On Location at the Toronto Film Festival

Coverage By: Rick Mele
Rick.Mele@gmail.com

Turn Off the Lights, Show's Over
September 16th, 2007

Well, the Film Festival came to an end Saturday night, which means my time here in Toronto is up. After last year, when I got in a few days late, it was a entirely different experience being here for the duration.

The whole thing is a bit like a wave: the first weekend, the celebs come crashing in, totally overwhelming the town. But by mid-week, most of the stars have already left, and the festivities and coverage calm down a bit (though the same can't be said about the rabid fans, who roamed the city in packs up until the last day).

As opposed to last year, when most of my movie-watching finished up before the final weekend, this time we had a movie the last night, the totally incomprehensible Glory to the Filmmaker. When making up my schedule, I envisioned this surrealist romp through genres as a fitting end to my time here at the TIFF; a comedic look at a director attempting, and failing, to make a commercially viable film in a variety of styles.

I pictured a grandiose entry, filled with sweeping metaphors comparing Takeshi Kitano's latest work to the many different films I saw at the festival, a fitting end to my coverage here.

Only there was one problem... After sitting through Glory to the Filmmaker, I have absolutely no idea what I just watched. 100 minutes of bizarre imagery and a complete lack of plot left me staring at the screen bewildered once the lights went up.

The conceit is interesting enough: a director famous for making gangster movies (Kitano's best known for Zatoichi) tries his hand at making something different for once - a period piece, a series of sterile dramas, a horror movie, a samurai flick, and finally a sci-fi film. Except, once Kitano settles on sci-fi, the film veers off into totally unconnected sequences (and outdated parodies like The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), each more outlandish than the last. Curiouser and curiouser indeed.

Ah well. If I've learned nothing else from my time here, it's that sometimes things don't always work out the way you expected.

Like last year, the TIFF should prove to be a launching pad for the slate of fall films (The Brave One topped the weekend box office after opening here earlier this week), but there were fewer big deals made at this year's fest. The buyers were here, but the pickings a bit slimmer this year. George Romero's Diary of the Dead found a distributer in the Weinstein Company a few days in, and GreeneStreet's Bill (starring Aaron Eckhart