'The Imitation Game' Wins TIFF's People's Choice Award

The 2014 Toronto Film Festival has come to a close and with it their top prize-- the People's Choice Award.  Toronto is somewhat different than other major film festivals (Sundance, Cannes, Venice, Berlin) in that their top prize is chosen by festival filmgoers rather than a designated jury.  They do hand out a few smaller jury prizes, but the biggie is the People's Choice Award.

PEOPLE'S CHOICE AWARD
The Imitation Game- directed by Morten Tyldum

1st runner-up: Learning to Drive- directed by Isable Coixet
2nd runner-up: St. Vincent- directed by Theodore Melfi

The Imitation Game from Headhunters director Tyldum stars Benedict Cumberbatch as mathematician Alan Turing, who cracked the German enigma code during WWII.  Branded a hero until his homosexuality was discovered.  Keira Knightley and Mark Strong co-star in the awards hopeful coming to cinemas this November courtesy of The Weinstein Company.  Last year, eventual Best Picture winner 12 Years a Slave won the same prize in Toronto.  Other eventual Best Picture winners that have won the People's Choice in Toronto include Slumdog Millionaire, American Beauty and The King's Speech, a comparable title to The Imitation Game, or at least its distributor hopes so.  Curiously, The Imitation Game had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival before playing Toronto, the same year Toronto organizers made a big fuss about Telluride premieres being sidelined to the back end of the Toronto slate.  The win for The Imitation Game sort of renders that decision even sillier, perhaps.

PEOPLE'S CHOICE AWARD (Documentary)
Beats of the Anotonov- directed by Hajooj Kuka
1st runner-up: Do I Sound Gay?- directed by David Thorpe
2nd runner-up: Seymour: An Introduction- directed by Ethan Hawke

PEOPLE'S CHOICE AWARD (Midnight Madness)
What We Do in the Shadows- directed by Taika Waititi & Jemaine Clement
1st runner-up: Tusk- directed by Kevin Smith
2nd runner-up: Big Game- directed by Jalmari Helander

BEST CANADIAN FEATURE FILM: Felix & Maria- directed by Maxime Giroux
BEST CANADIAN FIRST FEATURE FILM: Bang Bang Baby- directed by Jeffrey St. Jules

FIPRESCI PRIZE (PRIZES OF THE INTERNATIONAL CRITICS):
Special Presentation Section: Time Out of Mind- directed by Oren Moverman
Discovery Section: May Allah Bless France!- directed by Abd Al Malik

NETPAC AWARD FOR BEST ASIAN FILM: Margarita, With a Straw- directed by Shonali Bose

BEST INTERNATIONAL SHORT FILM: A Single Body- directed by Sotiris Dounoukos
BEST CANADIAN SHORT FILM: The Weatherman and the Shadowboxer- directed by Randall Okita

Butter

At one point positioned as an awards hopeful before it's gala screening at the 2011 Toronto Film Festival appointed it a dud, Butter, a cheap social satire designed to alienate and awe as surmised a big ugly and hypocritical world amidst the most benign of subject matters, was quietly shuttled to an early fall 2012 release free of buzz or attention by The Weinstein Company.  From the czar that is Harvey, it would appear business as usual, and under normal circumstances, I would object to the scuttling and left to rot corpse of a film that on the surface had the easy comfort food of big name talent.  I may have been, however, the most sensitive thing to do since the film itself is a rotting corpse itself.  However it came to be, and in whatever the shape the script (by Jason A. Micallef) might have been at one time-- there must have been something to it to attract the top level actors did-- Butter on the onset, firstly and foremost comes across severely neutered, but nonsensically vulgar, an awful mix of satire at it's most unrefined, queasily developed and visually amateurish.

Micallef and director Jim Field Smith (She's Out of My League) take the bizarrely niche subject of a Midwestern butter carving competition as the staple for their Election-like satire on the nubs of humanity, distilling enough stale red state condensation to make even the most sternest liberal cry uncle.  Jennifer Garner plays Laura Pickler, scheming social climber and near royalty in her small Iowa farm town where her husband Bob (Ty Burrell, Modern Family) is the butter carving king.  Garner enriches her all-American hellion with a thick Sarah Palin-like cadence and an arsenal of haughty glares-- her performance is flat, but the film doesn't give her much to do than tiredly meld together Reese Witherspoon's Tracy Flick and Annette Bening's Carolyn Burnham, hoping that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  When Bob's tenure all butter king is tossed aside from political pressure from above, Laura decides it upon herself to keep the Pickler name alive.  Never mind the little item that Bob has just pissed off a stripper/prostitute (gamely played by Olivia Wilde)-- the Picklers are America routine is what's paramount.  Laura's competition comes in the form of a naturally talented butter sculptor, a grade school aged African American foster child named Destiny (Yara Shahidi)-- allusions to Laura's Palin-esque need for the spotlight and Destiny's Obama-esque idealism the closest Butter gets to thematic subtlety.  Along for the ride are Hugh Jackman as a dimwit used car salesman and Rob Corddry and Alicia Silverstone as Destiny's liberal adoptive parents.

The ugly and fatal flaw of Butter is that it assumes that by nearly name-checking and trying to associate itself tonally with films like Election, American Beauty and Best in Show, then half the job is done with.  Yet ultimately the film is as desperate as Laura Pickler herself in that it's all bite and zero substance and despite the very R-rated, pushed up dialogue for the sole use of shock value, it stalls to a thrashing thud.  Harvey's decision to quietly bury this nasty and spineless little movie turned out to be the most humane one.  F

The Weinstein Company Triumphs!

Big weekend for The Weinstein Company, as the People's Choice Audience Award was bestowed upon David O. Russell's The Silver Linings Playbook at the Toronto Film Festival, while Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master achieves the (unadjusted) highest per-screen average for a live-action film in history.  Both films won their respective award, and it's a major coup for Weinstein, as they head into another awards season, being the undefeated champion the last two years running, for The King's Speech and The Artist, respectively.

The Audience Award at Toronto can be a major win (think American Beauty, Precious, Slumdog Millionaire, The King's Speech) or an also-ran (Water, Bella, Where Do We Go Now?; remember those?)  However, the comic-tragic mental illness romance between Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, with Robert De Niro and Jacki Weaver as support, played to luminous reviews and seemed a big festival hit.  The Master, the ponderously, critically drooled over film didn't win anything at Toronto (even though, an Audience Award seems somewhat antithetical for a film that keeps itself intentionally distant-- more on that later), after it's sweep at Venice, it became the king of the box office (nabbing $148,000 per screen on 5 screens this past weekend-- taking over this record from this summer's Moonrise Kingdom.)  Let the games begin.

Other winners at Toronto:

PEOPLE'S CHOICE AWARD: The Silver Linings Playbook
CANADIAN FEATURE: Lawrence Anyways- Xavier Dolan
CANADIAN DIRECTORIAL DEBUT: Antiviral- Brandon Croenberg; Blackbird- Jason Buxton
AUDIENCE AWARD MIDNIGHT MADNESS: Seven Psychopaths- Martin McDonaugh

The Weinstein Company would like to remind you that Meryl Streep hasn't won an Oscar in 29 Years!

Tacky? Perhaps, but no less than Melissa Leo's odd self-campaigning last year.  Plus, it's kind of nice to see some dirty play in this years more maudlin race.  The real news might be the borderline offense pulled, as Academy rules specify that mentioning prior performances or films in their campaigns are a no-no!

Sundance Film Festival 2010

I typically don't follow film acquisitions from festivals, but since last fall, only one major film got distribution (A Single Man by The Weinstein Company) from screening at film festivals, I think it's interesting how it seems to be the face of American independent filmmaking has changed. I post this on the very day that Miramax Films (the subsidiary of Disney), once prominently and infamously owned by the Weinsteins, officially closes up shop. It would be a mistake to say that without Miramax the last twenty-five years or so would have been a lot bleaker for independent film in the United States, as well as prominence in foreign films.

They exloded on the scene with sex, lies and videotape in 1989 as the brashed, hippest studio around. Of course this studio was owned by the Walt Disney Company which made its controversies even more warped. But the debut of Steven Soderbergh's raw and risky teeny-tiny film somehow catipulted in the zeitgeist of the pop culture and announced the bold new world of American independent film. Thanks to shrewd marketing the Weinsteins, the film was a relative success, and scored Soderbergh an Oscar nomination for original screenplay-- but it was the fact that the film had made an impact on the film industry, for bustling filmmakers and for the Weinsteins that makes the film a starting point of the buyers market that has been around various film festivals like Sundance, Cannes, Venice and Toronto for the past two decades.

Things have changed a lot since then. What Miramax started, was what every major studio did over the next two decades...form a small version of their bigger studios. 20th Century Fox has Fox Searchlight; Universal Pictures has Focus Features; Paramount Pictures has Paramount Vantage; Warner Bros. has Warner Independent Pictures; Sony Pictures has Sony Pictures Classics. The problem is that with the exception of Fox Searchlight, Sony Classics and Focus, most of others aren't very good at maintaining them the way Miramax was. Add to that an economy that sucks, and suddenly everyone's becoming more conservative about spending money on films that aren't guarnateed a big profit. This isn't to say all is gloom, but it's not as joyous and exhuberant as years before.

Last year for example, Lion Gate Films purchased Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire which is now on it's way to becoming an Oscar nominee (the first best picture nominee ever that won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, an aside), but it wasn't the selling frenzy as it might have been year ago, when for instance Little Miss Sunshine was sold to Fox Searchlight after an intense bidding war for over $10 million. Or when Focus Features paid even more for Hamlet 2. Or when Miramax back in 1999 went ape shit and spent $10 million on Happy, Texas, a movie that didn't come close to earning that green back.

This year the offerings at Sundance look very interesting, at least on paper, and it seems the buyers are there too, but not as prolifically as years past. So far, Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Alright is the biggest sale-- almost $5 million to Focus Features. The film stars Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as a lesbian couple with children, and when their children start to wonder who their father is, Mark Ruffalo shows up. Reviews so far have been very positive and the A-list actors insure that Focus will likely earn it's coin back. Other sales are the Iraq-stuck in a coffin film Buried, with Ryan Reynolds, which sold to Lions Gate for $3 million, the Hassidic Jew film Hesher with Joseph Gordon Levitt and Natalie Portman to Newmarket for $1 million, as well as the Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvienent Truth; It Might Get Loud) education documentary Waiting for Superman to Paramount Vantage.