TIFF 2011: Forget New York City, London and even Hollywood. Beginning this week, the starriest city on Earth will be in Canada












Forget New York City, London and even Hollywood. Beginning this week, the starriest city on Earth will be in Canada.

The 36th annual Toronto International Film Festival kicks off on Thursday, and the celebs are headed up north in droves.


Among the A-listers? George Clooney, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Salma Hayek, Keira Knightley, Gerard Butler and even Madonna are scheduled to be on hand for the North American premieres of their much-anticipated films.

Check out some of  THE movie critic's picks for the most buzz-worthy films of the festival:

W.E.
For her directorial debut, Madonna takes on a woman arguably as iconic (and even more controversial) than herself: Wallis Simpson. Andrea Riseborough stars as the wife of Britain's King Edward VIII (James D'Arcy), for whom he abdicated his throne and shocked the world. W.E. garnered mixed reviews at its Venice Film Festival premiere last week, so look for it to stir conversation in Toronto.

The Ides of March
Already generating Oscar buzz, this political thriller stars (and is directed by) George Clooney as a dynamic presidential candidate looked after by a wide-eyed campaign staffer (Ryan Gosling) caught between loyalty and ambition. Gosling does double duty in Toronto, by the way, with his gritty, stylish noir drama Drive also unspooling at the festival.

The Descendants
It's Clooney again. (You just can't escape the guy – not that you'd want to.) Only this isn't the dazzling, dapper George we usually see. In The Descendants he plays an average joe whose wife has a boating accident in Hawaii. In the aftermath, he discovers painful secrets about his marriage and tries to reconnect with the daughters he sees every day but barely knows.

Moneyball
Brad Pitt's baseball movie has seen its share of drama already. Directors have come and gone, shooting was shut down at one point, and then there's the basic problem of how you make a movie that's essentially about statistics. Those are the knocks. But what Moneyball has going for it is strong early buzz, a great cast – including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright and Jonah Hill, who plays a genius in the science/art of sabermetrics – not to mention Aaron Sorkin's name on the screenplay. The last thing he wrote? A little movie called The Social Network.

Pearl Jam Twenty
Director Cameron Crowe (Almost Famous) continues his cinematic love affair with rock and roll, bringing his documentary about the seminal band to Toronto for its world premiere. With concert scenes, interviews, and rarely-seen footage, Crowe chronicles Pearl Jam's meteoric rise and rocky years in the spotlight.

Martha Marcy May Marlene
It's the first feature film for writer/director Sean Durkin and it's been kicking around since the Sundance film festival ... last January. So what's the big deal with this tongue-twister of a movie? Only that's it the unveiling of a new star: Elizabeth Olsen. Olsen, younger sister of Ashley and Mary-Kate, plays a young woman who's lured into a cult and psychologically (and in all other ways) tortured by the charismatic cult leader (Winter's Bone's brilliant John Hawkes). She finally flees to her estranged sister (Sarah Polley), but soon realizes that she may have left her sanity behind. Here's my take: If Olsen doesn't receive award-season recognition, something is rotten in Hollywood.


TIFF 2011

How Davis Guggenheim stumbled upon U2’s breakthrough moment

 

If the 1991 album Achtung Baby was, as front man Bono described it, the sound of “four men chopping down The Joshua Tree,” we might consider Davis Guggenheim’s new film – the opening movie of the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival – as the vision of one filmmaker to update the 1988 rockumentary Rattle and Hum. American director Guggenheim, whose documentary From the Sky Down looks back at the making of U2’s game-changing reinvention Achtung Baby, spoke to The Globe and Mail about creativity, distance and the Irish quartet’s mysterious ways of challenging physics. 

The Toronto International Film Festival kicks off with a decidedly rock and roll opening Thursday, with the world premiere of Oscar winner Davis Guggenheim's From The Sky Down, a portrait of U2 during the making of the group's watershed album, Achtung Baby.

The anticipated film, which chronicles the Irish band's struggle to redefine its sound 20 years ago, is the first documentary ever chosen as TIFF's opening night gala.
It was an "irresistible" choice to start the star-studded annual cinematic celebration, which runs Sept. 8-18, said TIFF co-director Cameron Bailey.
Point one in the film's favour was its director. Guggenheim, who won an Academy Award for An Inconvenient Truth, had previously brought two other titles to Toronto: the U.S. public education exposé Waiting for Superman and the guitar-rock doc It Might Get Loud.
"We like his work a lot and he has a way of getting inside the working relationship of very prominent people," Bailey told CBC News.
"We like the fact that [the film is] about the process of creativity, which is what we're about as a festival. And I'm a U2 fan. I love that album, so it was kind of irresistible."
In recent years, a growing musical undercurrent has also been running through the festival, admitted TIFF CEO Piers Handling, with high-profile documentaries shining a cinematic spotlight on recording artists like Bruce Springsteen, The White Stripes and Joy Division. Other TIFF 2011 films showcasing musicians include Cameron Crowe's Pearl Jam Twenty, Jonathan Demme's Neil Young Journeys, Albert Maysles' The Love We Make and Paul Williams Still Alive by Stephen Kessler.
"Music has actually been a theme for the last number of years for me and some of the festival programmers. It's been fascinating to watch [films about] so many of these great bands we used to, you know, listen to as kids," Handling said.
"It's very exciting because I think so many of the most interesting films being done today are actually documentaries."

High-profile films, international stars

Though not tied to a music film, pop icon Madonna will visit TIFF with her latest directorial effort, the romantic drama W.E.
Her film is one of the premiere titles to be showcased at the festival, joining David Cronenberg's psychoanalysis drama A Dangerous Method, George Clooney's political film The Ides of March, Michael Winterbottom's modern literary adaptation Trishna, silent film drama The Artist, Luc Besson's bio about Burmese activist Aung San Suu Kyi entitled The Lady, fast-paced crime thriller Drive and the baseball tale Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt.
Along with Cronenberg's film, notable Canadian offerings include Sarah Polley's marital dramedy Take This Waltz, Mike Clattenburg's dark, wartime comedy Afghan Luke, Bruce McDonald's mockumentary sequel Hard Core Logo 2, cross-cultural hockey comedy Breakaway, Jean-Marc Vallée's dual love story Café de Flore and Léa Pool's fundraising exposé doc Pink Ribbons, Inc.
Aside from the music docs, the non-fiction lineup also includes the latest from prominent documentarians Wim Wenders (Pina), Werner Herzog (Into the Abyss), Nick Broomfield (Sarah Palin — You Betcha! ), Alex Gibney (The Last Gladiators), Jessica Yu (Last Call at the Oasis), Gary Huswit (Urbanized) and Morgan Spurlock (Comic Con: Episode IV - A Fan's Hope).
Altogether, the 11-day festival will screen 336 movies (short and full-length), across 17 different film programs.
Showcasing new Canadian films, international titles from 65 different countries, emerging directors as well as veteran filmmakers and stars like Francis Ford Coppola (Twixt) and Christopher Plummer (Barrymore) — all are exciting prospects, said Bailey.
"The range of people and the range of films I think we're going to be able to bring to the audience is what excites me," he said.
"We are launching what we feel are the best new films of the year, here."








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