboration can really shine," she said.

Egoyan, who usually scripts his own films, said that even so, he never strayed too far from Wilson's text, and that working with it was a relief.

"When I'm working with my scripts, because no one understands what they're about, when you read them at script-level, including myself, often, I find that people assign to me a certain responsibility because I must know how it's all going to come together," he said.

"And it's a bit lonely, actually. This was wonderful, because it's all on the page, and we all knew what the blueprint was, and I felt that we were working together."

Press conference photos by Michelle O. Chloe will screen again for the public tomorrow at the Visa Screening Room at 11:00 am.

I'm going to be perfectly honest here. I've never been a huge fan of Michael Moore. Sure, I appreciate Bowling for Columbine as much as the next person, but I find Mr. Moore to be, a lot of the time, unnecessarily rude and abrasive. So when I sat down in the conference room at the Sutton Place Hotel earlier today for Mr. Moore's press conference about his new documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story, I was certain that I would find him insufferable.

After all, this documentary is much larger in scope than any of Mr. Moore's previous films. Here he's not just attacking the health care system in the States, or poverty in his hometown of Flint, Michigan, but capitalism as a system. I assumed that since his subject was much grander, so too would be my intolerance for him.

Boy, was I proven wrong!

Mr. Moore spoke for 40 minutes about his film and about his take on capitalism. I barely noticed the time passing. I was completely caught up in what he was saying. The man is among the most eloquent I've ever heard. He has an infectious laugh, a wicked sense of humour, tends to punctuate what he's saying with expansive hand gestures and above all, he's smart. You might not agree with what he's saying at any given moment, but you have to admit that he's well-versed in his subject matter.

Mr. Moore is an encyclopedia of economic statistics. I'm not at all surprised that he's having trouble getting booked on talk shows to promote his doc due to the fact that no one will oppose his viewpoints. I know that I could hold my own against him for maybe a good two seconds before getting mowed over by his facts and opinions.

So I stand corrected. I admit that I misjudged Mr. Moore. And to apologize, I'm going to let him do the rest of the talking. Below are excerpts from his 40 minute rant about Love Story and capitalism in general. Go see his film. You won't be disappointed.

"I've probably been thinking about this movie for the whole time I've been making films. It seems like every issue I make a film about comes back to the core issue that there's something seriously wrong about the economic situation in our country. And so I felt that instead of dancing around the issue, that I'd just go for it. 'Tell us how you really feel, Mike!'

[...]

I think that capitalism in general is responsible, not for the worldwide recession, but for a lot of suffering, both in the United States and around the world. If it seems to be more on steroids in America, that's because we do everything better! Canadians have better banking regulations, but I see you try to copy so much of what we do that it's kind of sad. And you end up with a lot of the problems similar to what we have.

[...]

I don't think anybody who has tried to create art in any form, and in this case cinema, succeeds when one tries to reach for the mediocre, or to create art that makes people feel more comfortable. The purpose of art is actually, in many cases, to make people feel quite uncomfortable. Or at least to go to that place that is already of discomfort inside of you and tap into that. Because in that place and from that place come the emotions that the filmmaker, the artist, is trying to evoke, whether that's laughter or sadness or anger. That's how I really feel and I've felt that way for a long time.

[...]

When I say that capitalism should be eliminated I'm not talking about eliminating someone trying to open up a business selling shoes or someone working hard to earn money or even earning more money to do better for themselves... To me capitalism is a system of legalized greed and it guarantees that just a few people at the top of the pyramid are going to earn most of the money. And everyone else becomes their worker ants, becomes their slaves, essentially, to do their bidding, to earn that money for them. And the money that those earn, those other people below the pyramid, sometimes is okay, is sometimes enough to get by, and sometimes you're living from paycheck to paycheck. And a lot of the time you're one of the one out of eight people whose homes are either in delinquency or foreclosure right now. One out of eight!

[...]

I reject that system because I believe in democracy, I believe in the principles that our founding fathers gave us, that we are to treat each other in as fair and as equitable a manner as possible. The richest one percent in America have more financial wealth than the bottom 95% of people...that is not democracy. That is not moral; it's not right; there is no ethical foundation to it. In my film I speak to that through my Catholicism. But you don't have to be Catholic to say that. All the great religions denounce that kind of greed and denounce treating the poor as if they were your doormen. And if you're of no religion and belong to the Church of Bill Maher, this is just simply wrong.

[...]

I'm a filmmaker who sees something he doesn't like and who has witnessed a lot of suffering, a lot of letters from people around the country telling me their stories of utter despair everyday, and its painful to read. I try to think of what I can do in my privileged position as filmmaker, a person who's able to sit here and talk to you, to give voice to what they're living through. Because they don't get to have their voices heard in cinemas or on the nightly news or in the dying newspapers. I just think we can do better. We're in the 21st century... Aren't we smart enough to come up with something that is relevant to what we're dealing with right now?

[...]

I may not be right, but we're not going to be able to have that discussion about what's right and what we should do unless someone gets it going. Here we are. A year ago tomorrow the shit hit the fan. It's been a year and I don't think I've seen a single talk show, a single edition of Meet the Press, an op-ed in the New York Times, where they've allowed a voice to state the following: the real problem here, my friends, is capitalism itself. It's not this particular symptom or that particular piece of it. It's an economic system that doesn't work. It's not fair, it's not democratic, it's not just...it's gotta go! Has anyone heard anyone say that?

[...]

This film, like my other films, exists to interject an idea into the discourse. I have an open mind and I'm willing to listen to anything at this point.

[...]

Greed was there before capitalism. Greed is in all of us, it's the dark side of human nature. So we need to have a moral code that keeps it in check. Capitalism is not that moral code that keeps greed in check. Capitalism encourages it! Capitalism almost demands it! We legalize it. It make it part of our law, in the United States and in Canada, where we say if you are a corporation with shareholders you have a fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders to maximize profits. Capitalism is this legalized endorsement of greed. It doesn't have a soul, it doesn't compromise or allow for any form of safety net!

[...]

I believe in a moral code that says that those who are the "have-nots" should not be punished because they have less than us. A hand should be extended to them and there should be an equitable distribution of that pie.

[...]

Socialism is closer to a democratic concept. Socialism is closer to saying 'everyone at the table has a right to a slice of that pie.' So the irony is that dictatorships, under the guise of socialism, talked about having this equitable distribution of the pie, but really people had no say as to who was baking it, or cutting it. So that had its own crazy aspect. But certain aspects of socialism are necessary for a fair society, a just society. In a sense, Jesus was the first socialist, in the true sense of what it should be.

[...]

Capitalism is a beast. It will never stop. It has an insatiable appetite to make money. You can put as many strings or ropes around it as you want, but it will break through. There's no such thing as 'enough' in capitalism. People have asked me, 'well what's the love story in this movie?' The love story is that it's a movie about wealthy people who love their money. Except this movie has a twist. They don't just love their money, they love our money, and they're going to find any way they can to get it."

Well said Mr. Moore. Well said.

Press conference photo by Michelle O. Capitalism: A Love Story will screen tomorrow at Scotiabank Theatre at 3:45 pm.

The film tells the story of Felix Bush, a man who decides to stage his own funeral while he's still around to enjoy it, to get his affairs in order while he still can. It's a spin on the true-life story of Felix "Bush" Breazeale, who did just that in Tennessee in 1938.

When producer Dean Zanuck first stumbled across the film's script, he knew that it wouldn't be easy to turn it into a film, not least of all because it featured layered, aged characters, hardly what Hollywood associates with a blockbuster western. But the story stood out in his mind.

"I was really taken by the script's originality," he said.
Next director Schneider came on board. Then came the question of casting. Both Robert Duvall and Sissy Spacek, who would go on to play Bush and his ex-lover, respectively, were approached and both expressed interest in working on the project.

"I had always felt that Sissy and Bobby were these sort of acting icons, that everybody sort of lumps into the same category, but they had never really worked together in something like this," said Schneider.
Getting ahold of Bill Murray, who plays the conniving mortician who organizes Bush's funeral, was slightly more difficult. According to Schneider and Zanuck, the star does not operate like most in his profession. Working without a publicist, he does not read scripts, but only synopses, which are sent to a P.O. box. Inquiries are left in voicemail messages to a 1-800-number and, according to the two men, Murray is infamous for getting fairly far along in the pre-production process without actually committing to a project 100%.

Schneider joked that when Murray did briefly contact him about the script and promised to call him again to discuss it he "slept with the phone by [his] bed for six weeks waiting for that call, which never came."

Eventually though, Murray did announce his absolute interest in the film.

"That was a tremendous shot in the arm for us," said Zanuck.

"This cast was shaping up. This is a producer's dream, to work with any one of these guys, but to have three just amazing American icons... I feel blessed to have had this experience."

But even with an A-list cast on board, the fact was that the film was still not associated with any big studio. Finding the funding necessary to get the project off the ground took years. So many that Duvall joked that he forgot about the project between the time he was first approached about it and the time it started filming. But eventually, it did come together. Ironically, the project's main private investor offered his financial support one day before the stock market took a nosedive this time last year.

Zanuck is the son of legendary 20th Century Fox producer Richard Zanuck. He said that his father gave him the following advice about the film industry:

"'Just focus on stories you wanna tell and tell them as passionately as you can,'" he said his father said.

"'The rest of it, more often than not, will take care of itself.' I knew Get Low wasn't going to be easy. It goes against the grain of what people believe will work these days. But we all agreed that this was something that could work."

One of the things that did make Get Low work, according to its cast and crew, was the fact that its screenwriter and actors were real southern folk. Bush is not necessarily a cowboy, but the film feels every bit like a western, recreating on-screen a small, 1930s, western-American town beautifully. According to Duvall, you have to fully understand the cowboy's hat and overalls to don them.

Spacek said that acting with Duvall was not only a privilege, but a pleasure, and downright easy. She said he's such a natural actor that there's nothing to do when working with him except react to his performance.

"He's the engine, and you just have to catch the moving train and you get a great ride," she explained.

Duvall had a much simpler way to describe his approach to Bush, and his acting style in general.

"It's all about talking and listening, listening and talking," he explained.
As to what "get low" actually means, Duvall thinks that it has to do with being humble in preparation for whatever world lies beyond this one.

"I think it's 'get down' to your saviour, to your beliefs," he explained.
Sissy had another take on the expression. Although she thought the script was "sweet, deep, lyrical," she found the idea of "getting low" "odd."

"Myself I'm going to be cremated and I'd like to get things straight before I go," she laughed.
And despite the hardships that came out of producing the film independently, Zanuck has absolutely no regrets either.

"At the end of the day we got to make the movie without any studio interference, without interference from our investors," he said.

"And as filmmakers you can't ask for anything more. These are very rare experiences, to control the entire filmmaking process, from the very first day all the way to this moment. This film will succeed or fail based on our decisions and our performances and that's a great place to be."

Press conference photo by Michelle O. Get Low will screen for the public tomorrow at noon at Ryerson Theatre and again on Wednesday, Sept. 16 at 02:00 pm.

As a starving student (that's not just a cliché either; I've lived through entire semesters on cafeteria coffee alone) the idea of attending an international film festival like TIFF has always seemed out of my financial grasp. It didn't help that I live in Ottawa, but in my head it was only the rich and fabulous who could afford to enjoy the festival's screenings and stars. This was one of the reasons why I was so excited to be awarded the Sid Adilman Mentorship Programme internship: here was a chance to attend the festival, all of the festival, on a student's budget (i.e.: for free. Students will enjoy absolutely anything if it's free.)

So I arrived at the festival, brimming with excitement and the awareness that I was extremely privileged to be here. I haven't lost that sense of privilege, but what I've realized since arriving in Toronto is that the festival is far more accessible than I ever imagined.

Take the festival programming at Yonge-Dundas Square as an example. Every day a silent film is being screened right there, in front of the Eaton Centre, for FREE. And every night a special event, in conjunction with a festival screening, brings to film-loving Torontonians the stars, musicians and directors behind the festival's line-up. There's been a lot of talk already this week, at various industry programme events, about how new media is influencing cinema and how audiences consume it. Well, pay attention to what's happening at Yonge-Dundas: the free line-up is making cinema 100% interactive.

I was lucky enough to be on-hand yesterday when the annual Toronto Zombie Walk lumbered into the square after terrorizing the city for an hour in search of human flesh and brains, and groggily saluted George A. Romero, the unarguable master of the zombie flick. Romero's newest film, Survival of the Dead, was screening at 11:59 PM as part of the festival's Midnight Madness programme, and his classic, Night of the Living Dead, screened for those assembled at Yonge-Dundas. Again, allow me to stress, the latter was FREE.

Before heading on-stage to greet his fans, Romero said he hoped his new film would live up to their visible enthusiasm.

On-stage, Romero spoke briefly about Night of the Living Dead (1968), about how he felt compelled to do something fun, something different from the commercials on which he built his career as a director, and the fact that he never expected it to become the cult smash that it now is.

"We were just a bunch of young people that had a commercial production company, doing commercials, industrial films, and the like, and we all wanted to make a movie and we wound up making Night of the Living Dead," he explained.

"We were sort of pissed off that the '60s hadn't really changed the world and some of that anger is in the film. But basically we were just trying to make a good old-fashioned horror film that pushed the envelope a little bit. I'm still stunned. When we first made the film I had no idea that it would be showing here tonight. It's still stunning to me. Somehow it survives. And the new film is called Survival of the Dead. There's a bit of irony there. Thank you all for being willing to keep watching this stuff!"

He was then presented with the oddest trophy I have ever seen - a silver CN Tower being overwhelmed by a bloody, severed hand - in honour of his becoming a Canadian citizen and deciding to reside in Toronto. The trophy was presented to him by Kyle Ray, Toronto city councillor, who joked that the assembled crowd looked something like a council meeting. He presented Romero with the prize in honour of his efforts to "bridge understanding between the living and the undead through the cinematic arts."

"I saw the film in '69 and it made a difference in cinematography, just made a complete shift in what people expected in film," Ray said.

The undead crowd responded in a fashion that was altogether too lively if you ask me: are zombies really supposed to whoop?

"It's a celebration of the dead," said Zombie Walk organizer Thea Munster of the gathering.

"Hey, TIFF's all about the beautiful. It's time for the ugly and the dead to rise."

And rise they did. A dripping, sticky, oozing crowd of undead Jessica Rabbits and Marios and Quentin Tarantino's The Brides, complete will ripped clothing and gaping head wounds. The care given to these costumes was incredible.

"It's awesome," said "zombie" Katie Balforth of the experience.

"It's good to do something like this for Romero. He's kind of the father of zombies so it's good to get out and dress up and show him some respect."

As a fan of the horror genre, and of a good brain-munching zombie flick, it was fairly incredible to witness hundreds of fans like me face-to-face with someone who was, for many of them, a hero. The people in the square yesterday night were real fans of cinema...the sort of people you see dressed up at the opening night of a science fiction or fantasy movie.

Their excitement was tangible. It's the same excitement, the same palpable sense of expectation, that I've felt at every single public screening that I've attended here. Forgive me for getting sentimental here, but I'm very glad to see that everyone, regardless of student status or ability to purchase a festival ticket package or not, can get a taste of that raw passion for the movies.

Last night it was as though Romero's zombies dragged their rotting, bleeding, decomposing bodies out of his film and onto the street. And I honestly believe that what I witnessed is how cinema ought to be enjoyed.

Enough of this stoic consideration of a film in a darkened theatre. Let's howl at the movie screen, jeer, laugh, cry. Not only is the programming at Yonge-Dundas free, it's completely immersive.

All photos by Michelle O. For the full list of free TIFF programming visit http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/programmes/yongedundassquare. 

Believe it or not, the US army has actually conducted research into the use of the paranormal as a weapon against the country's enemies. New Age mumbo jumbo led some officers to believe that with the proper training and mindset they could learn to walk through walls and kill goats simply by staring at them.

This ridiculous but altogether true story inspired journalist Jon Ronson to write a book about this strange chapter in American military history, The Men Who Stare at Goats. Now that book has become a movie starring George Clooney, Jeff Bridges and Ewan McGregor.

At a press conference today to promote The Men Who Stare at Goats before its gala premiere at Roy Thomson Hall this evening, the same sort of ludicrousness that pervades the film dominated discussion of it.

Topics ranged from which supernatural power each actor would like to have (according to Clooney, who plays former special ops soldier Lyn Cassady, he was already using his; this was followed by a devilish grin, so you have to wonder what he meant), how well the film's actors dance, the ever-controversial question of who is the Sexiest Man Alive, Jeff Bridges (who plays the paranormal unit's founder Bill Django) as scientific test subject, Batman's nipples and Clooney being mistaken for an incompetent doctor while suited up to film a scene from E.R.

Amid the joking the cast and crew did manage to get in a word or two about the film itself.

Director Grant Heslov said that while the film satirizes a division of the US government during wartime, he was never afraid of the film becoming overly political or coming under fire in the current American political context.

"I feel that we were making a film that was investigating some stuff that happened in the military, stuff that I think was fascinating, that I think was cool, up to a point," he said.

"There is a slight perversion of that at the end of the film that I thought was terrifying but also interesting and that was worth exploring. It was part of the truth, so it seemed like it was worth talking about."

And according to Ronson and Peter Straughan, the film's screenwriter, it really is the true in the movie that is the strangest.

Heslov said that more than anything, he views the film as a man's journey to find himself.

Jeff Bridges took a time-out from pretending to be a dolphin (again, something about him being involved in tests at the Monroe Institute, where some of the paranormal unit's real experiments took place) to say that the film can be taken seriously, and that fundamentally it deals with a serious and universal desire.

"I think this one will play across the board," Bridges said.

"We're talking about a seriousness in humour. I think they go hand-in-hand. I think there's nothing more funny than someone who takes themselves seriously. Also, there may be a lot of silliness going on, all these different kinds of paranormal things, there's a silliness to it, but the idea of trying to get past warfare is a beautiful idea. I think everybody in the world can relate to that. We need to figure out a way to stop killing each other, disagreeing with each other, you know, figure it out!"

Even if the solution involves the loss of a few goats.

The Men Who Stare at Goats will screen for the public again on Sunday, Sept. 13 at Ryerson Theatre at 11:30 am.

Director Steven Soderbergh is no stranger to the whistleblower film. In 2000 his Erin Brockovich was a critical hit and secured Julia Roberts' place in Oscar speech history.

The Informant!, Soderbergh's latest film, is about another real-life whistleblower, Mark Whitacre, but the tone of this film could not differ more from that of Brockovich.

Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) was recruited by the FBI in 1992 to spy on his company, Archer Daniel Midland (ADM), which was suspected of price-fixing. But while working undercover Whitacre began to act strangely and was eventually discovered to have embezzled millions of dollars while working with the bureau on the case.

Whereas Brockovich's story was treated very much as dramatic triumph over the evil corporation, Whitacre's is treated comedically.

According to the film's screenwriter, Scott Z. Burns, comedic treatment of the scandal was always the obvious approach.

"We had a whistleblower story and we were looking for another way into the character," he explained.

"There are things that happen in the story that I don't think fit comfortably into anything but a comedy."

And here, said Soderbergh, it is not some evil corporation that is the film's antagonist, but rather Whitacre himself.

"All of the pressure that is being brought to bear on him in the film is created by him, so that I thought was an interesting set-up," he said.

The film is set in the '90s and has gotten attention for its detailed recreation of the decade's style, high-waisted pants and all.

"I was actually surprised," Damon laughed when asked about his less-than-debonair Whitacre get-ups.

"It's weird to make a period piece, for me, about a time I remember really well. I remember walking into the first wardrobe fitting going 'what are they going to do with the clothes; I mean the clothes are just like they are now.' I walked in and I was like 'oh my God!' I forgot."

Melanie Lynskey, who plays Whitacre's wife Ginger, joked that it wasn't her acting, but rather her wig that did her work for her. Damon added that if Oscar history says anything, the fact that he gained weight and sported a truly ridiculous wig for the role means that he'll walk away with a best actor statuette for sure (Charlize Theron in Monster, anyone?).

Producer Gregory Jacobs said that, apart from wigs and weight-gain, what makes the film work is that Soderbergh is a director in constant flux.

"Steven never repeats himself," Jacobs explained.

"Every job is a new and interesting challenge."

Scott Bakula, who plays FBI special agent Brian Shepard in the film, adds that it's due to the simple fact that Soderbergh knows what he wants.

"Steven works in such an unusual way compared to the directors I've worked with in the business in that he wants to be there, working hard, and not beat it to death," he said.

"He's interested in fresh, he's interested in almost rehearsal-type takes. He knows what he wants. Most directors shoot everything and figure it out later. "

Damon, who has collaborated with Soderbergh on several projects, and who is a filmmaker himself, said it's essential that Soderbergh's actors be prepared when they arrive on set. He is famous for his super-fast production of films, fulfilling most production roles himself, and often refuses to let actors take a second take.

"Anytime you make a movie it's a lie in the sense that it's a representation of life; it's not life," Soderbergh explained.

"So your goal is to try and represent it as accurately as possible. What I've found through a lot of trial and error, is that if you can create an environment in which the actor isn't loaded down with a lot of philosophy and you've given them practical things to do and there's a sense that we may only get to do this once... Because in life we don't get retakes."

The Informant! premieres at the festival tonight at the Visa Screening Room at 06:00 pm and will screen again for the public tomorrow and Tuesday, Sept. 15.

Sexy/funny horror flick Jennifer's Body premiered at a Midnight Madness screening last night to a sold-out crowd that had no problem with staying up late to express their enthusiasm for the film and to engage its cast and crew in a Q & A session well into the early morning.

Starring the ethereal Megan Fox, up-and-comer Amanda Seyfried (also starring in Atom Egoyan's Chloe, another official TIFF selection) and written by Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody, it's no wonder the film was generating buzz even before the festival opened.

But it's more than just star power that makes the film so tantalizing. Body is the brainchild of two real horror buffs, meaning that the film is treated not only as a loving homage to the genre, but was given an infusion of everything that two kickass femmes thought the genre was lacking.

For Karyn Kusama, the movie's director, horror films were a childhood passion.

"I look back on a lot of them fondly," she said.

"And I think that they have a lot to do with growing up and how you find a repository for all of your childhood anxieties. So it was a natural fit for me, but I was really lucky that it came in front of me."

For Cody, horror flicks were similarly worshipped, but off-limits, only adding to their sex appeal.

"I've loved horror films my entire life, but when I was a kid I was restricted from watching them, most of the time, which made that section of the video store all the more tantalizing," she said.

"So now to be able to make a horror film is very delicious; it's nice."

Jennifer's Body is certainly not lacking in sex appeal itself. But unlike other films within the genre, which tend to treat sex as the inciting incident to violence (Halloween's (1978) Michael Myers killed his sister after she engaged in sexual acts with her boyfriend and in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake (2003) it's the celibate Erin who is the only survivor), writer and director had a softer approach to budding sexuality.

"It's very easy to get away with a very negative depiction of sexuality, as though sexuality itself is the horror," Kusama explained.

"The seductions and the sexuality that Jennifer projects does have this sort of carnivorous and consuming and negative impact, but on the other hand [Seyfried's character] Needy has this positive relationship with [her boyfriend] Chip that's open and awkward but very real and connected and engaged. Instead of the cliché of the genre, that a lot of meaningless sex, whatever meaningless really means, leads to murder, this was reversing a lot of those trends."

As far as the age-old union of horror and teenagers goes, Kusama says that they're both the perfect subjects and audience of the genre.

"Teenagers are in danger," she laughed.

"I mean, despite being teenagers, it's a naturally precipitous place to be, so horror movies in my opinion just speak to the terror that young people feel and can't articulate. And I also feel the visceral pleasure of movies from childhood on involves being afraid, wanting to laugh, wanting to cry, wanting to love. So to me this movie answers a lot of those adolescent needs, and beyond, I hope."

As far as the notable reversal of male assailant/female victim to femme fatale/unassuming male victims is concerned, Cody claims that, in her mind, a female villain was a natural choice.

"I think there's nothing scarier than a bitch!" she exclaimed, explaining that she was always outside the queen bee's social circle at school.

"So for me I think the bitch should take her place in the catalogue of classic horror characters: Dracula, Frankenstein and a bitchy, attractive woman."

Both Fox and Seyfried admitted that they can't tolerate horror films. When asked why, then, they would want to terrorize young girls like horror films terrorized them as children, Fox shot back, "why not scare the hell out of boys?"

Why not indeed.

Jennifer's Body will screen tomorrow at noon at the Ryerson Theatre and on Thursday, Sept. 17 at 08:30 pm at Varsity Cinemas.

One doesn't think of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, nor of Darwin himself, as the sort of compelling subject matter that could fuel a sweeping love story.

This was certainly true of the majority of the cast and crew of Creation, the English film that kicked off TIFF last night, it was admitted at a press conference about the film earlier this morning.

That was, until a book called Annie's Box, written by the great great grandson of Darwin, Randal Keynes, was brought to the attention of screenwriter John Collee, then to director Jon Amiel and eventually to actors Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly. One by one their perceptions of one of the most influential men of all time changed.

For Keynes the journey began when he discovered a box in the family stead in Kent. This box turned out to contain mementos of Darwin's daughter Annie, who passed away at a young age. The discovery led to a quest to paint a portrait of Darwin as more than an intellectual, a scientist, but as a loving and then grieving father, and a man deeply in love with his wife, Emma.

"This box was just charged with emotion," said Keynes.

What attracted Collee to Keynes' book was that it made a man who has become his idea human again.

"The extraordinary thing about Randal's book is that it takes the character of someone whose writing is rather dry, an old-fashioned scientist, and he really added a wonderful level of modern humanity and passion to the man and that's what threw me into it," Collee explained.

"There was no separation between Darwin's creative life and his family life. An intensely creative life can also be intensely connected to the people you love and who are important to you - wife, children. As a result of family conflicts Darwin produced his most enduring work."

When Amiel was working with Collee to develop the script he was acutely aware that he didn't want the film to become a biopic of Darwin's life, a chronological narrative of his milestones and achievements. So he and Collee wrote a story that isn't linear, but one that is organized emotionally, jumping between the moments in Darwin's life that held particular emotional significance to him.

"I'm not a fan of the biopic genre," Amiel said.

"I don't like historical drama-documentaries and so I started out completely sceptical about the whole enterprise. But [in the book] you start to hear their own words, you start to feel them in a real, palpable way. Their emotional life, their voices, much of their language is actually in the script. We weren't going to tell a linear story, because Darwin's life has such a bizarre shape to it. It's not an easy life to shape. We decided very quickly to make our story non-linear, to organize our story emotionally rather than chronologically and to paint a passionate portrait of a man that we increasingly came to realize was an intensely passionate and emotional man."

What has emerged seems to be a work of heart. All involved in the film spoke sentimentally about it. And in fact, the film is quite sentimental, without seeming overdone. Much-publicized has been the fact that real-life couple Connelly and Bettany play Charles and Emma Darwin.

Connelly said that working with her husband is nothing less than a "privilege," and that Creation was the perfect project for them to star in together. She highlighted the fact that the Darwins knew one another their whole life and were in fact first cousins. She said that perhaps being as familiar with one another as she and Bettany were heading into filming helped them to recreate that lifelong love on-screen.

"I thought it was beautifully written," she said of the script.

"It put everything I knew about Charles Darwin into context and I thought it was the most remarkable story. I was surprised by the lack of information I had about his personal history and family life. I found it compelling. I found their love story inspiring and truly magnificent. I thought that Emma Darwin was a formidable and exemplary woman, so I thought it was a very exciting prospect."

As far as pitfalls go, Connelly insisted that the Darwins' characters and relationship were so different from their own that there was never a danger of recreating their romance on-screen instead of the Darwins'.

"There's so many things that seem to help to keep things separate," Connelly said.

"Such a different world, such a different language. She felt like the most different person that I've ever played. And the context and the subject matter...everything felt very much their story. I didn't really feel that we were discussing our story. It felt very clear to us that this was their story."

Bettany added that, rather than being a pitfall, being able to see the familiar in the picture of Darwin created by Keynes' book and Collee's script allowed him to relate to an otherwise daunting historical figure.

"I personally have to cling to those things, those things that you can identify with, that can be about you, especially when you're playing someone who had arguably the greatest idea a human being has ever had," he admitted.

"I'm naturally blonde and an actor; I can only fake that. I can't be that bright. But I do know what it's like to be a father and I do know what loss feels like and I do know what being in a committed relationship with children is like, so those things are actually concrete to me and the safety net to having to look really smart."

And it is in this humaness, these basic life truths being portrayed so successfully on film, said Keynes, that makes the movie so poignant.

"One thing I think is remarkable about the film is two episodes: Darwin with Annie as an infant and then with Jenna the orang. They work extraordinarily well, I think, because they found basic truth about the father and the child, the human and the orang. That basic truth carries the episodes and carries the film."

In yesterday's post I tried very hard to hide the fact that I am pretty much off-the-charts excited to be here at TIFF, hard-won press pass in hand. I'm not sure how well I succeeded, but all pretense of calm collectedness went out the window last night as I got my first taste of the red carpet.

Everyone told me that it wouldn't be what I expected, and it wasn't, but that didn't make the experience any less extraordinary.

The carpet at Roy Thomson Hall has been relocated this year to lead to the building's rear entrance. While the new location got mixed reviews from cameramen (the backside of Roy Thomson is, visually, slightly less spectacular than its entrance) it was universally agreed that the decision to move the carpet to a roomier location and to extend its length to a full city block was a good one.

I arrived on the scene plenty early and stationed myself behind a tightly packed line of television crew and personalities. As talent began to arrive from the festival's opening night gala film, Creation, milling media sprang into action. The film's composer and producer were shuffled down the length of the red carpet, from television camera to television camera for brief interview after interview.

Then came the announcement over the festival staff headsets that the film's stars, the always-radiant Jennifer Connelly and the very talented Paul Bettany, playing Emma and Charles Darwin, respectively, had arrived. The carpet positively exploded. Suddenly photographers were on their feet, tight in a scrum, clambering on top of stools and, it seemed, one another's shoulders. What was incredible for me was to see firsthand what we don't see sitting in our living rooms watching festival coverage at home. We see the star, the microphone and the interviewer, not the swirl of movement and cries and prodding of publicists just off-screen. 

It was hard to resist my inner fan-girl, the girl who's been reading entertainment magazines since she was twelve. When Connelly, somehow the definition of poise in what had to be five-inch black pumps, and the very versatile Bettany, stopped in front of me, my BlackBerry came out and low-resolution photographs were snapped. (Embarrassing proof included.)

And then, just as suddenly as it all began, the stars left the red carpet and entered Thomson Hall for the world premiere of Creation. Hours of waiting, a brief flurry of madcap activity, and then the media and the blocks of fans ten feet from the red carpet headed home. Now I, luckily, was headed to the opening night party at the Liberty Grand.

It was all very grand indeed. I would call my first taste of festival glamour intoxicating, heady. But what will stick with me the most from this experience, the first of many, with still nine days of festival to go, is the realization of just what it takes to pull a thirty-second interview with a film director, and indeed a world-class festival like this one, off. When I get home and return to Life After TIFF, I can assure you that my red carpet viewing experiences will be a tad more enlightened.

Here's a shocker: I love movies. All kinds of movies. Blockbuster movies. Independent movies. PG movies. Explicit movies. Movies meant for children and movies that stretch the limits of good taste. 

I will literally sit down and watch any sort of moving picture flashing across a cinema screen. I'm not promising that I'll like what I see, or that I digest film thoughtlessly, but I like to think that I give every movie a chance to impress me. My point is, I'm not against shocking cinema, and in my life I've watched a heck of a lot of films.

So when I was awarded a TIFF press pass with the Sid Adilman Mentorship Program, founded in 2007, I was blissfully happy. Last week I was editing the arts section of my campus newspaper...now I'm planning on attending press screenings of world class films until my eyeballs pop out of my head.

As the festival kicked off this morning and I perused my screening options, I whittled them down to two much-talked-about movies: Jennifer's Body, the sexy, gory, funny horror flick about a possessed cheerleader, written by Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody and starring the bodacious Megan Fox and Antichrist, by Danish auteur Lars von Trier. 

I had my qualms about the latter. I had heard that the film was disturbing, controversial and shocking. Was this really the best way to kick off my festival experience, and first-thing in the morning too? Yes, I decided. After the mixed reaction that met the film at Cannes, this is certainly one of those movies that people are going to be buzzing about for a while, whether positively or not. And so I decided to skip breakfast, swallow my worry and watch the film. That way, love it or hate it, I would have an opinion.

Antichrist chronicles a couple, known in the credits only as He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg), through the aftermath of the death of their toddler son. Gainsbourg's character descends into a well of grief and guilt following the death, collapsing at her son's funeral and winding up in the hospital, drifting in and out of grieving consciousness. Eventually Dafoe's character, a psychologist, decides against the better judgement of his wife's doctor and the rules of his practice to take his wife's care into his own hands. Her doctor called her grieving process "atypical," but Dafoe insists that her deep sadness is perfectly normal; he leads her through the stages of grief calmly, even as she becomes more and more frenzied.

The turning point (and if you believe that it's for the better you're in for a sorry surprise) comes when the husband insists upon taking his wife to their cabin, Eden, a misnomer for sure, where she spent her son's last summer with him, so that she can face her growing anxiety and fear. Here is where the real nightmare begins. The wife's behaviour becomes more and more irrational, her outbursts more violent and her sexual appetite voracious, while her husband withdraws into his psychological theories, spouting platitudes but unable to connect to his wife as anything more than a complicated patient, while he begins to witness disturbing visions of his own in the woods.

When TIFF programmer Steve Gravestock wrote in his description of the film that "you most assuredly are not" ready for the film's graphic sequences, I took that as a challenge, but ultimately, he was proven right. For indeed, simmering tension between the couple, accentuated by a chilling soundtrack, Gainsbourg's alternating blank stares and fistful furies and deeply disturbing imagery exploded into something truly horrific at the film's conclusion. I tried to remain calm, cool and collected amidst an audience of industry and press, but more than once was forced to look away, if only for an instant. As I left the theatre, I was jelly-legged.

So why see the film? The fact of the matter is that, from a purely cinematographic standpoint, it is sometimes very beautiful to look at. If one is able to remove revulsion and the on-screen suffering of the film's characters from the equation (and yes, I found this to be difficult) each individual shot is carefully, richly and beautifully constructed. See it for that reason.

Antichrist is rich with symbolism and imagery that will not easily leave one's head. The overgrowing grasses outside of the couple's cabin and the woods themselves adopt a strange sort of ominous, sombre personality and things unroll in a surrealist, quick-paced, dreamlike state. I don't pretend to understand everything about the film, but I do know that it raises interesting and deeply disturbing questions about sexuality, which is always represented as perverse and desperate, the sexes, each one's traits (reason vs. emotion) over-exaggerated, and our relationship with nature, which brims with carcasses and constantly encroaches on the cabin. I don't know if the film is misogynistic, as some critics of it have accused, but I do know that it taps into age-old fears of dark magic, madness and our universal inability to control our emotions. See it for that reason.

See it as well for Dafoe's and Gainsbourg's performances. You wind up with sympathy for neither character, but that's a testament to their spot-on portrayal of reason to the point of madness and emotionality to the same, respectively. 

When festival co-director Cameron Bailey was asked at a press conference on July 14 why films are important, he said that this importance lies in discourse, in the ability of films to spark debate and fuel conversation between film-goers. I might never feel inclined to sit through Antichrist again, but I am glad to have seen it, to be able to enter its discourse. See it for that reason. But don't say I didn't warn you.

Antichrist will screen for the public tonight at 9:00 pm at Ryerson Theatre and on Sat. Sept. 12 at 9:00 am at the Scotiabank Theatre. If you're interested in a deeper understanding of the film than my slightly disturbed self can provide, check out the live feed of tomorrow's press conference with von Trier, also at the Scotiabank Theatre.