Word: torontos
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...peripatetic week. On Tuesday I saw my last two features at the Venice Film Festival. On Wednesday I flew back to New York, and that evening I caught a screening of Julie Taymor's Beatles movie, Across the Universe. Yesterday I got to Toronto, where my first movie was the Jodie Foster revenge drama The Brave One. Today, wearing my two Toronto press badges along with the one I brought from Venice (just to show off) and my TIME ID, I'm sporting more bling than P. Diddy...
...Venice, which was launched by Mussolini 75 years ago, begins a week before TIFF. (It ends tomorrow, with the announcement of its Golden Lion prizes.) The scheduling allows festival director Marco Mueller to present the world premieres of many films that will be hot items in Toronto. That primacy makes Venice an important stop on the prestige-movie express for A-list talent wooing international critical opinion - in Europe and Asia. If the festival doesn't register on this continent, it's only because Americans don't much care about, or even notice, what happens first somewhere else...
...Among the hot-ticket films that played Venice before Toronto: Ang Lee's steamy Lust, Caution, the Iraq war dramas Redacted and In the Valley of Elah, Woody Allen's Cassandra's Dream, the Bob Dylan fantasia I'm Not There. Clooney and Pitt stood on the red-carpeted podium outside the Sala Grande to promote their product. All the big Hollywood films were shown in Venice's first few days, so the stars and directors could return to North America and catch a breath before coming to Toronto...
...festival's official slate from more than 100 films to 55. That's more movies than most cinemaddicts would attend in a year, but they're spaced over the 10-day skein so that one person could theoretically see all of them. Venice offers civility as opposed to Toronto's genial anarchy, an Adriatic breeze before the whirlwind off Lake Ontario. Held on the Lido, the glamorous resort that's a 15min. boat ride from Venice, the festival is its own serene island of sophisticated moviegoing. In Toronto, you move from one film to another at an bustling, big-city...
...Though Lust, Caution won the top prize at Venice, it has not been so widely admired by critics as Lee's other famous films. But it should be, for it mixes daring and delicacy with a master's touch. Toronto has got off to a good start with Lee's elegant, erotic movie - his own Brokeback Bedroom...