Saturday, September 15, 2012.
TORONTO 2012 ENDS TOMORROW.
I'll post the awards here when they're announced.
I am posting all Mike D'Angelo's Toronto 2012 Twitter reviews/ratings on my website here. Below are his top ratings out of 30-some watched. He has not watched most of the big release items I listed earlier, including ON THE ROAD (Walter Salles) , ANNA KARENINA (Jon Wright), CLOUD ATLAS (Tom Tykwer),) THE COMPANY YOU KEEP (Robert Redford), ARGO (Ben Affleck) (already debuted at Telluride, as mentioned above),HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA (Adam Sandler), END OF WATCH (Michael Pena), HYDE PARK ON THE HUDSON (with Bill Murray as FDR), THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER, and QUARTET (Dustin Hoffman)
He didn't much like several Nyrr main slate items, GINGER AND ROSE 44) and De Palma's PASSION (38); the Nyff item BARBARA came just below his top ratings. But the Nyff film FRANCES HA was his second most favorite.
D'ANGELO'S TOP TORONTO 2012 RATINGS:
Eat Sleep Die (Pichler): 75+. Still deciding how much I love this, may go 80+. A triumph of anti-miserablism, ROSETTA with a real girl.
Frances Ha (Baumbach): 76. As I'd suspected, he and Gerwig are a great match, with a similarly loopy sense of humor. Naturalistic absurdism.
Leviathan (Castaing-Taylor & Paravel): 73. Still wish human beings were kept strictly on the periphery. Purely abstract imagery astounding.
/Looper/ (Johnson): 72. Starts off "merely" imaginative and engrossing, then pivots on one of the most audacious bait-and-switch moves ever.
Seven Psychopaths (McDonagh): 68. A bit meta-cute for my taste, but very, very funny. His humor makes the subject matter almost irrelevant.
Ernest & Celestine (Renner,Patar,Aubier): 67. Like TOWN CALLED PANIC, endearingly nutty til it runs out of steam (further along this time).
Jayne Mansfield's Car (Thornton): 64. All over the place, but I wish more American films sprawled so unpredictably. Leave Billy Bob alone!
Byzantium (Jordan): 63. To the extent that there's a plot, it's pretty dumb. As an exercise in Gothic (not Goth) atmosphere, oft-stirring.
The Master (Anderson): 61. Apropos that this film features both a Rorschach test and a game called Pick a Point. Did not coalesce for me.
To the Wonder (Malick): 59. Can Malick's late, glancing style sustain its magic for the entirety of a simple love-lost tale? Almost
Barbara (Petzold): 58. Exquisitely made, but I was disappointed when its conventional shape took form beneath layers of subtle misdirection.
--From Mike D'Angelo's tweets: https://twitter.com/gemko
Manohl Dargis reports on TIFF in the NYTimes today (September. 15, '12 in an article called "Movie Frenzy But Still Comfy, Eh?" which is a sketchy report on films (she mentions about 11 titles) and less useful as a clearcut set of ratings compared to D'Angelo, but she talks about different titles mostly from D'Angelo. She starts with statistics: 289 features and 83 shorts from 72 countries. And that makes it easy to get lost outside the obvious titles, which she mostly focuses on. She notes that CLOUD ATLAS (which I'd thought was Tom Tykwer--maybe he dropped the project) by the former Wachowski brothers, now brother and sister since one did a sex change, is bad, a mess, partly embarrassing. Joe Wright's ANNA KARENA is a "travesty in its conception and execution" with a badly miscast Keira Knightley. She mentions the NYff BARBARA (Petzold) and GINGER AND ROSA (Sally Potter) with favor; but has she seen them? Not clear. She contrasts Malick's TO THE WONDER (self-parody?) scathingly asand constrasts it with David O. Russel's SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK (soon coming to US art houses)a wonderment of an unfortunate type that combines many images of young women running through sun-dappled rooms and fields amid musings about Jesus ChristDargis takes much interest in the "freakout" from North Korean COMRADE KIM GOES FLYING, which she thinks is the kind of film that makes Toronto "such an essential festival." Not sure she means this film is "essential" but she also liked small films Jem Cohen‘s MUSEUM HOURS, which she wished the fest hyped more, and she liked experimental films by Francesca Woodman (who committed suicide in 1982) and a B&W visual meditation about a modern city and an ancient ruin of one, VIWE FROM THE ACROPOLIS by Dutch artists Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan. "Essential," or just a relief after CLOUD ATLAS and ANNA KARENINA?the latest family comedy from David O. Russell, which takes place on solid terra firma where people eat, drink, work, talk — and, this being a David O. Russell encounter session — yell at one another as they grapple with many of the same Big Questions as Mr. Malick’s twirling, skipping, running, whispering and endlessly posing avatars.
VENICE ENDED LAST WEEK
Go back to my VENICE post in this thread here for the Venice prizes announced last Sunday.
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