It starts tomorrow, the juggernaut of the 32nd annual Toronto International Film Festival. But it already feels like it has been going on for weeks. And it has. Film critics in this town have been attending advance media screenings for TIFF films for almost a month. In early August, just as I was starting to get the hang of being on vacation, on a lake without phone or email, I ventured off the grid to check my messages and discovered I was missing a week of screenings hosted by a Canadian distributor. Yesterday I talked to a local TV journalist who estimated he’d already watched 65 TIFF titles. His tally could hit 70 before opening night. For this, we the media are entirely to blame. These screenings are for our convenience, so we can cover the festival before it happens. That way journalists can spend more time during the actual festival logging interviews, crowding into press conferences with the likes of Brad Pitt and “reporting” on parties. But the pre-festival festival also accelerates the rat race rhythm, as the various competing outlets of the Toronto media trip over each other trying to be the first out of the gate. It’s like the build-up to Christmas. Each year it starts earlier and earlier. And last weekend there was such a glut of coverage in the newspapers—not just capsule reviews but wrap-like theme pieces—that I could already feel festival fatigue setting in days before the first red carpet had been unrolled. The rush to get there first is a time-honoured ritual of the festival. From its early years, back when it was called the Festival of Festivals, the buzz was built on the race to get into sold-out premieres and see stuff before any one else. (And how Toronto is that?) You could trace the festival’s baptism as front-page news to 1978, when a “near riot” in front of the Elgin theatre erupted among angry mob trying to get into an oversold premiere of In Praise of Older Women, a lame Canadian sex comedy produced by Robert Lantos that had been turned into a cause celebre by the province’s censors. Now, 29 years later that same Robert Lantos is still playing TIFF like a pinball ball machine. His latest literary adaptation, Fugitive Pieces, opens the festival tomorrow night, and David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, which he co-produced, is one of the hottest titles of the opening weekend. TIFF has become a vast marketing and publicity machine, with the media marching in lockstep. That’s been the case since the early years—courting key media was a key to the event’s success, long before it actually became the “world class” festival it so desperately wanted to be. But now the relationships are cemented in corporate stone. With Bell, aka CTV Globemedia as the festival’s mega sponsor, it’s now routine to see TIFF news announced first in the Globe and Mail, then in a press release. Of course, there’s no stopping a juggernaut. Festival veterans, including some of those now running TIFF, will talk nostalgically about how much more fun it was during its wild adolescence, before the parties turned into spectacles of convergence by Hollywood studios, fashion labels and media giants. Every festival used to be more fun before it was successful. Y But you can’t shrink a festival. And all this synthetic buzz doesn’t dim the brilliance what TIFF has to offer. It still boasts the most impressive array of premieres of any such event in the world, outstripping Cannes at least for English-language films. Beneath the Hollywood gloss, the assiduously curated international programming runs deep. Besides, there's no point taking a bah-humbug attitude to TIFF. And it's hard not to get excited about the lineup. TIFF is the bellweather for the season of serious movies, and judging by some of the stuff I've seen so far—notably Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, Ang Lee's Lust: Caution, Paul Haggis's In the Valley of Elah, and Sean Penn's Into the Wild, plus half a dozen strong films from Cannes—this looks like an exceptional year both for TIFF and the movies. Plus, after covering this event for more than 20 years, I've developed a soft spot for the festival's extended family of programmers and publicists. Their warmth and hospitality is what has made TIFF so successful. But the race to cover the festival before it starts does tend to kill the suspense. The festival itself is a movie. It has a narrative—one that each festivalgoer creates, like a traveller amid the tourist mob trying to find the perfect unbeaten path to cinematic paradise. And want that narrative to unfold in real time. It goes live tomorrow. I have only two eyes, but I’ll try to keep up.
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Brian D. Johnson | September 5, 2007 | 12:18:59 | Permalink
brian.johnson@macleans.rogers.com
For this, we the media are entirely to blame. These screenings are for our convenience, so we can cover the festival before it happens. That way journalists can spend more time during the actual festival logging interviews, crowding into press conferences with the likes of Brad Pitt and “reporting” on parties. But the pre-festival festival also accelerates the rat race rhythm, as the various competing outlets of the Toronto media trip over each other trying to be the first out of the gate. It’s like the build-up to Christmas. Each year it starts earlier and earlier. And last weekend there was such a glut of coverage in the newspapers—not just capsule reviews but wrap-like theme pieces—that I could already feel festival fatigue setting in days before the first red carpet had been unrolled.
The rush to get there first is a time-honoured ritual of the festival. From its early years, back when it was called the Festival of Festivals, the buzz was built on the race to get into sold-out premieres and see stuff before any one else. (And how Toronto is that?) You could trace the festival’s baptism as front-page news to 1978, when a “near riot” in front of the Elgin theatre erupted among angry mob trying to get into an oversold premiere of In Praise of Older Women, a lame Canadian sex comedy produced by Robert Lantos that had been turned into a cause celebre by the province’s censors. Now, 29 years later that same Robert Lantos is still playing TIFF like a pinball ball machine. His latest literary adaptation, Fugitive Pieces, opens the festival tomorrow night, and David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, which he co-produced, is one of the hottest titles of the opening weekend.
TIFF has become a vast marketing and publicity machine, with the media marching in lockstep. That’s been the case since the early years—courting key media was a key to the event’s success, long before it actually became the “world class” festival it so desperately wanted to be. But now the relationships are cemented in corporate stone. With Bell, aka CTV Globemedia as the festival’s mega sponsor, it’s now routine to see TIFF news announced first in the Globe and Mail, then in a press release.
Of course, there’s no stopping a juggernaut. Festival veterans, including some of those now running TIFF, will talk nostalgically about how much more fun it was during its wild adolescence, before the parties turned into spectacles of convergence by Hollywood studios, fashion labels and media giants. Every festival used to be more fun before it was successful. Y
But you can’t shrink a festival. And all this synthetic buzz doesn’t dim the brilliance what TIFF has to offer. It still boasts the most impressive array of premieres of any such event in the world, outstripping Cannes at least for English-language films. Beneath the Hollywood gloss, the assiduously curated international programming runs deep.
Besides, there's no point taking a bah-humbug attitude to TIFF. And it's hard not to get excited about the lineup. TIFF is the bellweather for the season of serious movies, and judging by some of the stuff I've seen so far—notably Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, Ang Lee's Lust: Caution, Paul Haggis's In the Valley of Elah, and Sean Penn's Into the Wild, plus half a dozen strong films from Cannes—this looks like an exceptional year both for TIFF and the movies.
Plus, after covering this event for more than 20 years, I've developed a soft spot for the festival's extended family of programmers and publicists. Their warmth and hospitality is what has made TIFF so successful.
But the race to cover the festival before it starts does tend to kill the suspense. The festival itself is a movie. It has a narrative—one that each festivalgoer creates, like a traveller amid the tourist mob trying to find the perfect unbeaten path to cinematic paradise. And want that narrative to unfold in real time.
It goes live tomorrow. I have only two eyes, but I’ll try to keep up.
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