Brad Pitt.
Bruce Kirkland's picks
The Quote: With his quaint English, Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar described the big, wild hair he gave Penelope Cruz in Volver as "disabled" when he meant dishevelled and her butt as "too stylized" when he meant "too slender." Cruz's butt was remedied with padding inspired by Dustin Hoffman's ass enhancement in Tootsie.
Meltdown Moment: Life is good when Penelope Cruz, remembering a great conversation in Cannes, greets you with a smile, a hug and kisses on both cheeks.
Pretentious Git: Cillian Murphy (The Wind That Shakes The Barley), gets the boob prize for his idiotic assumptions about the Toronto media.
Big Fraidy Cat: You would never know Brad Pitt was a capable adult. Handlers tried to limit press questions at the Babel press conference, as if he couldn't handle it if someone asked about Angelina (no one did).
Coolest Superstar: Brad Pitt may need press protection but he was a prince with fans, stunning security by mingling to the max and signing autographs.
Shock 'N' Awe Prize: Will Ferrell (Stranger than Fiction) not only impressed us with his skilled performance but he handled Toronto with both serious and silly aplomb.
Filmfest Revelations: Red Road, Snow Cake, After The Wedding, The White Planet, The Page Turner, Radiant City, End Of The Line, shorts filmmaker Jamie Travis, Cline's work with Chantal Kreviazuk, child actress Samantha Weinstein (again), the civilized savvy of Quebec filmmaker Philippe Falardeau, and the smart-sexy appeal of Danish star Mads Mikkelsen, the villain in the new James Bond flick and the fest guest whom my femme friends are calling "the new Viggo!"
Filmfest Frustrations: The disconnect of the press conferences and the media managing by American publicists who think this is the New York film festival.
Jim Slotek's picks
Most Transparently Cynical Fest Booking: Death Of A President (or D.O.A.P. as the fest coyly kept referring to it). Just a lame movie, and programmer Noah Cowan must have known it. But then the cat-killing movie was no masterpiece either. What he saw instead was instant controversy, just add pundits and stir.
Best Disappearing Act: Director Gabriel Range (D.O.A.P.), who even turned down the Today show.
Best Next Wife For Dean McDermott: (Now that Tori has been virtually excluded from Daddy's will). It's Josie Ho, starlet of Hong Kong director Johnnie To's Exiled. Josie's a sometime Toronto girl who just happens to be the daughter of one of the world's richest men, Stanley Ho.
Best Acting Job: We'll try to say this without being spoilers. No, that wasn't makeup in that key scene in For Your Consideration when one of the characters shows up with botched plastic surgery. The actor in question merely squinched her face and pulled her lips just so.
Worst Impression Of A Happy Couple: Though they said lovely things about each other, young marrieds Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony sat with El Cantante director Leon Ichaso between them and posed for no pictures together.
Best Entrance: Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen), who showed up to the gala Ryerson screening of Borat accompanied by a pony in a cart pulled by babushka'ed women.
Favourite Quote: "They don't have a word for them in Scotland -- 'Rich bastards' I suppose." -- Billy Connolly, who spends his winters in Malta and summers home in Scotland, when I told him such people are called Snowbirds here.
Favourite Moment: When the projector broke at the Borat movie and Michael Moore ran up to the booth to try and fix it. Hundreds of people trained their cellphone cameras on the glass, taking pictures mainly of his backside as he dove into the machinery.
Jane Stevenson's picks
Biggest Disappointment: When legendary actor Peter O'Toole cancelled his appearance at TIFF for the film Venus after coming down with gastric flu.
Best Celeb Sighting: Viggo Mortensen, who is starring in a Spanish film, walking down the hallway of the Intercontinental in a beautiful suit speaking another foreign language -- Danish? -- to his companions. This guy acts, paints, writes poetry, is best friends with his teenage son, is multi-lingual AND looks like that? Sigh.
Biggest Girl Crush (If Only): French actress Juliette Binoche, with her soulful brown eyes, flawless skin and blond hair (which she was sporting for a current role) won me over. As people continually walked through our interview room during a one-on-one chat, she started to throw up her hands and scream: "How are ya? Come on in!"
Worst Party: I really wanted to like the Phoenix party for Shortbus with some of the nicest people in attendance. But when Sook-Yin Lee got up on stage alone and started singing and playing a rather morose song on her electric guitar in a language other than English, it suddenly turned into Jim Jones-Purple Koolaid time.
Best/Unused Quotes: Both from comedian-turned-filmmaker Bobcat Goldthwait who was in town promoting his funny and outrageous film, Sleeping Dogs Lie:
"Immediately, people think, when they hear the idea, 'A woman blows a dog,' that we're all going to be pointing at her laughing going, 'You blew a dog!' " -- Goldthwait on what people mistakenly think the tone of his film is going to be. (Used)
"It's kind of weird that we stumbled on that because I'm the guy from Police Academy and I'm sure if you didn't you'd be talking about Kubler Ross." (Dr. Elizabeth Kubler Ross, author of Death And Dying). -- Goldthwait going off on a strange tangent during our interview. (Not Used)
Liz Braun's picks
Fave Regular Person Quote: "It's really all about the size of the bollocks."-- Ciara Parkes, head honcho of England's Public Eye Communication, on why her business card reads "Chairman" and not "Chairwoman."
Fave Celeb Quote: "Juliet Stevenson can do anything. Anything! Isn't she amazing as Diana Vreeland? I suppose if we hadn't got Toby she could have played Truman Capote, too." -- Director Doug McGrath jokes about the wonders of working with Juliet Stevenson (Truly, Madly Deeply) in Infamous, which stars Toby Jones as Truman Capote.
Best Moment: Meeting Patrick Chamusso, the real-life ANC hero whose experiences fighting apartheid are the basis for the film Catch A Fire. Chamusso is played by Derek Luke in the movie, which was directed by Phillip Noyce; rather nice to see those chaps again, too.
Best Fan Moment: Sitting at a table with Julie Christie. Wait until you see her performance in Sarah Polley's movie Away From Her.
Biggest Pain In Backside: The press conferences during the festival seemed to have been arranged to suit television, which is just peachy, but that made them fairly useless for everyone else. It also turned the moderators into TV talking heads, which turned reporters into homicidal maniacs. Well, since you asked.
Only Connect: The quiet guy moving quickly through the cafe while speaking Spanish to Marc Anthony turns out to be actor Viggo Mortensen; you know, it's one thing to be told that Mortensen speaks several languages and it's quite another to witness it for yourself.
This story was posted on Sat, September 16, 2006
