Appearing in one of the movies! I was in Red Alert, a short that played before the movie Wet Bum. IT’s not enough that I cover 100 movies during the fest, now I have to be in them too! I even got a review. “@richardcrouse is great in Red Alert…” Mike Bullard wrote on twitter. “I’d like to tell you I didn’t know he was a redhead but I knew… I just knew ok.”
In person Benedict Cumberbatch’s voice sounds like hot melting wax. I liked Sherlock well enough and have seen him in several movies, but for me, and I know I’m the last to get it, his performance in The Imitation Game is a game changer. He plays real-life character Alan Turing, a Cambridge mathematician who volunteers to help break Germany’s most devastating WWII weapon of war, the Enigma machine. It was a top-secret operation, classified for more than 50 years, but that wasn’t Turing’s only secret. Gay at a time when homosexuality was illegal, punishable by jail or chemical castration, he was forced to live a world of secrets, both personal and professional.
Robert Pattinson telling me about how Hollywood was before camera phones: “When I first started going to LA everyone was underage and if you were a famous actor the rules did not apply. You could be a sixteen-year-old and go into a club but now that there are camera phones everywhere that doesn’t exist anymore. That period was so weird. You’d see a fourteen-year-old actor wasted, doing lines of blow on the table. It was crazy. Now they just do it at their parent’s house.”
Julie Taymore telling me that A Midsummer Night’s Dream “It was the first play I ever saw. I saw it here in Canada at the Stratford Festival…”
Michael Moore’s answer to my question about his reaction to all the celebrity he gained after appearing at TIFF 25 years ago with Roger and Me: Asked what was going through his head while all this was swirling around him, Moore says: “Why didn’t I go to Jenny Craig three months ago?”
“I don’t know where they are,” Kingsley says about his characters, “if they’re inside me waiting to come out or whether they are outside of me. Are they hunting me or am I hunting them? I don’t know.”
Repairing Dustin Hoffman’s watch. During a roundtable interview the alarm on his watch went off several times. He gave it to me and I looked up the instructions on how to fix it on Google. “How did it you look it up on line? They have instructions to fix Timexes on line? I don’t automatically go to those things,” he said. During the interview he said: “I was told to take acting. Nobody flunks acting.” Later he said that it wasn’t such a bad choice because, for instance, “No one ever says, ‘I want to be a critic when I grow up.’”
Lowlight… waiting for BIll Murray for seven hours. (Although I love this from @ZeitchikLAT: Bill Murray, offering implicit proof on the merits of Bill Murray Day: “If this is really my day, why do I have to do so much work?”)
Sitting next to next to Boo Radley, Bill Kilgore and Tom Hagan. (Robert Duvall!)
Most quotable actors of the festival? Robert Duvall who said, about acting, “There’s no right or wrong just truthful or untruthful.” He calls Billy Bob Thornton “The hillbilly Orson Welles…” and said “Brando used to watch Candid Camera.” Jane Fonda was a close second when she said acting is great for the heart but terrible for the nerves… “Butts have become more in fashion… (since Barbarella) and “Television is forgiving to older women and making it possible for us to have longer careers.”
“I have distilled socialism in this box and am taking it back to America.” – Robert Downey Jr in my roundtable interview.
#TIFF14 socks day 3. Chris O’Dowd called them “powerful.” and Rosamund Pike said, “I’m enjoying your socks. They make me happy.”
Watching “Whiplash” knock the socks off an audience at an IMAX P&! screening. It is part musical—the big band jazz numbers are exhilarating—and part psychological study of the tense dynamics between mentor and protégée in the pursuit of excellence. The pair is a match made in hell. Teacher Fletcher, played by J.K. Simmons is a vain, driven man given to throwing chairs at his students if they dare hit a wring note. He’s an exacting hardliner who teaches by humiliation and fear. This movie doesn’t miss a beat.
Love this quote: “Being in the military,” said Adam Driver of This Is Where I Leave You, “believe it or not, is very different than being in an acting school.”
TIFF is all about celebrating new films, but this year the festival looks back a quarter of a century at a film that came to the festival like a lamb, but left as a lion.
“I feel like I got very lucky here,” says Michael Moore on the 25th anniversary of his documentary Roger & Me, which became a sensation at TIFF. He credits the festival with the launch. “Actually, launch is too soft of a word,” he says of its “rocket propulsion.”
The documentary is a personal look at the economic blow-back of General Motors CEO Roger Smith’s decision to close several auto plants in Moore’s hometown of Flint, Mich. The closures cost 30,000 people their jobs and set the city on a downward spiral.
“When we were making it, our plan was to buy an old Ford-Econoline van and, like hippies, travel around the state of Michigan showing the film in union halls, churches and schools,” he says. “But when it was finished, I could tell people were going to love this. It was going to drive people crazy.”
Instead of a church basement in Michigan, the movie found an enthusiastic audience at TIFF. “The egalitarian thing about this festival is that if you’ve made a really good movie,” he says, “the cream will rise to the top. It will be seen. Studios will know about it.”
By the doc’s third screening at the Royal Ontario Museum, “the cops and the fire marshall had to be called in because there were too many people. Everyone was lined in the aisles, nobody would get up, and the fire marshall said, ‘We’re not starting this film until 100 of you leave.’ The next day in the newspaper there was a picture of the melee and a big headline that said ‘Riot at the ROM.’ My friends said, ‘Riot? That wasn’t a riot.’ I said, ‘For Canada, that was a riot.’”
Offers from studios began to pour in. “I was so petrified by the whole thing but I also was enjoying it. … I didn’t have an agent, didn’t have a lawyer. It was just me and I just started messing with them. They would say, ‘Here’s $100,000. Here’s $200,000, $300,000. I’m on unemployment at the time making $98 a week so once the offers passed $100,000 I thought I’d hit the jackpot, so I was just going to mess with them.”
Asked what was going through his head while all this was swirling around him, Moore says: “Why didn’t I go to Jenny Craig three months ago?”
From its Toronto beginnings the film went on to become a sensation and breathe new life into the documentary as popular entertainment.
“They ended up putting it on 300 screens,” he says. “Completely unheard of. The Thin Blue Line was the year before that, and that was big for a documentary. Probably played 100 art houses and made a couple million dollars. In hindsight I see the impact it has had on the form. … I think there were nine documentaries before Roger and Me that grossed $1 million or more. Nine. Since Roger and Me: 119. You see where that line is and that I feel great about.”
Sicko, the new film from Michael Moore, marks a different approach from the filmmaker, best known for his agitprop takes on gun control, big business and George Bush. The Moore who takes on America’s lucrative but appallingly inefficient health care system, is kinder and gentler, but still drives his point home with the power of a jackhammer.
For much of the film Moore casts himself as the wide-eyed traveler, an American abroad in Canada, France and England where he discovers health care systems that offer a level of care to everyone that is simply not available to all Americans. His glasses are certainly tinted a certain shade of rose, but his point is clear, the American health system is run by insurance companies who are more interested in profit than they are the health of their policy holders.
In the most provocative sequence in the film Moore takes a group of 911 rescue workers, now suffering from respiratory illnesses, to Guantanamo Bay to demand the same kind of health care for them as the Al Queda prisoners housed within. From a boat in the bay Moore bleats through a megaphone that they only want the same care offered to the “evil-doers” behind the imposing grey walls of the prison. It’s striking, incendiary and a near perfect Moore moment. When they are met with alarms instead of offers of help, Moore and his guests continue on to Cuba where they are received with open arms and given the care they need.
No health care system is perfect. Anyone who has sat in an emergency room in Toronto or Vancouver for three hours to get five stitches can tell you that, but the point Moore makes is that at least we are offered medical attention regardless of our age, the state of our existing health or income level. With that in mind I wanted to kiss the ground when I left the theatre, happy to live in a country where, by our taxes at least, we look after each other when we need the help most.
The release of “Capitalism: A Love Story” will be met with the usual hoopla that surrounds all Michael Moore exposés. Fox News will challenge his facts and call him un-American for having the temerity to suggest that one of the threads of the good old red, white and blue, capitalism, is a flawed and outdated system. Fifty years ago Moore’s habit of sticking up for the little guy, the average American who’s just been foreclosed on or had their pension disappear, would have made him a Roy Rogers type folk hero. But in today’s climate where dissent is seen as disloyalty Moore is painted as a villain, a naysayer determined to undermine the very fabric of American life. Perhaps the name callers should actually try watching one of his films, or at least stay through to the end of “Capitalism,” where, after a look at how the America he loves is in tatters, he announces, “I refuse to live in a country like this… and I’m not leaving.” It’s his “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” moment and a powerful end to an information packed, if somewhat rambling movie.
Moore doesn’t waste time getting to the point. He kicks things off with a mix of archival and recent footage that compares modern culture to the fall of the Roman Empire. From there he walks us through the beginnings of capitalism—which he describes as a system of giving and taking, mostly taking—through to the Regan years when, he says, it all started to go wrong. The story of capitalism unleashed continues through several more administrations until, for reasons far too complicated to detail here, the bottom falls out and we’re left with a system that instead of creating products for people to enjoy has been co-opted by banks who specialize in schemes that make money in ways that actually harm Main Street America. Along the way we meet the profiteers, companies who take insurance on their employees and benefit from their deaths—it’s called Dead Peasant insurance—and a poor family paid to clean out their own house; a house the bank had just repossessed.
Moore narrates the entire movie in his best Uncle Mikey voice, a calm reassuring tone with just a hint of outrage. It’s become his trademark, and even when he spews unsubstantiated “facts” like “Japanese and German cars hardly ever break down” he sounds convincing. It’s Fox News in reverse. Where they rely on raised voices and hyperbole to make their point Moore keeps the volume on low, but uses masterfully chosen images and music to drive home his outrage.
A sequence describing how Regan reduced taxes on the rich is scored with demonic “Omen” style chanting to reinforce the idea of the evil that was being perpetrated. Other sections are illustrated with a mix of archival and new imagery and, as always, Moore chooses provocative pictures to create emotion. Only the hardest hearted would be unmoved by the joy on a woman’s face as Obama is named president or the tears shed by someone who has just lost their home.
Moore’s greatest skill is creating great propaganda. He can string together info and images like no one else. It’s not documentary filmmaking in the strictest sense, he’s too agenda minded to be a purest to the form, but he knows how to entertain while slamming home his point.
“Capitalism: A Love Story” feels a bit more unfocussed than his previous films, but the ideas contained within, that capitalism has been perverted into a system that enriches the few at the expense of the many, may make this his most important film to date.
This is an extremely effective, if not rambling film that asks the question “Are we (America) a nation of gun nuts, or are we just nuts?” Director Michael Moore uses the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado as a jumping off point, then takes us on a journey that includes stops in Michigan, where it seems everyone owns a gun, a sit-in at K-Mart’s corporate headquarters and an amusing side trip to Moore’s idealized Canada. This movie is all over the place, and offers very few answers to the difficult questions it asks, but I think it was Moore’s strategy to present the facts and figures and get people thinking for themselves. Moore’s everyman appearance is put to good use in the film’s most effective scene. He talks his way into gun-nut Charlton Heston’s house for an interview, claiming to be a member of the NRA. Once inside he gradually warms Heston up before asking the hard questions about the consequences of living in a heavily armed society. Heston stiffens, ending the interview and walking away. Moore’s camera follows Heston as he shuffles down a long hall. The Grand Wizard of the NRA is revealed to for what he is, an old man, and not the Moses of the gun movement. It’s impressive footage that caps a film full of powerful images and ideas.
Appearing in one of the movies! I was in Red Alert, a short that played before the movie Wet Bum. IT’s not enough that I cover 100 movies during the fest, now I have to be in them too! I even got a review. “@richardcrouse is great in Red Alert…” Mike Bullard wrote on twitter. “I’d like to tell you I didn’t know he was a redhead but I knew… I just knew ok.”
