Toronto Diary

To catch up, I've been running around Toronto to too many screenings, interviews and parties:
1. Friday, on Air Canada to Toronto, I sat with two execs from Echo Lake Entertainment, industry veteran Mike Marcus (CAA and MGM), who runs the company's management side, and president Douglas Mankoff (Water, Tsotsi), who helped to finance and produce Canadian actress Sarah Polley's debut as a director, Away from Her, a romance about seniors starring Julie Christie, which is for sale here. UPDATE: The movie, while subdued, has been well-received and should sell to a small distrib like Roadside Attractions.

2. At Michael Moore's Sicko preview Friday night, Borat director Larry Charles, who had brought Moore up on stage the night before when Borat broke down (a rare projector malfunction), engaged Moore in a hugely entertaining conversation about his life in film—until the projection of his DVD clips from a docu about his roadshow in support of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry had to be pulled off the screen. The two men vamped —again—until they finally screened the clips from Moore's upcoming docu on healthcare, Sicko, which the crowd ate up. (Moore's Endeavor agent Ari Emanuel and his distributor Harvey Weinstein were in the audience.)

Moore, who has great comic timing and knows this audience well, explained how he went through a similar discovery process on Bowling for Columbine. That movie turned out not to be so much about gun control laws but about America's penchant for violence. As for the United States' dysfunctional health care system, on some profound level Americans don't seem to share the view widely held by even the most conservative people around the globe: that universal health care is worth paying taxes for. Why? is the question Moore's docu addresses. Why don't we want our poorer neighbor to have health care? Why don't Americans recognize that we're all in this together? Moore came to a profound realization, he said, when he watched aghast at how the Brits play their version of football. At the crucial moment, the guy who has the ball politely passes it to someone else to make the score. "The rest of the world plays football believing in fairness," he said. "In our football, we say, 'I've got the ball and it's going down with me!' Why are we wired that way? Americans are filled with anger and revenge and punishing people who are poor. Until that changes, all the other issues won't change, until we change who we are." I can't wait to see the final result. (Word is, Moore was so angry with what Charles called their "bad techno-karma" that he treated the Toronto staff rudely and refused to speak to fest director Noah Cowan.)

3. At Sony Pictures' Classics' post-Volver gala party at the Chanel store on Bloor, I hung out with director Jeremy Podeswa (Five Senses, HBO's Six Feet Under, Carnivale), who has just completed production on a new movie (Fugitive Pieces, produced by Robert Lantos, which will likely go to Berlin and be released by ThinkFilm), Lantos, Seattle fest director Carl Spence, Indiewire's indefatigable Eugene Hernandez and SPC's Dylan Leiner. After the posse arrived from their post-gala dinner, SPC's Michael Barker ushered Lantos and me into a small, hot room the size of a postage stamp. Crash writer-director Paul Haggis (a most-lauded Canadian) chatted up Penelope Cruz. Richard Roeper was huddled in a far corner. Photographer Henny Garfunkle and I talked to Pedro Almodovar, whose back was aching. Then I bolted. Too darn hot.

4. Saturday morning I saw Stranger Than Fiction, a comedy directed with detailed humane precision by Marc Forster from a smart carefully wrought screenplay by playwright Zach Helm. Will Ferrell is perfectly cast as the everyman schlump who suddenly hears his life being narrated by the voice of Emma Thompson in his head. He eventually figures out that she is a well-known author writing a book about him in which she intends to kill him. The audience sits on the edge of their seats wondering how this Kaufmanesque adventure will end. Interestingly, Tarsem's The Fall and M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water deal with similar writerly self-conscious themes, with far less of a sure hand. Other precedents would be Groundhog Day or The Truman Show. I want to see it again. Maggie Gyllenhaal, Queen Latifah and Dustin Hoffman are all terrific.

UPDATE: The press conference was a crazy comedy fest with Thompson and Hoffman competing for the most laughs. While it may have been hugely entertaining, it was doubtful any of the press corps got any juicy quotes out of it.