Alas, we have arrived at the end of 2013’s Toronto International Film Festival, and with the last days comes a healthy helping of awards recognition.
We’re talking major Oscar contenders,
the prime pick being Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave, which nabbed the Blackberry People’s Choice Award (a.k.a. the prime signifier of an Oscar Best Picture winner). Runners up included Stephen Frears’s Philomena and Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners. All three films are fairly tough, heavy-handed material, so it’s impressive they managed to nab the audience’s eye.
In other words, if you want not only a few safe bets but also quality theater-going, these three are your go-tos.
To recap some other impressive fare from the final few days of the festival, we’re looking at a slew of independent offerings. Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin features Scarlett Johansson as an alien who finds herself in Scotland, preying on the commoners around her.
It’s essentially a look at female sexuality via the eyes of an alien view—literally—and Johansson plays the foreign seduction well.
It’s one of those love it or hate it deals.
Joel Edgerton, arguably the best part of this year’s The Great Gatsby, brings Felony to TIFF, a film he both wrote and stars in. It follows ring of detectives who will do whatever it takes to protect each other if it just so happens one of their own is ever to commit a crime. The Australian flick is gritty, with more than a dash of heightened drama and plenty of brooding. One of the more surprisingly great films to come out of TIFF, it may also fall way under the radar, like 2011’s Rampart, another great cop drama with heavy grit. But Edgerton is sharp, in his script and his acting.
(Actually, if you haven’t seen Animal Kingdom yet, you’re an idiot.)
A quick list of under-the-radar flicks to keep an eye out for include The Past, Blue Is the Warmest Colour, Bastards, and Sunshine on Leith, three French films and one hailing from the UK. Some of TIFF’s best offerings this year were freshly delivered imports. (You don’t have to be a film snob to like subtitles.)
And for my on-the-radar picks, we’ve got Jason Reitman’s Labor Day, starring Kate Winslet as a depressed, agoraphobic mother of one who ventures out one day for some after school shopping, only to bring home an escaped con (a heaving, but charming Josh Brolin) at proverbial gunpoint. And believe it or not, pretty soon, love and domesticity begin to blossom.
Never has baking a pie been so sexual.
Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman’s The Railway Man—a story based on a WWII “Death Railway” survivor story—didn’t get the critic love it clearly expected to. With a winning, starring pair in Firth and Kidman, and a tear-jerking story adaptation, you’d expect as much (especially with a heavy emphasis on human torture, which seemed to be de rigueur for TIFF this year), but the story falls flat and lacks the suspense and emotional grip it so needs to keep the audience hanging.
The last showing of the week was Hayao Miyazaki’s final film, The Wind Rises, which follows the true story of Jiro Horikoshi, the designer behind World War II Japanese fighter planes. This picture is a little less fantastical and dreamy than the director’s usual fare, most popularly, My Neigbour Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, etc. It takes on a more political bout, without ever achieving the bite it needs to truly go there. But it also veers away from the usual fantasy, leaving it lying a little more than aimless, and making for a disappointing final feature for the director.
Though it does still make for an easy on the eyes watch, the animation as beautiful as ever and signature Miyazaki.
