The Toronto International Film Festival has issued another wave of announcements, releasing the lineups for the Midnight Madness, Real to Reel and Wavelengths programs.
It’s exciting stuff sure, the Galas and the Special Presentations draw all the red-carpet paparazzi, but long-time TIFF attendees know that Midnight Madness is where the fun happens, year after year.
Peter Jackson’s earlier, funny films? MM had ’em.
Tony Jaa? Borat? The Saw and Underworld series? That French splatter renaissance that began with High Tension and paid off with Martyrs? All midnight titles. You want to see the literal cutting edge of cinema, this is where you go.
Midnight Madness 2009 – curated once again by the enthusiastic Colin Geddes – kicks off with Jennifer’s Body, a much-buzzed horror entry which casts Transformers sexbot Megan Fox as a high-school girl possessed by a demon, or something Amanda Seyfried of Mamma Mia is her best friend, who is also the only one who can stop her. The screenplay is by Juno’s Oscar-winning Diablo Cody the director is Karyn Kusama, whose last outing was the regrettable Aeon Flux movie. (We’re hoping for something a little less laughable this time around.)
Also on Geddes’s plate for 2009: Sequels to the Spanish virus chiller [Rec] and the Thai-fu knockout Ong-Bak Survival Of The Dead, George A. Romero’s latest attempt to extend his deteriorating zombie franchise Bitch Slap, a “campy action comedy” about three women racing to discover a hidden treasure, and A Town Called Panic, a French-language curio which expands a cult television show about the adventures of children’s toys to feature length.
We’ll also get the world premiere of Michael and Peter Spierig’s Daybreakers, starring Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe as two of the last humans in a world overrun by vampires if it’s anywhere as enthusiastic and splatteriffic as their last Midnight Madness entry, Undead, I’ll be first in line. Also scheduled are Solomon Kane, which casts James Purefoy as another of Conan creator Robert E. Howard’s burly heroes The Loved Ones, an Australian thriller described as a “wild mash-up of Pretty In Pink and Misery”, and Symbol, the new film from unquantifiable Dainipponjin director Hitoshi Matsumoto.
Two of the most interesting documentaries at TIFF are screening in other programs: Emmett Malloy’s tour doc The White Stripes Under Great Northern Lights, which tracks the rock duo’s jaunt through rural Canada, will play in the Vanguard series, while Jeff Stilson’s Good Hair – a Sundance hit that follows producer-star Chris Rock as he investigates African-American hair culture – will bow as a Special Presentation.
Over in the Real to Reel program, we can look forward to Cleanflix, a study of the companies that scrub the sex, violence and language out of Hollywood productions for Mormon audiences in Utah How To Fold A Flag, a look at the lives of Iraq War veterans from Gunner Palace directors Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein Snowblind, which follows a sightless 23-year-old woman on her quest to complete the Iditarod, and L’Enfer De Henri-Georges Clouzot, which recounts the production and abandonment of the title effort through recovered footage and contemporary interviews.
This year’s avant-garde Wavelengths series features contributions from a number of reliable names, including new work from old masters Jean-Luc Godard and Michael Snow and rising international star Lisandro Alonso. But I’m most looking forward to Toronto filmmaker Sebastjan Henrickson’s Flash Camera Movie, assembled from still photographs shot with disposable cameras over the course of a year.
In other news, TIFF has announced the festival is launching two new Cadillac People’s Choice Awards this year, for Best Documentary and Best Midnight Madness film. Which means those films are now out of the running for the original People’s Choice Award, in the same way that animated films were effectively eliminated from consideration for a Best Picture Oscar when the Academy created its Animated Feature prize … but it’s a nice gesture.
