Taking the joy out of sex in ‘Shame’

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 11:59 PM - 0 Comments

Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan in 'Shame'

By the end of the Toronto International Film Festival, Shame was no longer just a movie. It was The Most Talked About Movie At TIFF. Its star, Michael Fassbender, had been named best actor at the Venice Film Festival. That buzz, and the film’s stark portrayal of sex addiction, put it on the top of everyone’s must-see list. Not to mention that it’s the second feature from British art-star-turned-auteur Steve McQueen, who made such an incendiary debut in 2008 with Hunger (also starring Fassbender, in a stunt-like tour de force as hunger-striking IRA martyr Bobby Sands).

When I first saw Shame, at TIFF, I found much about it amazing and admirable, but I was left cold. Despite all the carnal eye candy and sleek Manhattan visuals, the film’s descent into a hell of loveless sex seemed desperately bleak. What’s worse, I was disappointed by my disappointment, as if it were a personal failing akin to that of the film’s protagonist. For fans of Shame, that would just be proof that the film was doing its job. Art, after all, is meant to disturb. “You say Fassbender’s character is shallow and soulless? Well, of course he is! Welcome to the real world!”  Yet something still felt not right with the film that I couldn’t put my finger on. When I came out of it, my first thought was that I wouldn’t have to see it again, or want to. But as time went on I felt so conflicted about it that eventually, I did. Now I finally have an opinion or two. Continue…

The rehabilitation of Wallis Simpson

By Patricia Treble - Tuesday, October 4, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 3 Comments

John Rawlings/Conde Nast Archive/Corbis; EOne Films

What a difference a year makes. At last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Wallis Simpson was portrayed in The King’s Speech as a vulgar Yankee huntress who’d so bewitched Edward VIII that the handsome king chucked everything to be with her. This year another film about those pivotal events in 1936 was centre stage at TIFF, but this time, in Madonna’s W.E., the twice-divorced American is a vulnerable woman whose love for Edward sparked only jealousy and outrage from his family. The new Wallis-friendly attitude is a sea change for a woman reviled to mythic extremes for decades—she was a Nazi! A lesbian! A man! A prostitute! In The King’s Speech, the monarch’s fascination for her is attributed to “certain skills, acquired in an establishment in Shanghai.” It was “a terrible portrayal,” recalls Hugo Vickers, a historical adviser on the Oscar-winning movie. (Obviously, some of his suggestions were ignored.)

W.E., for which Vickers also gave advice, isn’t alone in re-evaluating “that woman” as the 75th anniversary (in December) of the abdication approaches. Two new biographies, including Behind Closed Doors by Vickers, present Simpson in a sympathetic light. The new tone can be partly explained by the fact that the passage of time, and decades of royal scandals, have softened once harsh attitudes. New interviews and documents have also cast her motives and actions in a more favourable light. “I can’t believe that such a thing could have happened to two people who got along so well,” she wrote plaintively to her second husband, Ernest, about their marriage shortly after the abdication, in a previously unpublished letter. Far from an uncaring woman who’d flung off her spouse, she was in fact full of regret: “It never should have been like it is now.”

The abdication story still fascinates, largely because it is so unique. “No man ever gave up so much for one woman,” says Vickers, who’s written about the couple for nearly four decades. “And we don’t understand why. These things don’t happen normally.” Simpson was and still is “a very provocative character,” Madonna said at TIFF. “She is also a mysterious and enigmatic creature, not conventionally beautiful, not young, twice divorced.”

Continue…

My top 5 TIFF moments

By Jessica Allen - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 4:10 PM - 1 Comment

Here's Alexander Skarsgard and me, hanging out like old friends.

5. BREAKING AWAY

TIFF caused major downtown traffic mayhem. It was so nuts that my well-tempered colleague Brian D. Johnson even blogged about how annoying it was trying to travel from event to event. Not for this gal, though. I rode my bike to every downtown press conference, interview, film screening and red carpet and then hauled myself back uptown to the Maclean’s office, sometimes clocking in more than 25 km a day. I even biked to all the parties all dolled up in a dress and heels. And didn’t I feel oh-so-smug while I passed gridlocked cars! That is, until I fell off my bike standing still at an intersection. That’s right, I was stationary before I fell.

4. FREE FOOD! Continue…

Michael Shannon on his turn in ‘Take Shelter’

By macleans.ca - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 4:41 PM - 0 Comments

Dirty jokes abound at amFAR Cinema Against AIDS gala

By Jessica Allen - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 4:27 PM - 1 Comment

Courtesy of amFAR

I’ve been told that last year’s amFAR Cinema Against AIDS Gala at The Carlu was one of the most dazzling attractions at TIFF. (No wonder, considering tickets start at $1,000 and tables go for $25,000.) This year, more than 500 guests, mostly dressed in black ties and really fancy floor-length gowns, saddled up to eat dinner (more on that later), watch host Kathy Griffin swear like a f–king trucker, listen to amFAR chairman Kenneth Cole give a fantastic speech on recent advances in AIDS research, try to get a photo with amFAR chair Kim Cattrall and watch a pro (Lydia Fenet of Christie’s) conduct a spirited live auction on Sunday night. By the time it was over, $800,000 was raised for AIDS research. Not too shabby.

Courtesy of amFAR

Leading up to the ballroom on the Carlu’s 7th floor is a long, dimly-lit corridor outfitted in black and purple with touches of old Hollywood glam, like plushy black round settees and pretty ladies dresed like movie confectionary girls from the 1930s. There were plenty of recognizable sorts there, like Suzanne Rogers, dressed in a Kelly Green floor-length gown with a bejewelled neck, and actor Brian Cox, who I watched like a creep in the shadows for ten minutes. Continue…

Nathan Morlando and Scott Speedman on the making of ‘Edwin Boyd’

By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 1:38 PM - 0 Comments

Ralph Fiennes on directing and starring in ‘Coriolanus’

By Jessica Allen - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 5:00 PM - 0 Comments

Yesterday, as four other reporters and I sat on plush sofas and stools around a leather coffee table in the mezzanine lounge of the Park Hyatt, Ralph Fiennes walked in—no, glided in—and sat at the head of the table. I was the last one to introduce myself: “I’m Jessica Allen from Maclean’s magazine.”  Squinting his blue eyes for a moment, as though he was going through the file folders of information in his mind, he responded in a soft voice, “Ah yes, I know Maclean’s.”

Whew.

Fiennes is at TIFF to promote his directorial debut, Coriolanus, which he also stars in along with Gerard Butler, Brian Cox, Vanessa Redgrave and Jessica Chastain. (Then he’s back to London to perform on stage in The Tempest as Prospero, which explains the long hair and the beard.) It’s shocking that the last installment in Shakespeare’s Roman series has never been adapted for the screen considering it’s one of the playwright’s most radical plays; peasant revolts were taking place in England while Shakespeare wrote it and the play was even banned in France during the 1930s. And its plot has all the makings of a really good drama: think tough-as-nails-but empathetic general with political rivalries, social unrest, riots, revenge and ultimately tragedy. Leave it to Ralph Fiennes, who played the lead part on stage 11 years ago and instinctively knew it would make for a great dynamic modern film, to make it happen.

I ask the first question: how does he think the plot, which bears an eerie resemblance to current world events, will resonate today? “I hope it provokes discussion,” he says, looking straight at me. “I love it dramatically because I think audiences are challenged about where to put their allegiance. They can start off resisting Coriolanus and then find a way to admire him despite their thoughts about his views. I think it’s actually much more of a dissection of perennial dysfunction in humankind: of war, conflict, social unrest and what do you do when you put an extreme figure in the middle of it.”

I was having a hard time paying attention. Fiennes looks like a Roman emperor despite being dressed in worn-in jeans, a long-sleeved black cotton shirt and runners. It’s taking all I have to behave like a pseudo-professional.

Sitting up in his chair, Fiennes admits he found it hard to act and direct at the same time. “It was a bit schizophrenic. But I guess I knew it would be hard and I tried to be as prepared as I could be. And I knew the part—the learning of the lines wasn’t an issue because I’d learned them over the years.”

The hardest part, Fiennes says, deliberatly and in a near-whispered tone, was learning to trust the editing process. “You see a whole shot in the course of things and you start to look at it as a complete performance and it’s never going to be,” he says. “And then a good editor comes in and says, No I’ll just take this. Oh!”

Like Baz Luhrmann, who Fiennes believes “created a very coherent world” in Romeo and Juliet, he and scriptwriter John Logan decided to keep the Shakespearean text but set the movie in modern times (it was filmed in Belgrade.) “I think it’s a potent mix when you put Shakespeare in modern dress,” he says. “It’s a sort of artifice, but it’s been done in the theatre. I was intrigued by the idea of a film that was like a documentary or had a gritty style of shooting and people are speaking Shakespeare… The pitfall is that you’ve got to strip the language of any theatricality, and yet not deny its poetic power.”

Fiennes was first exposed to Shakespeare at the age of five when his mother took him to see Laurence Olivier in Henry V. “And then, two or three years after that, she told me the story of Hamlet and she produced this LP of Olivier’s speeches from Hamlet and Henry V, which I listens to again and again and again. I found this voice of this man using words I couldn’t understand but I became fascinated by what they might mean.”

With our 20 minutes up, an assistant comes over and thanks us. Fiennes lifts up his arms and slowly stretches them over his head. His back arches slightly and his shirt lifts up just enough. Like a wide-eyed child grabbing for something sparkly and shiny, I almost reach out to touch it, but I’m not that kind of lady.

If you miss Coriolanus at TIFF, it opens in North American theatres this January.

Check out Maclean’s chatting with Fiennes and costars Brian Cox, Jessica Chastain and Gerard Butler on the red carpet here.

Shooting stars at TIFF

By Andrew Tolson - Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 1:20 PM - 2 Comments

Movie stars don’t have a lot of time.

When you’re photographing them, there’s no asking about their Aunt Phyllis or how their golf swing is progressing. Yes, there’s small talk of the ‘How are you liking Toronto?’ variety, but really, they just want you to get the shot and move on. They have a red carpet to walk, scripts to read, multi-million dollar deals to sign, and, presumably, eating and sleeping to do. For the Movie Star, this is all part of their job; the promoting, the glad-handing and the quickie hotel room portraits. It’s all business.

Which is why you only have one minute to take the photograph.

For the Movie Star, there are varying degrees of involvement in the shoot. Most endure it like a grumpy kid having their picture taken with Santa Claus. Some enjoy the exercise, such as David Cronenberg, who cordially offered me his very effective Death Stare. Sarah Silverman had fun posing as if she were cramped into a photo booth. For some Movie Stars of a certain vintage, it’s about controlling their image: Juliette Binoche insisted on critiquing every frame and pronounced I “had the shot,” when I wasn’t sure I did.

(She was right. I did.)

But during that single minute I have with the Movie Star, it’s always an odd sensation, being so close to someone who is normally forty feet tall. Because after you’ve been face to face with them, in some anonymous hotel room or bland boardroom, you can’t help but feel the Movie Star seems, well, kind of normal.

Follow me: @andrewtolson @macleansphoto

Shooting Ralph Fiennes

Ralph Fiennes

Emily Blunt

Juliette Binoche

David Thewlis

Sarah Gadon

Scott Speedman

John Lydon, AKA Johnny Rotten

Sarah Polley

David Cronenberg

Sarah Silverman

Cocktails at the Soho House with Jessica Allen

By Jessica Allen - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 5:33 PM - 0 Comments

Snapshots from the red carpet

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 3:14 PM - 0 Comments

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Snapshots from the red carpet

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September 10, 2011: Robert De Niro poses for photographers at the premiere Killer Elite at Roy Thompson Hall during the Toronto International Film Festival. (Kara Dillon/Maclean's)

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Jessica Allen hits the red carpet at the ‘Coriolanus’ premiere

By Jessica Allen - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 12:55 PM - 4 Comments

Emily Blunt on what it takes to make a good romantic movie

By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, September 12, 2011 at 4:54 PM - 0 Comments

Johnny Rotten on how the teenage years are terrible years

By Tom Henheffer - Monday, September 12, 2011 at 10:28 AM - 0 Comments

Muscling into the ‘Ides of March’ press conference

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

Random revelers at TIFF’s opening night party

By Jessica Allen - Sunday, September 11, 2011 at 8:35 AM - 0 Comments

It takes all kinds to get a party started and Thursday’s TIFF opening night extravagant bash at the Liberty Grand was certainly a good example of just that. Inside the series of connected opulent rooms dimly lit by dozens of chandeliers and outfitted with multiple bars and dance floors—plus an outdoor garden space with a giant disco ball strung overhead—was an astounding assortment of merry makers. The only type of reveler missing was actual celebrities (unless they showed up after 1am, and unless you consider the CBC’s Jian Ghomeshi a star.)

Maybe Hollywood A-listers had little desire to mix with the hoi polloi, who didn’t seem to mind one bit that stars were decidedly absent. Actually, two lovely ladies with whom I spoke around midnight—and who I first noticed only because I saw every pair of eyes in the room turn to watch them, and their hair extensions and considerable assets, hobble by in their sky-high platform heels, might’ve cared. “Isn’t that white guy from Entourage supposed to be here?” Asked the buxom blond. Continue…

Dinner with Harvey Weinstein and friends

By Jessica Allen - Sunday, September 11, 2011 at 8:14 AM - 0 Comments

Last night, some 50 colleagues and acquaintances joined host Harvey Weinstein for supper at The Roosevelt Room to celebrate The Artist, a black and white, mostly silent movie set in 1927 Hollywood, that the Weinstein Co. purchased this May in Canne.

My job? To be a fly on the wall. But first I had to get out of the way of  Bob Weinstein, who squeezed past me in order to reach the bar, where he ordered a diet Coke. As I excused myself, a young man said hello to him. “Oh yeah!” He said. “I read your script and it was good. There’s some real crazy stuff in there! I mean, it was rough in spots but it’s workable.” Continue…

Scenes from the red carpet at the Killer Elite premiere

By Tom Henheffer - Sunday, September 11, 2011 at 7:32 AM - 0 Comments

‘What’s your favourite sports movie?’

By Jessica Allen - Saturday, September 10, 2011 at 10:27 AM - 7 Comments

Scenes from the red carpet at the ‘Ides of March’ premiere

By Tom Henheffer - Saturday, September 10, 2011 at 10:13 AM - 0 Comments

Sarah Polley on married life, Seth Rogen, and who left her starstruck

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, September 9, 2011 at 10:57 AM - 0 Comments

TIFF sports: Brad Pitt hits a homer; ex-Hab hits doc rehab

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, September 9, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill in 'Moneyball'

The front half of U2, Bono & the Edge, launched The Toronto International Rock Festival, er, Film Festival last night with From the Sky Down, the first documentary to open TIFF—and one of three rock docs at the festival. Introducing the premiere onstage at Roy Thompson Hall, Bono admitted the band was anxious about letting director David Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) spy on their creative process. “Not because we’re precious—which we are!” he said, but because songwriting “is not that pretty.” He cited the adage that “if you knew what you went into the sausage, you wouldn’t eat it.” When it comes to U2, I’m not much of carnivore anyway, but that’s another story. On TIFF’s opening day, my highlights were two sausage-making stories about the other stuff that goes on in stadiums and arenas when rock stars aren’t performing—namely Moneyball, a terrifically entertaining baseball movie starring Brad Pitt, and The Last Gladiators, a timely documentary about hockey enforcers by Oscar-winning U.S. director Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room)

Pitt is having a remarkable year. First he plays the dark side of the American Dream in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, which won the Palme d’Or in Cannes; and now he switch-hits to the sunny side in Moneyball‘s amazing-but-true story of Billy Beane, a general manager who changed the face of major league baseball. Continue…

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).

Continue…

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…