The mock documentary "Death of A President" is being released nationally Oct. 27 by Newmarket Films. The trailer for the film will begin appearing in theaters Sept. 29. The film looks at the state of the world several years after the assassination of Pres. Bush. Originally produced for British television it gained notoreity at the Toronto International Film Festival where it played to sold out theaters. Tickets to screenings were fetching $200 on the black market.
 
  Check out a review of the film in the Rocky Mountain News here.

  NEWMARKET FILMS TO RELEASE GABRIEL RANGE’S PROVOCATIVE “DEATH OF A PRESIDENT” IN THE UNITED STATES ON OCTOBER 27TH
 
The trailer for the highly anticipated film, which recently received the prestigious Fipresci International Critics Award at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival, will debut in theaters Friday, September 29th

New York, NY. September 28, 2006.  Newmarket Films announced today, that the company will release Gabriel Range’s award winning “DEATH OF A PRESIDENT” in cities across the United States on Friday, October 27th.   The trailer for the highly anticipated film, which recently received the prestigious Fipresci International Critics Award at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival, will begin screening in theaters this Friday, September 29th.

“DEATH OF A PRESIDENT” follows the investigation of the fictional assassination of President George W. Bush in October 2007.  Combining real archival footage with a credible but fictional story, “DEATH OF A PRESIDENT” presents a fascinating and thought-provoking political thriller.

Director Gabriel Range is no stranger to taking on controversial and intriguing subject matters, his previous film “The Day Britain Stopped” was honored with a BAFTA TV nomination.
 
Newmarket Films has previously released such box office and critical successes as “Monster,” “Memento,” “The Passion of the Christ,” “Whale Rider,” and “Donnie Darko.”

Running time: 93 MIN.

Toronto - You never know what to see at a film festival until it's over. Turns out I was shut out of two of what turned out to be the hottest tickets at the Toronto International Film Festival. I was turned away from "DOAP," or "Death of A President," twice, although there were reports that it did not live up to its hype. Check out a review of the film in the Rocky Mountain News here.

The British television mock documentary about the assassination of Pres. Bush and its aftermath, was awarded the FIPRESCI Prize, from the international federation of film critics, for the "audacity with which it distorts reality to reveal a larger truth." It has been picked up for distribution by Newmarket Films, which has a reputation for controversy; Newmarket previously distributed "The Passion of the Christ."

Despite it being the last day of the festival and with many of the press already gone, I was shut out of the directorial debut of the Canadian actress Sarah Polley (remembered by some as TV’s "Ramona"). Polley’s film, "Away From Her" is the story about a married couple torn apart when the wife suffers onset Alzheimers. It is based on a story by Alice Munro and could lead to Oscar nominations for Julie Christie and veteran Canadian actor Goron Pinsent.
 
So what did I see? Even watching as many as thirty films just scratches the surface of what was being presented.

But of those these were my favorites.
 
Try not to be shut out when they come to a film festival or at a theater near you.

"The Lives of Others" A political thriller about a member of the East German police eavesdropping on a playhwright and his actress girlfriend, in which no on escapes untained or uncompromised. The German language film, with allusions to "The Conversation," was greeted with an ovation and potential Oscar buzz.

"Pan's Labyrinth" Some called this film by "Hellboy" and "The Devil's Backbone" director Guillermo del Toro the best film at the festival. This fantasy, set after the Spanish Civil War, is about a girl and her cruel Fascist army officer stepfather. She discovers a grotesque creature in the countryside who gives her three tasks to complete to fulfill her secret destiny. A fairy tale for adults.

"Babel" Four separate stories loosely connected by coincidence and a shared humanity, by "21 Grams" director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. One is about a rebellious deaf Japanese teenager, one is about two young Morrocan goat herders, another is about American tourists in crisis (this one co-stars Brad Pitt), and another is about a Mexican nanny who takes two young American children she is caring for across the border, to a wedding in Mexico.

"Mon Colonel" Another tale of political persecution. The murder of a former French Army colonel is somehow related to his service in Algiers years earlier, and the storoy travels parallel paths in the past and the present. Written, and some speculate that is was partly directed as well, by Costa-Gavras.

"And So Goes the Nation" Documentary about the 2004 presidential election. The state of Ohio was the Democrats to lose and this film details how they went about doing so and helped re-elect Pres. Bush. Strategists from both parties disect the ground war, media buys and the strength and weakness of both candidates. A primer on winning and losing.

Toronto - Ever the contrarian I did not hate the most widely disliked films at the Toronto International Film Festival. "

The Fountain" was one of those glorious disasters, an abstract and self involved story of endless love that might be seen as a valentine from writer-director Darren Aronofsky to girlfriend Rachel Weisz who co-stars in the film.

Hugh Jackman plays characters in the past, present and future, equally obsessed with eternal life and a woman, played by Weisz. Aronofsky has abandoned the stark aesthetic of "Pi" and "Requiem for A Dream," for CGI spin art. And while abstract and pretentious - "The Fountain" was booed at festivals in Venice and Cannes - the film and its "2001"-like ending, in which a tree grows in space, may hold some interest for sci-fi fans.
 
The similarly psychedelic the "The Fall," was not treated so dismissively.
 
It was directed by Tarsem, who directed the mind-blowing "The Cell," starring Jennifer Lopez. "The Fall" is the story of a suicidal silent movie stunt man who weaves an elaborate tale for a rapt immigrant girl while both of them are hospitalized, But he has ulterior motives and his story becomes a metaphor for his and her troubled lives. The round-faced girl is a dead pan and darling discovery, and Tarsem creates a kaleidoscopic series of blinding colors, rich textures and exotic locations.
 
But frankly it would be a surprise to see the esoteric film widely distributed.
 
The most pilloried film at the fest was "All the Kings Men." It is the story of Willie Stark, a Huey Long-type populist turned demagogue, and is based on the novel by Robert Penn Warren. It’s release was delayed for almost a year, reportedly while it was re-edited, and Kenosha native Mark Ruffalo told reporters he was surprised at how much his already small role had been further trimmed.
 
The film, which is set in Louisiana, is drenched in atmosphere. Sean Penn is charismatic and the early scenes of the film, as the character finds his political voice, are intriguing. But the character soon grows one dimensional and the film with it, with Penn widely gesticulating and spitting when he speaks, like a tin pot Mussolini. The terrific actress and real life Southerner Patricia Clarkson, is given too little to do, while Kate Winslet, is given too much to do,, plus her accent is unreliable.

It will arrive in theaters Friday, Sept. 22.

So, what did I like?

Funny you should ask. Check this space for my favorite festival films.

Sarah Bojan Elezovic’s rendering of a scene from Bergman’s 'Autumn Sonata.'

Toronto - Sometimes you find what you’re not looking for.

For instance, one day during the Toronto International Film Festival, I was looking for quiet place to make a phone call and collect my thoughts and stumbled across an unexpected oasis.

It was Bojan Eleovic’s world of cinematic landscapes.

Talk about following your muse.

In 1997 Eleovic, 30, followed his from Yugoslavia to Canada. "We lost everything due to the war. We had no choice but to come here." He moved to Toronto in 1999, where he works delivering food. (In fact a well known Canadian star to whom he made a delivery during the festival was a terrible tipper, he said.) Three years ago Eleovic picked up a paint brush for the very first time.

"I never studied," he said. "I was with a girl who was a painter and I draw something and she realize I had talent."

He was holding a four day exhibition of his works in an out of the way hotel meeting room that would be hard to find if you weren't looking for it. It was no surprise then that it was empty except for him, a reporter making a telephone call and paintings from his "Cinematic Landscapes" series.

It is also unsurprising that a man far from home would become interested in landcapes.
Eleovic’s techinique is to take a film he loves, freeze a favorite frame showing a landscape on his computer screen and then paint what he sees, with a change or two to avoid copyright hassles.

The films that he loves are mostly art films by European, Middle Eastern and Asian directors.

On display were scenes from Ingmar Bergman's "Autumn Sonata," Abbas Kiarostami's "The Taste of Cherry," Atom Egoyan's "Calendar," Jean-Luc Godard's "Contempt," "Dreams," by Akira Kurosawa and "Blow Up," by Michelangelo Antonioni.

You can see Eleovic's work at http://www.bojanelezovic.com/.

But if you buy something, you'll be the first to do so. He hasn't sold one and said he wouldn’t know what to charge. He contacts the filmmakers whose work he is painting and sometimes gets a reply. Last year Johnny Depp was doing press in an adjacent room and stopped by.

Eleovic is also a writer, director, poet and musician. "and in all these fields I create enormous amount. In 2005, I painted 130 paintings, I wrote over 100 poems. I wrote two features and thirty hours of music." None of it published or on display except for the paintings in this room.

The festival does not give him any funding support. And when he approaches galleries about displaying his work they say "they only accept Canadian born artists. Or they tell you that they’re booked until 2010." He currently has a collection of 200 paintings, including the ones on display.

And after the festival, "I put them back on the wall and plan another series."

Sights, sounds and scenes at the Toronto International Film Festival
 
Overheard from a passerby: "My mother got Russell Crowe’s autograph." (Crowe was here for "A Good Year.")

"We can always do a phone interview closer to opening." The festival equivalent of "have your girl call my girl," usually heard after not getting a particular interview.

"Do frogs consider their babies beautiful?" wonders the title character in the Indian film "Vanaja," about a young girl who gets caught in the vortex of a powerful family.
 
A voluble Jeff Goldblum, here in Hal Hartley’s film "Fay Grim," sweeping a child actress up in his enthusiasm for her performance in an entirely different film, sitting her down in a hotel lobby and posing for pictures with her.
 
"Nobody ever helped a hick, but a hick hisself." -- Sean Penn in the not-well-received "All the King's Men," about a political demagogue in the South.
 
"If we had monkeys in Scotland, we’d probably deep-fry them." -- James McAvoy, in "The Last King of Scotland," about a Scot who became a personal advisor to Ugandan president Idi Amin, played by Forest Whitaker.
 
"I am a very difficult person, but I take comfort in the fact that God made me that way." -- Ed Harris, as the title character in "Copying Beethoven."

Me, to Juliette Binoche: "You're blonde!"
Binoche to me: "And tall."
She had bleached her hair for an upcoming role, and was wearing three-inch heels for reasons unknown. She was here starring in "Breaking and Entering," by Anthony Minghella, her director in "The English Patient."

"What a brussell sprout would sound like, if a brussell sprout could talk." -- An actor playing Gore Vidal, describing the sound of Truman Capote’s voice, in "Infamous," the second Capote biography in the last year. Capote is played by Toby Jones, and Sandra Bullock plays Harper Lee.
 

You can't rain out a festival, but you can dampen festivalgoers.

At the Toronto International Film Festival Tuesday night, hardy souls waited in the rain for a film outside the Cumberland Theatre in the trendy shopping district Yorkville, one of the festival's hubs.

Toronto - Everyone was somewhere on Sept, 11, 2001, and I was at the Toronto Film Festival.

I was filing some forgettable story and my editor told me to turn on the hotel television, and like every one else my day and my world changed. The night before, on Sept. 10, I left a screening of the optimistic and life affirming, "Amelie," about a matching-making French girl who finds love herself, high on its giddy helium filled effervescence.

I spent Sept. 11 at a press conference where officials announced they would close the festival for one day in memorial, filed a public reaction story and commiserated with other reporters at a bar that night. The first film I saw after Sept. 11 was Mira Nair’s "Monsoon Wedding."

"Monsoon Wedding" was life-affirming under the best of circumstances, but, in the worst of circumstances, it was defiantly humanistic and breathtakingly exuberant, and had the audience in tears for its portrait of a world where love can triumph and differences coexist. I wrote at the time that it was a vivid reminder of the very thing the terrorists tried to destroy.

The human imagination, including movies, threatens all fundamentalists, despots, and narrow-minded people and creativity and freedom of expression are the first things to go in their colorless worlds.

Why do they feel so threatened, I asked the writer-director and star of the award-winning German film, "The Lives of Others," about life in the Kakfa-esque world of East Germany under the watchful eye of the secret police called the Stasi. The film is showing at this year's festival.

"Because they don’t understand it and they are scared of everything that they don’t understand," said Ulrich Muhe, speaking in German and translated by director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Muhe, who plays a Stasi agent in the film, was himself was under surveillance by the secret police during those years.

"The essence of an artist," explained von Donnersmarck, "has to be that he will be unpredictable. And the main goal of dictatorships is to influence your people so much that they will do what you want so that you can predict how they behave. And artists undermine that. At the end of the day artists will be the most dangerous elements in any dictatorship."

I have been in Toronto every Sept. 11 since 2001, and it have seen the artistic response to a world at war work itself out in fits and starts, from bruised and contemplative to overt and visceral.

This year, there are at least four films about political violence: "Bobby," Emilio Estevez’s film about the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy; "All the Kings Men," with Sean Penn as Willie Stark in an adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s novel; and two provocatively titled films - the incendiary British TV film "D.O.A.P.," whose acronym stands for "Death of a President," and which pretends to be an investigative documentary look at the assassination of President Bush years after the fact (festival co-director Noah Cowan calls it the "most dangerous" film he’s seen this year); and "The Prisoner: Or How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair," about an Iraqi journalist imprisoned because the U.S. military believed he had plans to kill the British prime minister.

And there are many films about political oppression, include "The Lives of Others"; "Catch a Fire," about an ordinary man who becomes a revolutionary against apartheid in South Africa; "The Last King of Scotland," about the reign of Idi Amin, spectacularly played by Forest Whittaker; and "Mon Colonel," a political thriller about the French misadventure in Algieria, written by Costa-Gavras.

It seems ironic that the most high-profile film out of Iran, at the center of tensions in the Middle East,  is the humanistic and progressive "Offside," about a group of soccer loving girls imprisoned for trying to sneak into a World Cup qualifying match. Women are not allowed to attend sporting events with men in Iran.

John Scheinfeld

Toronto - Stars are people too. Take Heath Ledger.
 
During an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival he fidgeted, mumbled, excused himself to go to the bathroom and absentmindedly ate popcorn out of a bag on the table in front of him.
 
There was something compulsive about how he dug the unpopped seeds out of the bag that was not unlike the character he plays in the new Australian film "Candy," which is about two addicts more in love with heroin than with each other. He gives a gritty believable performance that captures the agony and the ecstasy of the drug, but his co star Abbie Cornish - a Nicole Kidman type who starred in "Somersault - is devastating as the title character who surrenders to the drug’s allure.
 
Ledger knows a thing or two about addiction himself. "Nicotine" is his addiction, he said.

To understand the character’s need for drugs, he supposed it was like "you’re really, really thirsty, if you’re parched, and you get that drink of water. That’s how I imagined" the addict’s need for heroin, said Ledger, whose Oscar nomination for "Brokeback Mountain," marked a leap from heartthrob to serious actor. He said that he tries to choose projects that "present an element of fear, it gives me the sensation of trying to defeat something." And his next two roles are fearfully challenging.
 
He is about to start work on Todd Haynes’ film "I’m Not There," in which different characters portray aspects of Bob Dylan’s life and career. The film also stars his wife Michelle Williams, who was Ledger’s "Brokeback" co-star and is the mother of the couple's four month old daughter.

"We’re in different stories within the movie," he said. "There are seven different characters that play versions of (Dylan) and portray different aspects of his personality and events in his life. It’s ... all over the place. It’s a trip. Michelle is shooting as we speak and I start Tuesday. I’m more curious about this film than any other film I’ve done."

Ledger is also slated to co-star in "The Dark Knight," the upcoming sequel to "Batman Returns," as the Joker, a character played by Jack Nicholson in the 1989 film "Batman." "I love wearing masks. I like falling behind and into a character and I know this will be a beautiful mask to wear," Ledger said.
 
"And obviously we’re not going to head down the same path that Jack Nicholson took. We’re going to make it more sinister. Its very new to me right now and I’ve got a lot of thinking to do about it. It’s going to require a lot of energy and preparation. But I feel like it’s going to be a lot of fun. I’ve never been a fan of comic book movies. But I saw (‘Batman Returns,’ directed by Christopher Nolan) and I thought it was good. He’s a good director." Christian Bale who plays Batman "is awesome. And for some reason Joker is the one character that has intrigued me. I feel like there’s a joker within us all."

Audio interview with Heath Ledger

You want to lose ten pounds of ugly fat quickly?

Unplug.

At an unofficial weigh-in prior to the Toronto International Film Festival which begins today I learned I will be lugging ten pounds and four ounces of electronic equipment needed to help my do my job, through customs and into Canada. And since I will be blogging regularly during the festival, he said optimistically, I will be carrying this equipment with me, rather than leaving it in my hotel room.

During the Cannes Film Festival in May, there were people with laptops filing outdoors wherever they found a signal. One memorable photo opportunity involved a group of six or so sitting side by side on the edge of a fountain, each of them hunched over their keyboards like synchronized bloggers. Inside the pressroom, groups of reporters regularly hogged the private kiosks used for filing and handed off chairs, tables and electrical outlets to other members of their group, like a relay team. Toronto is a much more sprawling city and event, and so I will be blogging opportunistically during waking hours while trying to see at least four movies a day, and setting up and conducting interviews.

Preparatory work for the festival includes emails and phone calls to set up a schedule of interviews in advance of your arrival. If you arrive there without having done so it is often impossible to get what you want. And in fact it is usually impossible anyway. For instance an interview with Will Ferrell for the new "Stranger Thank Fiction" has morphed into an interview with its director Marc Forester.

Although the festival runs ten days PR types all want to use the first weekend as a publicity platform for their films causing innumerable scheduling conflicts. Zach Braff of the film "The Last Kiss" will be so busy at the festival they offered a telephone interview with him while there, which sort of defeats the purpose of going. After that first weekend the festival is a comparative ghost town.

Of my ten pounds plus of equipment the heaviest piece is, of course is the laptop computer and power cord, which is where all the magic happens. To this I am adding a digital camera to download photos. I will tape interviews on a digital voice recorder to put on line as well, and since I am a belt and suspenders guy, I am taking another recorder for backup. Plus, I’m taking bulky headphones to use while transcribing interviews and my Ipod, which I can’t live without. Shove it all in the same shoulder bag and there goes your posture.

Check http://www.jsonline.com/ to see if I figure out how to use this stuff. And go to www.e.bell.ca/filmfest for a schedule of festival films and related items.