Cinematical

When you live in downtown Toronto, you quickly become accustomed to the people calendar -- when the streets will be silent, and when they'll be buzzing. It starts when school lets out -- young kids hit the playgrounds while the college kids head home and free up the late-night sidewalks. Every third person is now a tourist, stopping every few feet for pictures or to look at a map. On the weekends, the city often becomes a ghost town, as hordes head up north to cottages. But then it's back to school, often marked by the eager new engineers running around the city painted purple.

And just a few days later, they're joined by slick stars and a million press badges as the Toronto International Film Festival gears up. The stars are out, as are the press, the movie lovers, and the eager onlookers. Teeny boppers buzz like packs of bees around the Four Seasons and other Yorkville haunts for a peek at someone famous. It's movies and fans everywhere.

But reviews don't give you a taste of the city, nor do quick glimpses in films like Chicago and Urban Legend. You can see it retro-style with SCTV, but that city is in the past. The best way to get a taste of Toronto without being here is through Canadian filmmaker Don McKellar. Between the films he's directed and those he's acted in, you can get many tastes of this town, from exotic women to last nights on Earth. In honor of the fest, and of the wonderful T-Dot, I offer you: Childstar and Monkey Warfare.

One man to not truly break through the 1980s stigma and revamp his career is Eric Stoltz. James Spader did a heck of a job with it, now being smarmy fun on Boston Legal, as did the likes of Jon Cryer, Kiefer Sutherland, Charlie Sheen, and more. But then again, even Stoltz's '80s classics, Mask and Some Kind of Wonderful, were drowned by the likes of Molly Ringwald and her swarm of teen romances, so it's not like he ever had a bit spotlight.

Stoltz remains a bit on the outside, but still working as hard as ever. He's got a bit of a role in Milk, and now Variety reports that he's joining a wartime indie drama called Fort McCoy. Along with the likes of Brendan Fehr, Camryn Manheim, Lyndsy Fonseca, Seymour Cassel, and Kate Connor, Stoltz is nestled in Wisconsin shooting the true story, based on a script from Connor.

McCoy centers on "a barber who moves with his family during WWII to a POW camp in Wisconsin, where the children are the sole youngsters on the base -- save for a German teenager who forges an alliance that crosses language barriers with the barber's little girl." I imagine we can see how this plays out sometime during next year's festival season, with hopefully a release after that.

The latest wacky work from Ethan and Joel Coen, Burn After Reading, is headed to screens next week. As you might have seen from the trailer, the flick has brought together the awesome collection of George Clooney, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, and Frances McDormand. But this is certainly not the first Coen movie that Frances has graced. In fact, they jump-started her career in 1984 with Blood Simple.

Above, you can check out the trailer for the film, which follows love triangles and murder. McDormand's Abby is married to Julian (Dan Hedaya), but having an affair with Ray (John Getz). To make matters messier, her lover works for her husband. Julian finds out and wants murderous revenge. But deals with sketchy characters will always be that -- sketchy -- so things don't go according to plan. If you need to know more, check out Peter's great retro review.

It's not really a primer for Burn After Reading, which is definitely more in the Coens' goofy sea, but it is a look at how far McDormand has come over the years. Thank God Joel found her and married her! Can you imagine all those films, especially Fargo, without McDormand?

Good lord, Tim Roth is doing a lot of morphing lately. He de-aged himself in Youth Without Youth, became a weird ol' monster in The Incredible Hulk, and now he's getting his wings.

Variety reports that Roth is taking the title role in Skellig -- a UK production that will hit television screens next spring before getting a theatrical release. Based on the novel by David Almond, Skellig focuses on a boy in northern England who makes a surprising discovery. His parents have just bought a rundown house, and while investigating the shed out back, he finds a man/creature lying in the darkness who he decides to help. "Feeding him Chinese food and beer, the boy nurses the creature, who possesses magical powers, back to health."

It definitely sounds like an interesting story (read more about it here), and it's hard not to get intrigued at the thought of Roth as an angel, alongside the likes of Kelly MacDonald, Bill Milner (the cutie from Son of Rambow), and John Simm. The film has just started shooting in Cardiff.

The Promotion
After Dane Cook's Employee of the Month ripped out our interest in office-led comedies and stomped on it, The Promotion was a welcome breath of fresh air that has become a comedic emblem over here at Cinematical. It's graced a top films of 2008 list, popped up in a few fan rants, and has been part of a lot of multimedia. And now, after a modest release, the comedy is on DVD.

Seann William Scott and John C. Reilly play supermarket workers who vie for the same management position in a new store. Scott is told that he's a shoo-in for the gig, which will be nestled near his neighborhood, while Reilly is a new hire straight out of Quebec who is eager for the position. They fall into an insane battle of one-upmanship. In Scott's review, he said: "I just watched it with a jam-packed house at SXSW -- and these folks were laughing like nitrous oxide had just been pumped into the air ducts."

The disc features deleted scenes, a commentary with writer/director Steven Conrad and producers Jessika Borsiczky Goyer and Steven A. Jones, a making-off featurette, promotional webisodes, and finally, outtakes.

Check out Scott's Review | Buy the DVD

Frakking lawsuits.

Last month, Elisabeth alerted you to the legal turmoil bubbling around Watchmen. Basically, 20th Century Fox used to have the rights, and claim they still have them, so they're trying to prevent Warner Brothers from releasing the eagerly awaited film. Warner Brothers, meanwhile, claims that Fox has sat silently until the film was set to go, knowing full well what was happening.

Now The New York Times says that Warner is pushing for a trial date of April, with Fox pushing for June. Assuming that the film can't be released until this is cleared up, we might not only not get Watchmen in March, but also not in the summer of 2009. Will we have to wait until 2010? I don't want to think about it. There's a whole swarm of moviegoers peeved about the Harry Potter delay. I can't imagine what a year-long delay would do to Watchmen fiends. Where's Doctor Manhattan when you need him? Or a jail-storming Nite Owl and Silk Spectre?

Bringing the story of John Lennon and Mark David Chapman to the big screen didn't help Chapter 27. But perhaps a story of his life, one without Jared Leto and Lindsay Lohan, will fare better. And I raise that perhaps to a probably since this new biopic is coming from the writer of Control, which makes the news pretty damn sweet.

The Hollywood Reporter posts that a new biopic centering on John Lennon is in the works. Titled Nowhere Boy, the film was written by Matt Greenhalgh and will be helmed by visual director Sam Taylor-Wood. Nowhere will focus on Lennon's "childhood and subsequent journey to icon status." Basically, just the earlier years, and not the time that brought Yoko, Julian, and Sean. The script is said to portray his personal life as "a lonely teenager growing up as his aunt and the mother who gave him up fight for his love. His only escape is music, art, and his fateful friendship with Paul McCartney."

Casting is underway now, with plans to shoot on location in Lennon's hometown of Liverpool. I imagine that we'll see a collection of lesser and bigger actors flood the roles, but do you have anyone in mind for the famous Beatle(s)?

On the 21st, I shared pictures of Zac Efron, Christian McKay, and others on the set of Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles. Now we can get a peek at his older love interest, Claire Danes, in the picture above, courtesy of EW.

In the film, Efron is an aspiring actor who gets a bit part in a Welles production, and then gets sexy with the older, perky production assistant (Danes). According to Richard Linklater: "He's falling for this older woman. She's taking him for a bit of a ride." With that smirk above? No!

We already know that Danes has a pattern with this impressionable young men. Do you remember what she did with Igby? But at least Steve Martin gave her a taste of her own Shopgirl medicine.

Me and Orson Welles debuts next Friday at TIFF.

Buddy films. They're an interesting breed of cinema. Instead of finding success in a niche, they appeal to the masses. With buddy flicks, you're served a variety of time periods, races, genres, laughs, and scenarios. If one doesn't appeal, the next is sure to come -- all tapping into the goodness of friendship and camaraderie.

And snuggled nicely into that sector of cinema are the buddy cops. They've made the careers of a few big stars, like Mel Gibson and Eddie Murphy. But I don't want to give you something quite so obvious as Beverly Hills Cop or Leathal Weapon. Since this is all due to my recent purchase of Hot Fuzz, I give you that plus an ol' '80s classic -- Running Scared.

There are girls swinging on a red swingset and piles of potluck food piled high on the tables, all nestled into a wood-fence-lined back yard. According to Oliver Stone's W., this is how George W. Bush met Laura Welch -- the girl who says: "I read. I smoke. I admire." No wonder the two ended up together!

The above is a clip about their meeting, which has popped up over at CNN. Now I know that the big question surrounding this film is whether people will go to see it, or ignore it, kind of like the proliferation of Iraq war films out there. I have to say, if W. tanks when it hits screens on October 17, it would be a waste. The film looks entertaining, it has a distinct life to it, and it would be a shame to miss how the killer cast takes on their roles -- Brolin, Banks, Cromwell, Burstyn, Newton, Dreyfuss, Wright, Glenn, Gruffudd, and Bradford.