This past summer, both Pages Books and the Cumberland Theater (which is actually still open, but not for long) announced their pending closures, now it seems the Carlton Cinema is joining the club. That leaves downtown Toronto - Canada’s alleged culture center - with a gaping hole in its cinema exhibition (in addition to its gaping holes in fun bars, nice parks, cheap rent, bookstores, real grocery stores, and affordable and efficient transit). The Carlton was really the only place you could see smaller scale independent and foreign films that the Varsity or Cumberland wouldn’t program, or if you missed a film’s three week run at one of those cinemas, you could see it on one of the Carlton’s screens basically until it comes out on DVD. It’s a great shame that effective December 6th, it will be converted into office space after a 28 year run.
On my first ever big gay date, I saw “Far From Heaven” there just after I’d moved to the city. Since, I could go on for half page with what I’ve seen… “Lost in Translation,” “Vera Drake,” “Before Sunset”, “4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days”... Before this whole film journalism thing started working out, it was basically my primary source for non-Hollywood cinema outside of TIFF or Hot Docs. While there’s still the Varsity (which usually has 2 or 3 usually rather major indies or foreign films running), and the pending hope of whatever the year-round programming TIFF’s Bell Lightbox provides… I fear this is just one more tiny nail in the nearly shut coffin of hope I have for Toronto as a city.
Not that there’s much to predict or that it the Toronto Film Festival’s awards offer the same prestige as say, Cannes or Sundance, it’s audience prizes can often be a huge coup for a film and launch it into awards season (“Whale Rider,” “Hotel Rwanda,” “Tsotsi,” and though they need it a bit less, “American Beauty” and “Slumdog Millionaire”). Honestly, over the years the winners almost seem suspiciously perfect in how they find their way into awards season and give Toronto its reputation as awards season launch pad (and I just don’t get how a lone winner is even determined from 300 films voted on with a 1 through 5 ranking scale especially since some of those films don’t get their final screening until after the award has been announced).
But anyway, my conspiracy theory aside, the award matters. And I’ll be at the ceremony at 12:30 or so this afternoon and the winners should up at indieWIRE soon thereafter. Because I’m a nerd, here’s my predictions:
Cadillac People’s Choice Award: Up In The Air, directed by Jason Reitman
(alternate: City of Life and Death, directed by Lu Chuan; or maybe even Precious, though I can’t recall a Sundance title ever winning here)
Cadillac People’s Choice Award For Best Documentary: The Topp Twins, directed by Leanne Pooley
(alternate: The Art of the Steal, directed by Don Argott)
Cadillac People’s Choice Award For Midnight Madness: Daybreakers, directed by Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig
(alternate: Solomon Kane, directed by Michael J. Bassett)
City of Toronto-CityTV Award For Best Canadian Feature Film: The Trotsky, directed by Jacob Tierney
(alternate: Suck, directed by Rob Stefaniuk)
CityTV Award For Best Canadian First Feature Film: I Killed My Mother, directed by Xavier Dolan
(alternate: Year of the Carnivore, directed by Sook-Yin Lee)
FIPRESCl Prize For Discovery Award: The Unloved, directed by Samantha Morton
(alternate: Applause, directed Martin Pieter Zandvliet)
FIPRESCl Prize For Special Presentations Award: City of Life and Death, directed by Lu Chuan
(alternate: A Serious Man, directed Joel and Ethan Coen)
I figured I’d might as well put up a couple of these. As a supplement to this interview with “A Single Man” director Tom Ford, here’s some audio clips. After the jump.
I decided I needed to supplment this article on indieWIRE - which is basically ten quotes from my interview Werner Herzog - with some audio as Herzog’s delivery makes his glorious ramblings so much more. After the jump.
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