This year’s winners: the game changers

By Anne Kingston - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Chris Wattie/Reuters

ARCADE FIRE

The once-fringe Montreal band was handed a scad of mainstream music hardware for their third studio recording, The Suburbs, which was praised for expressing familiar big themes with greater bounce and lightness. The multi-talented ensemble was rewarded with Album of the Year at the Junos and the Grammys and International Album and Best International Group at the Brit Awards.

MARK CARNEY

It’s a bird, it’s a plane—it’s Solvency Man, a.k.a Mark Carney, newly named chairman of the Financial Stability Board, the international body that oversees the global economy. The 46-year-old Bank of Canada governor is an ideal fiscal superhero—a Ph.D. economist and former investment banker, he’s also a disciplined, fit marathon runner. Who knows better that slow and steady wins the race?

CLICK HERE TO READ ABOUT THIS YEAR’S EPIC FAILURES

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The real festival stars

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, September 23, 2011 at 3:35 PM - 0 Comments

George Pimentel/WireImage/Getty Images; Courtesy of TIFF

It was celebrity gridlock. Each year the juggernaut of the Toronto International Film Festival seems bigger than ever, but with its 36th edition (Sept. 8-18), it turned a corner. Anchored by its grand new headquarters, the TIFF Bell Lightbox, the festival finally moved fully downtown. As black SUV limos lined the streets, disgorging stars into the red-carpet blaze of cameras, the city’s entertainment district turned into a glass-and-concrete answer to Cannes—with some surreal moments worthy of Fellini.

Counter-spinning tabloid gossip, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie wrapped their arms around each other in a regal show of marital bliss at the premiere of Moneyball—for which Pitt earned up to $15 million as a hero who reinvents baseball by casting low-rent players instead of high-priced stars. Fresh from her hydrangea-bashing faux pas with a fan in Venice, Madonna ran a gauntlet of critical scorn for W.E., her risible take on Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII, then denied reports that her goons told festival volunteers to avert their eyes when the Queen Mother of Pop came into view. Impresario Garth Drabinsky, on the eve of going to prison for fraud, took a hubris-heavy perp walk down the red carpet with Christopher Plummer for the premiere of Barrymore. Bono introduced a U2 documentary by comparing songwriting to sausage-making. And Neil Young did a double take when a grey-haired lady introduced herself at the premiere of his concert film—he confessed he had a crush on her in the fourth grade.

Now that the stardust has settled, and the circus has left town, all that remains of the festival are the movies. Some of them we’ll still be talking about in February. Each year TIFF launches the fall season of Oscar-pedigree films, and as the buzz merchants tried to sniff out the next King’s Speech or Slumdog Millionaire from 268 feature titles, there was no obvious champ. But some clear contenders stood out. It was above all a festival of stellar male performances—Clooney, Pitt, Gosling, Fassbender, Harrelson—even if the audience prize went to Nadine Labaki’s Where Do We Go Now?, a feel-good fable of female liberation from Lebanon.

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Juliette Lewis liked my purse!

By Jessica Allen - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Jeff Vespa/Getty Images

A novice navigating Toronto International Film Festival nightlife on the opening Friday and Saturday eves of the festival—the only nights, the pros will tell you, that guarantee spotting gaggles of A-list celebrities—is a comedy of errors. Mistakes are inevitable, like leaving George Strombolopolous’s party at ONE restaurant uptown on Friday night in order to get downtown to Soho House—a pop-up club sponsored by Grey Goose in an old brick building—because Twitter, the all-knowing oracle of TIFF, which was difficult to consult earlier (because there was dinner with Harvey Weinstein to report on), says that the cast of Ides of March, including George Clooney, Ryan Reynolds and Philip Seymour Hoffman, are there, not to mention Mark Wahlberg, who has got behind the bar to make cocktails for himself and his entourage, and Tilda Swinton, who is at this very moment eating dinner. Of course, upon arrival, the stars have left and Swinton is out of sight.

And then at 2:30 a.m., after getting home empty-handed from Goodnight, a back-alley bar that was last year’s hot spot for Toronto elites and Hollywood A-listers, Twitter professes that Jon Hamm, Gerard Butler, Bono and others ended up at ONE, where the night began.

Still, even novices have some successes: at the Vanity Fair-Belvedere-Fox Searchlight party at Scarpetta on Saturday night, where Clooney and Bono enjoyed dinner, Kirsten Dunst sits in a corner, fresh-faced and pretty in a polka-dot blouse and floor-length breezy skirt, sipping on a cocktail and attending to her BlackBerry. A tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed gent in a sharp suit tries to get her attention. But Dunst acknowledges his presence only after finishing her cellular task. “Oh, hey Alex,” she smiles coyly. That would be Alexander Skarsgård, who stars with Dunst in Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia. Tonight he’s all smiles and happily obliges fans who politely ask for cellphone photo ops. As a woman passes her BlackBerry to her husband, the Swedish True Blood star grins, wraps one arm around her waist while holding a pint of beer behind his back and contorts his face into a smouldering frown replete with puckered lips and a singular raised eyebrow. He’s become his vampire character, Eric. And then it’s the novice’s turn: Juliette Lewis, who is far less severe-looking in person than she is in photos, grabs hold of her vintage sparkly purse and turns it over for inspection. “I like this.”

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Muscling into the ‘Ides of March’ press conference

By Jessica Allen - Sunday, September 11, 2011 at 12:04 PM - 0 Comments

Red hot Ryan Gosling

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 1 Comment

Richard Saker/Rex Features/CP

It must have been the glasses. As Ryan Gosling sat down for an interview at a beachfront bar in Cannes one afternoon last May, it took a moment to connect the man with the movie star. Behind a pair of thick horn-rims, his cautious gaze had none of the laser intensity that makes his blue eyes so electrifying onscreen. It was like talking to the Clark Kent version of the Hollywood heartthrob. And despite the fake American twang that he adopted as a young actor—because he “thought guys should sound like Marlon Brando”—in the way he parried questions with polite, self-deprecating charm, you could still see the Canadian in him.

Gosling wanted to be an American action hero ever since he was a kid, a scrawny working-class child born in London, Ont., and raised in Cornwall by Mormon parents. Rambo was an early role model. “When I was in first grade I watched First Blood and I filled my Fisher-Price Houdini kit with steak knives and brought them to school and started throwing them at kids at recess,” he recalls. “I got suspended and my parents nixed R-rated movies. The writing was on the wall when I saw Rocky for the first time. I went and picked a fight right afterwards and got my ass kicked. The movies took me into their dream.”

Now he’s living it. This week, as the juggernaut of the Toronto International Film Festival (Sept. 8-18) launches the fall season of Oscar-pedigree movies, Gosling’s career is on fire. With sensational lead roles in two films at the festival—as a smouldering action hero in Drive and a ruthless election strategist in The Ides of March—he has emerged as TIFF’s It Boy. His talent has never been in question. At 26, as a drug-addicted teacher in Half Nelson, he became the first Canadian in six decades to be nominated for Best Actor. And ever since he romanced Canadian sweetheart Rachel McAdams in The Notebook (2004), he has been an unlikely and enduring heartthrob. This is a ladies’ man with range, able to carry on a credible love affair with a blow-up doll in Lars and the Real Girl (2007), and coax an Oscar-nominated performance from Michelle Williams as her alcoholic husband in Blue Valentine (2010).

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What’s hot at TIFF

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 11:25 PM - 0 Comments

Here are mini-reviews of 21 films I like so far at TIFF. (Some I love.) Ten were screened in Cannes. The others I saw more recently, in advance media previews. As the festival unfolds, more favorites will be added, and the list will appear as a fixture of our dedicated TIFF page. Click on each title to read the TIFF program note and screening times:

The Artist Finally a French movie that needs no subtitles. This silent black-and-white rom-com was the biggest crowd-pleaser in Cannes.  Set in Hollywood, it’s tale of star-crossed stars: a Valentino-like silent film idol sees his career sink with the advent of talkies, while an extra flirts her way into his heart, and to stardom. A wonder dog steals the show. It’s a movie you can imagine Woody Allen wishing he had made.

Café de flore After his restrained fling with British royalty (2009′s) The Young Victoria), Quebec director Jean-Marc Vallée re-embraces the French language, and the lyrical virtuosity that made C.R.A.Z.Y (2005) such an intoxicating triumph. His daredevil drama of shattered love dances a tightrope between two far-flung and seemingly unrelated storylines—a single mother (Vanessa Paradis) struggles to raise a Down Syndrome boy in 1969 Paris; a celebrated DJ (Kevin Parent) navigates a painful divorce in present-day Montreal. Emotional dynamite. Continue…

Forget Gosling, Pitt and Clooney—check out the children

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, September 6, 2011 at 6:05 PM - 0 Comments

Cécile de France and Thomas Doret in 'The Kid with a Bike'

After previewing a bunch films at TIFF, the 36th edition of TIFF is shaping up to be a promising festival. Already you hear people handicapping the Oscars, which feels premature. But from what I’ve seen, some things seem obvious.

Look out for George Clooney, who brings us his best directorial effort to date with The Ides of March, a political intrigue in which he plays a Democrat governor vying for the presidency. A smart tale of backroom betrayal, it’s this year’s answer to The Social Network. The lead role belongs to Canada’s Ryan Gosling, who also burns up the screen in Drive,  co-starring with Carey Mulligan as a smouldering action hero reminiscent of Steve McQueen.  There’s no question that Gosling is TIFF’s It Boy.

Speaking of Steve McQueen, the British director of the same name who made Hunger will be at the festival with Shame, starring Michael Fassbender as a man obsessed with pornography. Once again Carey Mulligan co-stars, in the role of his self-destructive sister. And in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, Fassbender pops up again, as the kind of man who could offer treatment to some of his other characters—he plays Carl Jung to Viggo Mortensen’s Sigmund Freud.

One could keep daisy-chaining names like these through the entire TIFF program. But it’s just as interesting to trace the circuits of thematic synchronicity in the films, and leap to conclusions that there may be something wild going on in the zeitgeist. One distinct trend that I’ve notice from the movies I’ve seen is the haunting presence of feral children.

Some of the best performances I’ve seen are by unknown kids acting without a net. Continue…

Newsmakers: August 25-31, 2011

By Colby Cosh, Richard Warnica, and Alex Ballingall - Monday, September 5, 2011 at 3:45 PM - 0 Comments

Mark Blinch/Reuters

Just call her ‘G’

Winnipeg philanthropist Gail Asper, 51, is inspiring admiration and horror in her hometown with a surprise contribution to the genre of “older white folks rapping.” Asper is among prominent locals asked to contribute short videos to the University of Manitoba’s VoteAnyWay youth-voter drive; Asper’s supposedly self-penned number, delivered on the steps of the legislature building, reminds viewers: “Even if you’ve got smallpox / you can still go tick that box,” as the media heiress improvises gang signs and grabs her derrière. Local rapper Patrick “Pip Skid” Skene told the Winnipeg Sun her intentions were “honourable” but admitted “the rap is pretty wack.”

Brother of the year?

Gaelan Edwards said he learned his craft from “medical books” and TV. But as an amateur doctor, his record is pretty solid nonetheless. The 12-year-old delivered his own baby brother after his mom went into labour at their home in Campbell River, B.C. Gaelan, the eldest of five, pulled his brother out by his shoulders, helped his mother push out the placenta, then clamped and cut the umbilical cord. Baby Caynan was born a healthy 7 lb., 9 oz. Lucky for mom, Gaelan was up late watching a movie about showgirls when her sudden labour kicked in. He is now said to be considering a more formal medical career.

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De Niro's jury turns 'The Tree of Life' into a Golden Palm

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, May 22, 2011 at 4:35 PM - 1 Comment

Freshly bearded jury president Robert De Niro talks to the press after the Cannes awards ceremony/photo: Brian D. Johnson

Robert De Niro’s Cannes jury awarded the Palme d’Or to Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life this evening, although the notoriously reclusive director was, predictably, not on hand to accept it. “It was a difficult decision,” said De Niro, who said Malick’s picture had “the size, the importance, the tension that seemed to fit the prize.” He made it clear there was some dissension around the verdict, then hastily added it was not a compromise: “Most of us felt the movie was terrific.” The Tree of Life, which stars Brad Pitt as a strict father raising three sons in 1950s America, grafts a coming-of-age nostalgia piece onto a rapturous epic about the creation of the cosmos. It polarized critics in Cannes more severely than almost any other picture (I liked it).

Other films awarded  included The Artist, a silent romantic comedy in black and white, which took best actor for Jean Dujardin’s wordless performance as a silent film star whose career is ruined by talkies; and Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, which won best actress for Kristen Dunst’s role as depressed bride coming terms with the imminent annihilation of the planet. In accepting her award, Dunst alluded to the controversy that dominated the final days of the festival, saying, “Wow! What a week it’s been.”  She thanked the festival for “allowing our film still to be in competition” after Lars Von Trier was exiled for his inflammatory Nazi comments. De Niro said the decision to ban Von Trier from the festival had no influence on the jury’s decisions, or at least his own views about the film. And he trivialized the festival’s decision to ban Von Trier: “There was some little punishment for the director,” De Niro muttered. “He had to go away or something.”

'Drive' director Nicolas Winding Refn (left) with Ryan Gosling / photo BDJ

Meanwhile, Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn won best director for Drive, starring Canada’s Ryan Gosling. It’s a smart, stylish, ultra-violent action art film. (This is an auteur who cites Texas Chainsaw Massacre as his favorite movie of all time.) Refn thanked Gosling generating the project and commissioning him—a relationship they’ve compared to Lee Marvin getting John Boormann to make Point Blank.  Gosling told the press: “I’ve always wanted to make an action movie or a superhero movie, but I’m happy I did this film.” He added that he and Gosling will team up again next year in a remake of Logan’s Run. “Next time we’ll do a real Hollywood movie. Let’s get into bed with [producer] Joel Silver, because that’s the ultimate bang.” Look out. A new action hero is on the loose, and he’s Canadian.

Belgium's Dardenne brothers, who shared the Grand Jury Prize with Turkey's Nuri Bilge Ceylan / photo BDJ

Two films shared the second place Grand Jury Prize: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, an agonizingly slow drama by Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and The Kid With A Bike, another neo-realist gem by Belgium’s Dardenne brothers, previous Palme d’Or winners.  The third place Jury Prize went to actor-director Maïwenn Le Besco for Poliss, a raucous drama set in a police youth protection unit investigating pedophile crimes. Running to the stage on stilettos, she gave a breathless speech so endless and tearful and over the top it sounded like she was trying to achieve orgasm, rather than accepting bronze. Israeli filmmaker Joseph Cedar won the screenplay award for Footnote, his ingenious and strangely thrilling tale of rival father-son Talmudic scholars—one of my favorites. Finally, the Camera d’Or, awarded to best feature debut by a separate jury, went to Les Acacias, by Pablo Gioregellli, an entry in the Critics Week sidebar that managed to escape me.

The most universally loved film that somehow failed to get a prize was Aki Kaurismaki’s Le Havre, a quiet masterpiece that I guess was too modest to impress the jury. It’s also noteworthy that This Must Be the Place—featuring a stunt performance by Sean Penn in full make-up as a retired rock star—came up empty-handed. “I thought Sean Penn was terrific in it,” offered De Niro, who seemed to have settled on “terrific” as the consolation adjective, “but we as a group had to decide.” Whenever De Niro spoke, he hummed and hawed, as if incarnating the jury’s indecision, while affecting so many of his classic shrug/grimaces it looked like he was imitating himself.

Jury member Jude Law / photo: BDJ

When pushed at the press conference, Jude Law, one of the jury members, listed a bunch of other films that were favourably discussed, including Sleeping Beauty, Le Havre, Pater and Papus Habemus. “And the Pedro Almodovar film,” piped up fellow jury member Uma Thurman. Which left just seven of the 20 features in competition unawarded or unmentioned.

The ceremony itself didn’t break from tradition. It’s always an awkward amateurish affair, the glaring exception to a festival that is organized with military precision the rest of the week. The highlight was watching De Niro fracture the French language, with phrases like “Nous avons décidé the best we could” and “J’espère que c’est okay.”

Terrence Malick's producer accept Palme d'Or for 'Tree of Life' in his absence / photo: BDJ

Silence and scandal in the Cannes bubble

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, May 22, 2011 at 7:04 AM - 0 Comments

Cannes is a bubble, an opulent bubble of glamour and art that, from the inside, feels like the centre of the cultural universe. It lulls the media horde into fabulous delusion. Faithfully dragging ourselves to the Palais each day at 8 a.m. (to get a good seat), we’ve been assembling as a 2000-plus congregation in the Lumiere cinema, listening to soft jazz and reading the trades as we wait for the lights to go down, trying to remain awake as the  the classic Cannes trailer rolls to the fantasia strains of Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals—a set of red-carpeted steps that rise from an aqua sea, into a sky that turns indigo then black until we’re officially in heaven.

This is life in the bubble. It’s like undergoing mass hypnosis. And as we follow the 11-day program of the official competition, which has it’s own epic narrative, we blog the over-heated triumphs and scandals as if the world hung in the balance—forgetting  that back home all people care about is Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Still, Cannes is a fascinating bubble, a fairy tale cosmos where the usual rules of commercial gravity don’t apply, where directors are more exalted than stars, and where the films light up the zeitgeist.

Even though, on this Victoria Day weekend, I doubt anyone is paying attention,  I feel some reflection is in order while I’m still in the mood. Before the bubble bursts and the red carpet is ripped up. The awards are announced tonight. Best do it now, before Cannes is reduced to a minor sports result.

Overall it was an unusually rich festival. Those hard-core cinephiles who measure the quality of a film by its level of difficulty (for the audience) may have been disappointed. But what made this Cannes competition exceptional was the number of films that bridged the gap between the art house and the audience. The festival premiered several flat-out crowd pleasers with artistic pedigree—from The Artist, a silent black-and-white romcom, to Drive, a customized piece of pulp fiction driven by a mostly silent performance from Ryan Gosling. Even Sean Penn’s half-silent, sotto voce performance as a faded rock legend in This Must Be the Place played to the crowd with its mime-like minimalism.

Silence was à la mode on and off screen. Terrence Malick did not speak a word to the press for the premiere of The Tree of Life, leaving Brad Pitt to do the heavy lifting. Pitt argued, convincingly, that he didn’t see why the architect of a film was also expected to be its real estate agent, selling and explaining his creation. (It goes without saying that stars must do media.) Not everyone was silent, however. As one industry observer quipped, “This festival was the story of the man who wouldn’t talk [Malick] and the Man Who Said Too Much [Lars Von Tier].”

If ever there were an argument for a director keeping his mouth shut, it was the Von Trier scandal, in which Denmark’s auteur provocateur made a string of ill-advised quips about Nazis, Jews and Hitler at a press conference, trigger a furor that hijacked the festival narrative for days. Pedro Almodóvar’s cosmetic surgery thriller, The Skin I Live In, was completely overshadowed because it premiered just before the festival’s board of directors decided to ban Von Trier from the premises. Holed up outside Cannes for the next few days, Von Trier talked to journalists—not about his movie, Melancholia—but about his banishment.

The scandal hurt his movie,  infuriating its distributors and alienating the stars who were ready to promote it (Kirstin Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg). Which is too bad, because despite flaws, Von Trier’s latest work is a powerful, haunting drama. And its image of a ridiculously lavish wedding in a castle by sea overshadowed by a killer planet called Melancholia could be a metaphor for Cannes itself. Depression was certain on the agenda in the films, affecting everyone from the willfully comatose prostitute in Sleeping Beauty to the damaged rock legend played by Sean Penn in This Must Be The Place.

Another prevailing theme was conflict between fathers and sons, notably in The Tree of Life, The Kid With a Bike and Footnote. But perhaps the most startling trend was the strong presence of women. Aside from the fact that four out 20 competition entries were directed by women (compared to none last year), we saw an unusual number of powerhouse performances by women, not to mention a couple of sisterhood spectacles with ensemble female casts—the whores in House of Tolerance and the Arab villagers on strike against their husbands in La Source des femmes.

Who know how the awards will go tonight. I’d like to see Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki win the Palme d’Or for Le Havre. However, I’d be neither surprised nor disappointed if Malick wins for The Tree of Life (unlikely according to the gossip), or if Nicolas Winding Refn wins for Drive. Certainly Drive, which owes something to Taxi Driver, is the film closest to the sensibility of jury president Robert De Niro. If, on the other hand, the jury wants to pick the biggest crowd pleaser, that would be The Artist, another decision I’d happily support. If I had to put money on the Palme d’Or right now, I’d bet on The Artist. It is, in some ways, the most conventional diversion of all the major contenders—ironic given that it’s black-and-white and silent. Best actor should come down to a contest between Ryan Gosling for Drive and Sean Penn for This Must be the Place. Gosling should win. And Tilda Swinton is the overwhelming favorite to win best actress for her harrowing role in We Need to Talk about Kevin.

By the end of the day, we’ll have the results. Stay tuned.

Ryan Gosling and Sean Penn heat up Cannes

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, May 20, 2011 at 11:47 AM - 11 Comments

Ryan Gosling at the Cannes press conference for 'Drive' / photo by Brian D. Johnson

In the final lap of competition at Cannes, which wraps tomorrow, the race just heated up between Drive and This Must be the Place—two movies shot in America by European filmmakers. Both have emerged as real contenders for the Palme D’Or, which will be awarded Sunday. And the jury, led by Robert De Niro, will likely end up trying to decide which of their respective stars most deserves the best actor prize, Ryan Gosling or Sean Penn.

In Drive, a noir thriller set in Los Angeles, Gosling stars as an ace stunt driver who moonlights as a getaway driver. The movie is styled with the kind of arty visuals and cutthroat wit that would make Tarantino jealous. Call it Pulp Traction. Directed by Denmark’s Nicolas Winding Refn (Valhalla Rising), it’s a contemporary samurai western, with sparse dialogue, and a quiet tone of hair-trigger suspense that’s snapped by short bursts of extreme, bone-crushing violence. As a noble hero on a mission to save his neighbour (Carey Mulligan) and her boy from a gangland retribution, Gosling combines a sensitive, Zen-like grace with a slow-fused capacity for psychotic brutality. Albert Brooks makes a surprisingly scary villain. And in a bravura performance, Gosling reveals himself as an über-cool action hero reminiscent of Steve McQueen or the young Clint Eastwood. Continue…

'The King's Speech' tops Golden Globes

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 2:43 PM - 0 Comments

With today’s announcement of the Golden Globe nominations, the Long March to the Oscars is officially underway. The King’s Speech reaped a total of seven Globe nominations, followed by The Social Network and The Fighter, with six apiece. All three movies are based on true stories of unlikely heroes triumphing over tall odds—though it’s not clear if Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg is a hero or villain, which is what makes The Social Network the most compelling of the three pictures. The Social Network has already swept film critics awards in Los Angeles, N.Y., Boston and Toronto. It has clearly emerged as the American movie of the year. But with the Globes announcement by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, The King’s Speech is showing its Oscar pedigree—as a feel-good period drama about royalty and disability, it’s overqualified. The other two films recognized by the HFPA in the Best Motion Picture/Drama category are Black Swan and Inception. Notable by its absence is the Coen brothers’ remake of True Grit, which has figured in the critics awards.

Competing with Colin Firth’s stammering royal and Jesse Eisenberg’s Facebook mogul for Best Actor in a dramatic motion picture are James Franco as a self-amputating survivor in 127 Hours, Mark Wahlberg as a working class hero in The Fighter, and Canadian Ryan Gosling as a blue-collar loser trying to saving his marriage in Blue Valentine. The Best Actress nominees in the dramatic category are: Natalie Portman as a tortured ballerina in Black Swan, Nicole Kidman as a bereft mother in The Rabbit Hole, Jennifer Lawrence as a desperate Ozark Mountain daughter going through hell in Winter’s Bone, Michelle Williams as a wife at the end of her tether in Blue Valentine, and Halle Berry as a mental patient in Frankie and Alice. (If you’re an actress and you want award consideration, you have to suffer.)

The Globes are often touted as a bellwether for the Oscars, but they really serve more as a publicity campaign for the Academy Awards. And a blow-out. The HFPA’s Jan. 16 ceremony, which involves copious food and drink, is Hollywood’s favorite party, far more relaxed that the Oscar’s quasi religious ritual. There’s also a fundamental disconnect between the Globes and the Oscars.  In their Best Picture and lead acting categories, the Globes split the field between best dramatic feature and best comedy or musical. That means more actors get nominated. And more stars show up! This year the comedy/musical slot has produced some hilarious results. Two of the most savagely panned movies of the year—The Tourist and Burlesque—both have nominations. The Tourist is neither a comedy nor a musical; it was billed as a thriller. But the junket whores at the HTPA have never met a superstar they didn’t like. By nominating The Tourist, along with Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp, they’ve dutifully enriched their guest list. Depp, who’s also nominated for Alice in Wonderland, will be competing with himself.

Also nominated in this category, Paul Giamatti may have a real shot at Golden Globe for his gonzo performance in the Canadian feature Barney’s Version, based on the Mordecai Richler novel. It’s sad, however, to see Barney didn’t get a nod in the Best Motion Picture Comedy or Musical slot, and that Rosamund Pike didn’t get cited for Best Supporting Actress. In other Canadian news, it’s also sad to see that Canada’s foreign-language hopeful, Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies, was snubbed by the Globes. Expect Biutiful, starring Javier Bardem, to take that category.

I predict that Colin Firth will win the Globe for best dramatic actor, Natalie Portman for best dramatic actress, and that The Social Network will take director, screenplay and picture, a pattern that may well be repeated at the Oscars. My own organization, the Toronto Film Critics Association also announced its winners today. We echoed other critics groups in awarding The Social Network best picture, along with another four awards—director, script, actor (Jesse Eisenberg) and supporting actor (Armie Hammer). Our best actress award went to Jennifer Lawrence for Winter’s Bone. We also recognized Thailand’s Palme D’Or winner, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, as best foreign-language film  and as one of two runners-up for best picture.  For more on our picks, go to: TFCA Awards.

Oh, did I mention they give out Golden Globes for television? Well, they do. But no matter how much we hear that TV drama is outstripping film, TV folks are definitely poor cousins at the Globes, except for Ricky Gervais who no doubt will be slagging everyone as he returns to host the ceremony—last year he insulted the whole affair and the HTPA, but hey, these foreign press bozos were probably thrilled just to see a star talk about them.

Click here for a full list of Golden Globe nominees.

Top 10 best moments of TIFF

By Tom Henheffer and Stephanie Findlay - Monday, September 20, 2010 at 1:25 PM - 0 Comments

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Top 10 best moments of TIFF

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Torontonian Cocktail

The fest's best drink was a Grey Goose cocktail at the Soho House Club made with vodka, organic cucumber juice and ginger beer. And honourable mention goes to the Roosevelt room for their signature martini with white chocolate and gold flakes on top.

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Singing with glee

By John Intini - Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 10:45 AM - 2 Comments

As well as being a member of the choir backing up Dead Man’s Bones in Vancouver last month, Jane Ag­yeman was picked to perform a solo, a cover of Cher’s Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down). Fully aware of who the packed house had paid to see – the band is fronted by Academy Award-nominated actor Ryan Gosling – Agyeman wasn’t expecting much more than a polite response, like at an elementary school concert, she says, when “the crowd claps because it’s mandatory.” So it came as a bit of a shock when the club erupted with applause following her four minutes alone in the spotlight. And the Georgia Straight’s review of the show, while generous to Gosling, credited the Grade 11 student at North Vancouver’s Carson Graham secondary school with having “turned in the night’s most killer performance.”

Being upstaged by a kid from the choir is something Gosling has been setting himself up for this fall. On the band’s self-titled debut, which came out last month, Dead Man’s Bones is joined by the Silverlake Conservatory of Music’s children’s choir. And at every tour stop, the band selected a local chorus, painted the members’ faces like ghosts, and took them on stage as backup. When asked by a journalist from Pitchfork what they hoped to achieve by including the kids, Gosling offered a rambling, but poignant response: “You know when you’re a kid and you get crayons and papers and just draw whatever you want and it’s just a bunch of messy lines, but to you it makes sense, and then they put it on the fridge? From that point on, you’re always trying to get back on the fridge. We wanted to get back to that place before we were trying to make the fridge. We wanted to work with people who hadn’t been affected in that way yet.”

The guys in Dead Man’s Bones aren’t the only ones trying to capture a bit of that magic. Aside, perhaps, from Whoopi Goldberg’s turn in Sister Act, choirs have never been more centre stage in pop culture than they are right now. The soundtrack for Where the Wild Things Are features Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and 16 untrained children’s voices. A Grade 5 chorus at New York City’s PS22 regularly captures the YouTube generation’s attention (12 million views and counting) with covers of modern-day pop songs, and counts Beyoncé, Rihanna and Lady Gaga as fans. The Choir, an award-winning BBC reality show about a choirmaster who tries to turn inexperienced, and often reluctant, students on to song, has proven incredibly popular in the U.K. (TVO is airing all three episodes of season one on Jan. 1). And then, of course, there’s Glee. Fox’s massive hit, about a high school show choir, has 8.6 million tuning in every week. And the show’s chart-topping music—including covers of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ and Beyoncé’s Halo—has sold more than 2.6 million downloads on iTunes. At the risk of being stuffed in a locker for saying it, choirs are, well, cool.

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Photo Gallery: Toronto Film Festival 2007

By Jeff Harris - Friday, September 14, 2007 at 5:23 PM - 0 Comments

The stars just seem to shine brighter north of the border. Exclusive pictures of celebrities on the red carpet and in their own habitat (aka hotel rooms) at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival. Check out Matt Damon, Jennifer Garner, George Clooney and Brad Pitt — erm, with an itchy nose.

Click here for exclusive photo gallery.