Now the festival officially has a new home, with screening rooms and exhibition space and offices and a Toronto International Film Festival gift shop right there on ground level, tempting passers-by to stop in for orange-and-white memorabilia of all sorts.
The TIFF Bell Lightbox had its grand opening on Sunday with an afternoon-long block party featuring a variety of special guests (including Ivan and Jason Reitman), Canadian politicos and festival officials. Canadian musical artists including K’naan, the Sadies and Radio Radio performed on a stage set up to face the intersection of King and John Streets – and finally, four days into the festival, screenings can finally be held in what is supposed to be one of the festival’s prestige screening rooms.
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A couple of Sunday’s galas were films thought to be squarely in the Oscar mix – and its safe to say as the dust settles, Danny Boyle’s “127 Hours” is still squarely in the mix, while the jury’s still out on Clint Eastwood’s “Hereafter.”
Partly, that’s because the Boyle film had already screened in Telluride, where it won mostly raves and emerged as a strong Best Picture contender and a near-certain Best Actor nomination for James Franco.
The Eastwood film, on the other hand, was kept under wraps until a Saturday press screening and its Sunday gala – and reviews were embargoed until midnight, which means that most critics have yet to chime in on the newest work from a prolific director who’s always considered an Oscar candidate, even if his last three movies (“Gran Torino,” "Changeling" and “Invictus”) haven’t been embraced by the Academy.
The first reviews contained several references to French director Claude Lelouch in the way it intertwines stories of people facing issues of, as Kirk Honeycutt wrote, “fate and destiny.”
Honeycutt largely praised the movie, though he felt its ending was too facile. Leonard Klady, on the other hand, called the film “Eastwood does Lelouch,” and says the result is “a pretty good Lelouch and a pretty good Eastwood … but not great stuff.”
And some of the tweets after yesterday’s press screening were downright brutal: “It might be the worst thing Eastwood has ever directed,” wrote Cinematical’s Erik Davis, who didn’t see the film but was passing along the words of “our writer.”
On the other hand, one Roger Ebert is worth a host of young bloggers – and Ebert’s comments on the film, which were posted just after midnight, began with the confession, “I was surprised how enthralling I found it,” and concluded with the line, "’Hereafter’ is unlike any film Clint Eastwood has ever made, but you'd think he'd been preparing it for years.”
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One of the chief goals of anyone taking a film to Toronto is to come out of the festival with buzz, whether the aim is to translate that buzz into a distribution deal, public attention or awards momentum.
