Word: hollywoodisms
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...Toronto Film Festival ends its 34th annual session tonight, but most of the international press corps has gone home, their heads crammed with images and performances. Toronto, famous for years now as the kickoff to Oscar season, is the place Hollywood visits in search of Academy Award contenders. There were a few - though in a straitened economic environment, with fewer zillionaires eager to bankroll indie movies, some excellent films (Life During Wartime, The Joneses) had a tough time finding buyers. Crystal-balling the Oscars is fun, but it can't compare with seeing and savoring good films that might...
...Which ones to save? Imprisoning the audience with the soldiers may be a gimmick, but it's an inspired one: the viewer wants both to stay inside - shielding them from harm, or from doing harm - and to get the hell out. The situation may be familiar from dozens of Hollywood foxhole dramas, but the treatment is original: What other movie has, as its exalting emotional climax, the spectacle of one man helping another to pee into a tin can? Working as a horrors-of-war screed and a depiction of men under impossible stress, Lebanon is a salutary, unrelentingly claustrophobic...
...Helen (Ally Sheedy) is a self-sufficient Hollywood screenwriter. Her soft-touch sister Joy (Shirley Henderson) keeps getting visits from dead boyfriends (including ex-Pee-wee Herman Paul Reubens). And Trish (Alison Janney), whose convicted pedophile husband (Ciaran Hinds) is about to be released from jail, has found a new beau, the solid, stolid Harvey (Michael Lerner), whose touch makes her "feel wet, all over." That doesn't please Trish's son Billy (Dylan Riley Snyder), who's also troubled to learn that his father is still alive. "I just wanted you to grow up free and happy," Mom explains...
...actors breathe, allows viewers to detect the toxic undertaste in their own good time. In its amiable, ambling way, The Joneses is a zeitgeist film: it says as much as a Michael Moore screed about the American way of debt. It's also a feature-long joke about Hollywood's mania for product placement...
...adolescent protests like “You don’t even know me” from time to time, but their main role is on their mother’s coattails. The plot itself is supposed to be at least loosely based on the childhood of perennially bronzed Hollywood has-been George Hamilton, but this could easily escape the average viewer’s notice. These blemishes are also negligible, as the movie truly belongs to Zellweger and to her odyssey. Like most American sojourns, the characters end up in Los Angeles, west of where they started. Their experience...