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...beauty of TIFF, with an unseeable total slate of 261 features in 10 whirlwind days, is that each moviegoer creates his own festival. And the hottest Toronto ticket, the buzz bomb of the Great White North, is another Brit-American mockumentary that is just as politically pointed as Death of a President but with a wildly raucous, satiric tone. It is Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, whose guide is a purported TV host and "sixth most famous man in Kazakhstan" of the former Soviet Union. Borat is the nom de guerrilla-humor...
...TIFF is so routinely described as the launching pad for awards season that it's only apt that For Your Consideration is premiering here. It relates the making of a small, indie film - Home for Purim, about a Southern Jewish family - that some showbiz blogger unaccountably tips as an Oscar contender. In a trice, the non-starry cast (impersonated by Catherine O'Hara, Harry Shearer, Parker Posey and Christopher Moynihan) gets dreaming of statuettes - an addiction that infects the film's director, sitcom veteran Jay Berman (Guest, funny) and the studio boss (Ricky Gervais) who now thinks the film could...
...scarved Kazakh peasants. When the film broke down at the start of its run, Baron Cohen, director Larry Charles and visiting fireman Michael Moore passed the time by answering questions. The screening was eventually postponed until the following night, leading to some grumbles from the normally ultra-placid TIFF audience - although the headline on Defamer.com, "Toronto Film Festival Projectionist Slain By Angry Borat Fans," was a slight exaggeration...
...whodunit? We'll get to that shortly. But first, the audience. TIFF audiences are among the most generous and enthusiastic in the world, but they gave Death of a President only lukewarm applause over the closing credits. They'd been so pumped up, I suspect, that the film itself almost had to be a letdown. Engrossing but not enthralling, Death of a President let the air out of its own balloon. It was hard not to be impressed by the expertise of the intercutting (archive footage, staged demonstrations and fictional interviews), by the seamlessness of the photo-realism and photoshopping...
...hope we portrayed the horror of assassination," Range said at the TIFF screening. "There have been plenty of fictional films about assassination, and I don't think anyone would get the idea of assassinating Bush from this film." Range also declared that his movie meant to use the death of this President essentially as a device to investigate what might change in domestic and international affairs if Bush were gone...