AND THE WINNER IS...

It's 2:00am and I have never felt so tired in my life. This marks the fourth straight day of waking up at 9am (at the latest) and getting to bed at 2am (at the earliest). Not meaning to bitch, because the stuff that happens in-between is terrific, but it definitely catches up to you. More than that, it leaves precious little time to write about what I've seen. So here's a brief overview, with a promise for much further detail about all of it just as soon as is humanly possible:

Over these past four days, I have seen screenings of Appaloosa (studio); The Brothers Bloom (studio); JCVD (Midnight Madness); The Duchess (studio); Burn After Reading (Gala Screening; international premiere); Lovely, Still (public); Me and Orson Welles (public); Blindness (Visa Screening Room special presentation; North American premiere); Slumdog Millionaire (Toronto premiere); and The Other Man (Gala Screening; international premiere). I have sat through press conferences for Appaloosa and Burn After Reading. I have interviewed Adrien Brody; Zac Efron; Adam Scott. I have attended parties for JCVD; Burn After Reading; Me and Orson Welles; Blindness; Lovely, Still; Slumdog Millionaire; and The Other Man. I have visited half a dozen hospitality suites, inconveniently located in half a dozen hotels. I have spent at least $200 on cab rides in order to rapidly make it from one event to the next. And the list of things go on.

For now, all you need to know is this: Slumdog Millionaire, the final cut of which premiered this evening at the Ryerson Theatre to raucous applause, is everything that Telluride, Jeff Wells, Tom O'Neil, and basically anyone else who has seen it has built it up to be: easily one of the best films of the year. My best short explanation of it is this: City of God meets Forrest Gump. Think along those lines... authentic and unvarnished foreign flavor along with a far-fetched but plausible and charming love story. Anyway, as far as awards campaigns go, it poses some serious challenges—it features an unknown cast and is about a foreign land, to name two of the bigger ones—but it does have Fox Searchlight behind it, and anyone who has been conscious these past few years knows that no film is too small for them to turn into an awards-winner, which this one unquestionably deserves to be. More soon.

Just hearing that the Academy Award winning actor Tommy Lee Jones has filed a lawsuit against Paramount alleging that they have stiffed him on $10 million of bonus-compensation that he says they promised to pay him if No Country for Old Men proved to be financially successful. Paramount ended up taking in $160 million and the Academy Award for Best Picture. They have not yet offered a public response.

Zac Efron stars in the new film Me and Orson Welles

These days, few if any males are more popular with the bobby-soxer demographic than Zac Efron, the actor whose good looks and voice single-handedly turned High School Musical (2006), High School Musical 2 (2007), and Hairspray (2007) into phenomenal commercial successes. This week, Efron, who is a month shy of turning 21, is in Toronto to call attention to his latest film, Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles (no U.S. distribution yet), which is quite different from anything else he's ever done before. Set in 1930s New York, Efron plays a 17-year-old aspiring actor who has a chance meeting with Orson Welles outside the famed Mercury Theatre, impresses the great master, and is given the opportunity of a lifetime when Welles invites him to play Lucius in his production of Julius Caesar. Efron befriends the rest of the acting company, romances the secretary (Claire Danes), and learns some hard lessons along the way to opening night.

I'll have more to say about the film when I have a minute to write it up, but for now I'll note that Efron gives a surprisingly mature performance thatleads me to believe he'll be around for years to come (and not only in singing roles), and share the audio of my chat with him (about the film, singing, and his relatively new celebrity) at Friday evening's post-premiere after-party...

The Golden Lion, the highest honor at the 2008 Venice Film Festival, has been awarded by the International Competition Jury to The Wrestler, the Darren Aranofsky-directed film about an aging former professional wrestler who attempts an unlikely comeback. The title role is played by veteran actor/real-life boxer/former Hollywood "bad-boy" Mickey Rourke, whose magnificent reviews in Venice and now Toronto mark a great comeback for him, as well. Assuming The Wrestler will now find U.S. distribution, Rourke would have to be considered a serious contender in the Best Actor Oscar race.

Adrien Brody's immortal moment at the 2002 Oscars

On Saturday morning, I had the opportunity to speak for about ten minutes with the Academy Award-winning actor Adrien Brody, who is here in Toronto celebrating the release of his latest film The Brothers Bloom (Summit, 12/19, trailer), and who I'd already run into at a few parties and found to be incredibly gracious. I've enjoyed watching Brody's career develop over the years, from Liberty Heights (1999) to The Thin Red Line (1998) to his triumphant, Oscar-winning performance in The Pianist (2002); I'm not sure if I agree with too many of his career choices since then, but I must say that he has remained the same fun-loving (just ask Halle Berry!) but also humble guy that he was before he struck stardom and celebrity. We covered all of this in what proved to be a pretty enlightening chat, entirely because of his unusually lengthy and insightful answers. You can hear for yourself...

Anita Page's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame

At 98, Anita Page was no youngster, but she was the last living major star of Hollywood's silent star and an unlikely acquaintance of this writer, so it is sad nonetheless to report her passing.

I had unsuccessfully pursued an interview with Page (for inclusion in my ongoing book project on the history of American cinema) for years when I finally got my chance in May 2005, thanks to the kindness of her adopted-grandson and my  friend, the actor Randal Malone. Though quite ill, she agreed to respond to my questions in writing, and weeks after I submitted them I received pages upon pages of responses, many that went into such detail that they still make me shiver, since no other living person could have provided them. After all, Page was not only the last survivor of the silent era (during which she co-starred with the likes of Buster Keaton and Joan Crawford), but also of the cast of the second Best Picture Academy Award winner in 1928 (The Broadway Melody), and of those who had attended the very first Academy Awards in 1927.

I'll share one representative response: upon being asked whether she felt Gloria Swanson's portrayal of a demonic former silent-era star in Sunset Boulevard (1950) was offensive to her, Page told me: "I didn’t feel humiliated in the least. I felt Gloria was marvelous as a former silent star. I felt relieved I wasn't the only one who felt that way about the advent of sound. I also felt so invigorated when her character, Norma Desmond, said, 'We had faces then,' because let me tell you something, baby—we did."

Jeremy Irons, Renee Zellweger, Viggo Mortensen, and Ed Harris at Appaloosa press conference

Sorry I didn't get this up last night, but this is literally the first opportunity I've had to write since Thursday night. Anyway, let me begin to catch up now, event-by-event, beginning with yesterday (Friday) morning...

I began the day by attending a studio-hosted press conference for Appaloosa (New Line, 9/19, trailer), the Ed Harris-directed western that I saw on Thursday morning and liked well enough. All of the film's stars—Harris, Viggo Mortensen, Renee Zellweger, and Jeremy Irons, as well as two producers—were in attendance.

Things began a bit confrontationally when a reporter repeatedly asked a question that was completely incoherent to anyone but herself; she basically stated that all women in westerns are one-dimensional schoolmarms or whores, and implied that Zellweger's character was no different. Regardless of the validity of such a statement (it happens not to be true of Zellweger's feisty lady), it was not smart, and it set off Harris and Mortensen, who vehemently came to Zellweger's defense until she intervened and graciously settled everyone down.

A few minutes later, I was called on. I mentioned that numerous elements of Appaloosa reminded me of the classic western High Noon (1952), starring Gary Cooper: "Katie," Mortensen's Hispanic lover in the film, is in many ways like Cooper's lover, played by Katy Jurado; the major shootout in the street reminded me, down to its very blocking, of the climactic shootout between Cooper and Frank Miller's gang; and, above all, Harris' character's outlook—as expressed in the most memorable line of the very quotable film, "Feelings get you killed," which is also its poster's tagline—could just as easily summarize Cooper's character's worldview in his film. I asked, therefore, whether High Noon and/or any other westerns had been referenced by Harris when adapting and directing Appaloosa, and whether or not any of the cast had drawn upon any past westerns when crafting their performances. Harris said High Noon was certainly one consideration; Mortensen echoed that sentiment, while also ticking off an impressive number and array of other titles and directors with whom he had become familiar (John Ford and Anthony Mann right through more recent titles). He also emphasized that the vast majority of westerns are bad, and that we conveniently forget about those ones.

After things came to an end, I found myself exiting the room alongside Mortensen. I thanked him for a very good 1:1 interview he had done with me last year, when he was promoting Eastern Promises, and he stuck around for a few moments to chat. As he started to be hustled away to his next interview, he urged me to make a point of seeing his other film showing at the festival, which does not yet have a distributor—I cut him off before he went any further and told him I had already seen Good at a screening in New York and thought it was very good—to say nothing of his fine work in it—which pleased him greatly. (I'll post more extensive thoughts on Good shortly.) I know a number of Viggo Mortensen fan clubs link to this site, so I thought I'd share this story, since I'm sure their readers would be particularly interested to know that one of our finest actors is also a good guy.

The hottest ticket at TIFF '08 is Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight, 11/28), the Danny Boyle-directed film about India that was the surprise sensation of last week's Telluride Film Festival and is now reaching a larger group of top film pundits here in Toronto. The early consensus is that Fox Searchlight—the studio that turned indies like Little Miss Sunshine and Juno into awards powerhouses—has struck gold again. I'll be seeing the film tomorrow evening, but my friends/colleagues Tom O'Neil (Los Angeles Times' "The Envelope") and Jeff Wells (Hollywood-Elsewhere.com) attended a screening this morning, and emerged convinced that they had seen one of the five movies destined to be 2008 Best Picture nominees. Check out their assessment (on video) now, check back for mine tomorrow, and then be sure to check back after that for a write-up/audio of a conversation with man-of-the-hour Boyle that I have confirmed for Tuesday!

Completely insane but great day... so tired at this point... will post today's recap tomorrow. Be sure to check this space again soon!

Adrien Brody, Rachel Weisz, and Mark Ruffalo in the underwhelming The Brothers Bloom (Summit, 12/19)

On Thursday morning, I attended a Warner Brothers screening of Appaloosa (New Line, 9/19, trailer), the western adapted by, directed by, and starring Ed Harris alongside Viggo Mortensen, Renee Zellweger, and Jeremy Irons. I am embargoed from sharing my thoughts about the film until Friday evening, when it has its official debut as at the Visa Screening Room, but look for them here at that time, along with highlights from the Appaloosa press conference, which will be attended by the entire cast, and which I will attend late Friday morning...

Next in line today was The Brothers Bloom (Summit, 12/19, trailer), the second directorial effort of Rian Johnson (Brick), which stars Oscar winners Adrien Brody and Rachel Weisz, as well as the great character actor Mark Ruffalo and supporting player Rinko Kikuchi (an Oscar nominee for Babel). I must regretfully echo Jeff Wells' sentiments about the nearly two-hour film: it revolves around an incredibly convoluted plot that becomes increasingly absurd and harder to follow as the clock ticks on. It's not the actors' faults—Brody does a nice enough job (incidentally, I'll be interviewing him on Saturday); Ruffalo makes the most of his limited part; Kikuchi is harmless but wasted as a mute sidekick; and Weisz is actually quite good. Rather, blame for the film's shortcomings should probably fall on Johnson...

Finally, after a stop at Hemingway's Bar in Yorkville with some buddies, I attended the Peace Arch Entertainment pre-party for and premiere of JCVD, the much buzzed-about indie about and starring the Belgian-born action icon Jean-Claude Van Damme. Peace Arch is one of the up-and-coming smaller studios—based in and funded out of Canada, it's big claim to fame thus far has been television's The Tudors, but this week they have been at the center of the storm surrounding the Van Damme semi-serious bio-pic, which is currently gracing the cover of a major Toronto newspaper's TIFF preview. The movie itself struck me as only mildly amusing, if not a bit over the top—but, then again, what is the real JCVD if not just that?—and the "Midnight Madness" audience seemed to eat it up.