Sacha Baron Cohen arrives in the guise of Borat for the TIFF screening of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. (Evan Agostini/Getty Images)
Best Soundtrack
The decade-jumping soundtrack (Weird War, Sun Ra, Leonard Cohen) to Monkey Warfare, put together by Toronto-based filmmaker Reg Harkema, is one of the movie’s best characters, the perfect anarchic complement to a great wired comedy about the unfortunate intersection of hipsters and radicals. Also cool: Harkema himself was seen passing out vinyl versions of the soundtrack downtown.
Best Festival Fandemonium
The elbowing, jostling and screeching that met Brad Pitt’s heart-racing red carpet appearance was nothing next to the frenzy that greeted Bollywood superstars Shah Rukh Khan and Amitabh Bachchan. In Toronto to promote the film Never Say Goodbye, the two Hindi cinema heroes were mobbed by multicultural crowds of admirers at the film’s screening and at a public panel discussion. When an overwhelmed volunteer tried to shut down the illicit snapping of photos at the panel discussion, one distraught young man in the balcony called out, “Wait a minute, I haven’t gotten a good picture yet!”
Best Anti-tearjerker Tearjerker
Heartstrings aren’t usually tugged in Danish cinema; in the hands of Lars von Trier et. al., they’re snipped. But After the Wedding, one of the festival’s best offerings, is an emotionally busy Danish film by director Susanne Bier where two men — a fat-cat businessman and an ascetic dropout — come together in Copenhagen for a surprising, life-changing reason. A study in the nature of charity that feels like an old-fashioned weepie.
Director Sarah Polley arrives at the TIFF gala for her film Away From Her. (Jim Ross/Getty Images)
Best Escape from Destiny
She could have been a tabloid paragraph: former child star goes bad or goes nowhere. Instead, the unfairly talented Sarah Polley walked the red carpet (wearing a great black dress) as a formidable writer-director presenting her astonishing feature length debut, Away From Her. In a year devoid of Cronenbergs and Egoyans, Polley’s presence assured us that the next generation of Canadian filmmakers is ready to step up.
Best Brave Face in Light of Technical Difficulties
Larry Charles arrived in Toronto looking like a world-beater. The director’s outrageous comedy, Borat: Cultural Leanings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, was an early contender to become TIFF 2006’s most-hyped film — but suffered major buzzkill when projection problems interrupted and ultimately prevented its North American premiere. Charles turned up again the following evening to interview his friend and colleague Michael Moore for a Mavericks session ... but then stood by, helpless again, as audio distortion marred clips of Moore’s The Great ’04 Slacker Uprising. No one could have blamed Charles for feeling beaten down, but he persevered through the finish regardless. Cheek kisses for you, Larry.
Best Scene Filmed More Than 6,000 Metres Above Sea Level
We are reluctant to spill too much about the ending of Blindsight, Lucy Walker’s remarkable documentary about the blind mountain climbers of Tibet, but will not soon forget its footage of overjoyed teenagers treating a mountainside ice field like it was the world’s ultimate amusement park. You read that right: overjoyed teenagers, captured on film. Once again, fact proves stranger than fiction.
Best Use of Prosthetics
While Christina Ricci’s pig snout in Penelope was central to the modern fable about a young blue-blood damned by a family curse, it was Penelope Cruz’s fake ass that was the festival’s most-discussed physical enhancement. Worried that Cruz’s figure was too slender for her star turn as a weary, working-class mother in Volver, director Pedro Almodóvar famously told the costume department to add some padding to the beauty’s behind. Upon hearing Almodóvar’s distinctive cackle in an adjoining room during a discussion with journalists, Cruz rolled her eyes and joked, “That’s Pedro talking about my big, fat ass. Again.”
Sean Penn smokes a cigarette during a news conference for the film All the King's Men. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press)
Best Anti-Smoking Public Service Announcement
In a year of films about the fictional assassination of U.S. President George W. Bush, a sexually charged love affair set against the Tiananmen Square massacre and an all-inclusive sex club in post 9/11 New York, who knew the festival’s biggest controversy would be actor Sean Penn’s illicit … smoking? When photos of the All the King’s Men star puffing on a cigarette during a press conference at the Sutton Place Hotel were published around the world, Ontario Health Promotion Minister Jim Watson sternly reminded festival organizers that the province’s ban on smoking indoors applies to celebrities, too. Er, except that Penn got off with a warning, and the Sutton Place got more than $600 in fines.
Best Rant Overheard in a Crowded Theatre
This is paraphrased (because taking notes would have been too obvious), but it went something like this: “Yadda yadda yadda, I came early and got the exact seat that I wanted. Then some idiot in a gold lamé dress — it was a nightmare, I mean really — showed up and had the nerve to ask me to move over. People who attend film festival screenings know that you do not ask people to move. It’s just not done.”
CBC
does not endorse and is not responsible
for the content of external sites
- links will open in new window.
