The Oscar race, like Christmas, starts way too early. But if there’s one clear contender who has emerged as an early favorite among those who handicap awards, it’s Carey Mulligan, the 24-year-old British actress who stars in An Education. This is Mulligan’s first lead role, and her chief rival at the Academy Awards will likely be Gabourey Sidibey, the 26-year-old African American who makes her screen debut as an abused daughter in Precious. That makes two women playing susceptible teens in the clutches of predatory men. But An Education is by far the easier film to watch. The giddy rite of passage that Mulligan’s character experiences in the arms of an older man is a relatively harmless joyride, especially next to the horrors that Sidibey’s heroine survives in Precious. Here’s an expanded version of what I wrote about An Education when it premiered last month at the Toronto International Film Festival.

In a star-making performance, Carey Mulligan is adorable as Jenny, a smart 16-year-old from a London suburb who has her sights set on Oxford when she’s led astray by a debonair but dodgy suitor.  And Peter Sarsgaard is more likeable than he has any right to be as David (Peter Sarsgaard)—a silver-tongued gent who tempts Jenny with a much racier education than anything she could find in university. Written by Nick Hornby (High Fidelity) and directed by Lone Scherfig, the story is set in 1961, in post-war, pre-Beatles England. And as its impressionable heroine is seduced by art, jazz, nightclubs and everything French, the film captures a world on the cusp of a cultural revolution. Continue…

Comedian Chris Rock has ventured into Michael Moore territory with a comic documentary that exposes the strange and secret world of black women’s coiffure. As host and co-writer of ‘Good Hair,’ he conducts a funny, fascinating excursion into tricks and taboos surrounding the billion-dollar industry of African American perms, weaves and wigs. Above is a video of my interview with Rock, conducted when his movie premiered last month at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Clive Owen belongs to a dying breed of Hollywood alpha males. In a world of chick-flick friendly leading boys (Robert Pattison, Ryan Reynolds Michael Cera), Owen and his Brit compatriot Daniel Craig are almost alone in holding the fort of old-school macho grit. But in his latest film, a purely domestic drama, Owen tackles a role quite unlike anything he’s done. In The Boys Are Back, he plays Joe, a suddenly widowed father struggling to hold down his job as a sports writer while raising two boys—an uncontrollable six-year-old (Nicholas McAnulty) and his estranged teenage half-brother (George MacKay). The story, which is based on a memoir by journalist Simon Carr, is set largely in Joe’s rambling Australian beach house, where all hell breaks loose as he patents his own renegade parenting style—behaving more as a friend to his kids than a father.

Australian filmmaker Scott Hicks (Shine) directs The Boys Are Back in a straightforward, conventional style, with the occasional flourish of sentiment. But when you think it about it, this is not a conventional movie. As a deeply flawed yet oddly heroic single father, Owen plays a character that we’ve rarely glimpsed on screen. If you’re a widowed dad in a movie, like Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle, it almost goes saying that you’re a paragon on virtue. But Owen brings the same volatile edge of discomfort to this character that he brings to gangsters and adulterers. It’s a compelling performance.

I talked to both Clive Owen and Scott Hicks when they passed through the Toronto International Film Festival for their film’s premiere. You’ll find a video of my interview with the director at the top of this post. As for Clive, we had a terse, efficient little talk. He was sternly dressed all in black, but he’s a more diminutive, delicate presence than you’d expect. He was cordial, and quick to smile, but you could still detect a simmering impatience, the latent menace that magnifies his screen persona. The actor didn’t waste words, and when the publicist signaled that our time was up, he cut his final answer short with cold economy. Our conversation: Continue…

Ben Whishaw and Abbie Cornish in Jane Campion's 'Bright Star'

I cannot recommend Bright Star too highly. Here’s an expanded version what I wrote about the film when it premiered in Cannes last May:

From the opening frames, as the camera luxuriates in the deep-flowered meadows of early 19th-century England, Jane Campion takes us into the bright, beating heart of Romantic movement, that fleeting place of truth and beauty, youth and reverie.  Bright Star conjures poet John Keats  through the eyes of the woman who becomes infatuated with him, only to see him die of consumption at 25. The love and the death both unfold at an exquisite pace, as a poetic courtship.

This is  Australian director Jane Campion’s first feature in six years, and her best since The Piano (1993). Her previous movie, In the Cut, was an intimate contemporary thriller about sex, death and poetry; Bright Star is an intimate  period romance about love, death and poetry. Big difference. Although I was among the minority that appreciated In the Cut, it was too clever by half.  Bright Star is  deceptively simple, and radiant. It should leave audiences  swooning, though I suspect women will like it more than men. Continue…

Here’s a video of my interview with Diablo Cody during the Toronto International Film Festival. The Oscar-winning screenwriter of Juno showed up for the premiere of her new movie, Jennifer’s Body. She talked about teenage sex, Megan Fox, Steven Spielberg,writer’s block, roller coasters and tattoos, among other things.

'Precious' star Gabourey 'Gabby' Sidibe

It was wrap yesterday for the Toronto International Film Festival, as it staged its awards ceremony at a hotel brunch. This is always a low-key affair. Unlike the othe major festivals—Cannes, Berlin, Venice and Sundance—Toronto prides itself on being a non-competitive event. Which is why a lot of filmmakers feel comfortable unveiling their work here. There are no losers. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t winners. Although there’s no formal competition, awards are given out, and this year there were more than ever. Juries honoured three categories of Canadian films with cash prizes—Ruba Nadda’s lush and delicate romance, Cairo Time, won $30,000 for best Canadian feature, Alexandre Franchi’s The Wild Hunt, about role-playing games, won $15,000 for best Canadian first feature, and Pedro Pires’s Dance Macabre, a dark ballet conceived by Robert Lepage, won $10,000 for best Canadian short. But the prize that has taken on more and more significance over the years is the People’s Choice Award, which is voted by audiences—and has come to serve as a bell-weather for Oscar success. Past winners have included Chariots of Fire, American Beauty, Crash and Slumdog Millionaire. To no one’s surprise, at least not mine, the 2009 winner was Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire. By turns harrowing and inspirational, this tale of an abused, obese, illiterate Harlem teen is this year’s Slumdog. Continue…

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Jennifer's Body

Jennifer’s Body: Written by Diablo Cody (Juno), and starring Megan Fox as —who acts like Angelina Jolie in her Billy Bob Thornton phase—Jennifer’s Body throws a feminist kink into the old blonde/brunette, saint/slut high-school horror movie formula. Evil arrives in the form of an indie rock band called Low Shoulder, which comes to the town of Kettle Falls and commits a cult murder to achieve stardom. Fox is, well, a fox, and teenage boys all over North America will be trying to sneak in under the film’s R rating to drool over her. The sex is strictly soft-core (no nudity, boys). But there’s a long, lingering lesbian kiss, framed in profile as extreme-close-up, between Fox and co-star Amanda Seyfried. And while Fox devours her flesh-eating role with great gusto, Seyfried’s performance is the film’s revelation. She plays the good-girl heroine opposite Fox’s carnal cannibal. But in a modern twist on the formula, this sweet blond is far from virginal. She knows her way around a condom, and may even be having more sex than the bad girl. Seyfried also stars in Atom Egoyan’s Chloe, where she gives a dynamite performance in a shape-shifting role as a hooker that allows her to demonstrate remarkable range. Continue…

Jana Pallaske and Til Schweiger in 'Phantom Pain'

Tonight I had a beer with Germany’s biggest box office star. I was introducded to Til Schweiger at a small, jammed party for TIFF’s gala premiere of Phantom Pain (Phantomschmerz)—a German movie inspired by the true story of a Canadian cyclist Mark Sumner, whose life was traumatically changed by a car accident.  Til Schweiger has been called Germany’s Brad Pitt. And he co-starred with Pitt, speaking English as one of his Nazi-scalping squad in Inglourious Basterds. But when I ask Schweiger about the comparison, after expressing his huge admiration for Pitt as an actor, he says, “I’m not Germany’s Brad Pitt; I’m Germany’s Will Smith.” (Given that Smith is Hollywood’s biggest earner at the box office, the analogy makes sense.) Inglourious Basterds has been a massive hit in Germany,  bigger than Pulp Fiction. But Schweiger told me he was furious that European countries chose to dub the film rather than subtitle it—undermining the multilingual intrigue that serves as its central comic conceit. “Here comes this guy who goes against all odds,” says the actor. “At the risk of alienating all the Americans,  Quentin had everyone speak their own language, so you wouldn’t have Germans speaking English to each other in a phony German accent.” In his role as a German-American soldier, Schweiger naturally spoke English with his comrades. But for Germany’s version of the film, he had to dub his English lines into German. “The German audience knows me as a native German speaker. And when I’m in an international film speaking English it’s a different  timing, a different rhythm. Then I dub it into German, and the German audience wonders, ‘why does he talk like this?’ “

When Schweiger asked me what I thought of Phantom Pain, I confessed I had to work late and missed the premiere but planned to catch it in a repeat screening. He said he appreciated the honesty, then recalled an incident at a party where he caught someone’s bluff. Once he was schmoozed by a producer who profusely congratulated him on his performance in a film that he didn’t appear in, but was incorrectly listed on his IMDB page.

Los Viajes del viento (The Wind Journeys)

By now, George and Oprah and the rest of the Hollywood circus have left town, and with them the horde of U.S. media junketeers. They gave us a good ride, showing up with a glut of stellar films to promote. But even the best of them—from Up in the Air to the Road—only took us deeper into the psychosis of our own culture. And they kept people like me so busy that there was no time to get off the grid and explore the wilder extremes of world cinema that TIFF makes available. But finally I’ve had a chance to do that. My journey into wild began with two films by Werner Herzog: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans and My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done. These are urban American crime stories, and the former features a Hollywood star, Nicolas Cage. But no matter where Herzog shoots—the Amazon, Alaska, Antarctica or Los Angeles, he seems to find the jungle, and madmen who are drawn into it. My Son, My Son and Bad Lieutenant are both murder stories about characters going insane, and they form a good- cop/bad-cop matched set. It’s the murderer who goes crazy in My Son, My Son, which is based on a true story of matricide in Los Angeles by a actor who becomes consumed with playing Oedipus on stage; in Bad Lieutenant, it’s the cop, a crack-smoking maniac played by Cage. Despite the urban settings, in both movies Herzog finds room for a menagerie of exotic animals: fish, snakes, flamingos, ostriches, iguanas, alligators. It’s as if he travels with the jungle in his carry-on. I had the extraordinary pleasure of interviewing the German filmmaker on two separate occasions in the past couple of days. I’ll be writing more about that, and his movies. later. But I feel it’s more urgent to tell you about the most recent film I’ve seen, which may be my favorite of the festival so far—an amazing first feature from the wilds of Colombia called Los Viajes del viento (The Wind Journeys). Continue…

What a wild and crazy Sunday we had yesterday. It started at 9:30 a.m. with a royal visit from Oprah Winfrey, holding court at a press conference for Precious with a remarkable phalanx of African-American talent—including Mariah Carrey, Tyler Perry, the novelist Sapphire, singer Mary J. Blige, directror Lee Daniels, and super-sized ingenue Gabourey ‘Gabby’ Sidibe, who’s living out a Star is Born fantasy making her film debut in the title role. Cameron Bailey, TIFF’s dashing African-Canadian co-director—who looked as much like a movie star as anyone on the podium—called it a historic event. And he was right. Black stars and black directors have made their individual marks in Hollywood. But I can’t recall another film that has united such an inspired, and inspiring, powerhouse of black talent. At the press conference, Oprah set the tone for an outpouring of emotion that turned the session into a media love-in. The movie, she said, “is so raw that it will suck the air out of the room. When I finished watching this film the first thing I did was call Tyler so I could get Lee’s number and tell him how I was gasping for air.” Precious—the story of an abused woman pregnant with a second child by own father—premiered at Sundance last winter, but could have languished in indie obscurity without the support of Oprah. It’s not an easy film to watch or sell. But she hopped on board as executive producer and at TIFF she’s launching a juggernaut campaign that seems destined to end in Oscar glory. One voice after another made the case that for such a sad and harrowing story, Precious is not a downer. And some did it by drawing on their own experience of childhood abuse, including Blige and Perry. “For anyone who has endured that kind of situation,” said Perry, “me being one of those people, it left me with hope. I don’t think it’s dark. I think it leaves you with hope. . . No matter what your situation, you can walk away from it feeling hope.” Continue…