Toronto Film Fest Dispatch #1

For people who love watching, making, writing, and talking about movies, the first two weeks of September are a special time of year. Because that’s when the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) takes place.

And for the third year in a row, I’ve managed to secure a press pass for the festival. On Wednesday afternoon, I traveled up to the Queen City with Westville resident and Madison Art Cinemas owner Arnold Gorlick to spend the better part of the next week feasting on terrific new films.

Over the past 43 years, TIFF has matured into the largest and one of the most respected film festivals in the world. There are 375 different movies playing at this year’s 11-day fest, which officially started on Thursday.

The cinematic fare ranges from big-budget Oscar hopefuls like Damien Chazelle’s First Man and Steve McQueen’s Widows to new movies from international masters of the medium like Mike Leigh, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Claire Denis, to obscure international arthouse flicks coming in from France, Thailand, Sudan, and elsewhere.

Arnold, who ran the former York Square Cinemas on Broadway for nearly 25 years before founding his current two-screen arthouse cinema in Madison in 1999, comes to TIFF each year to figure out what movies he’s going to screen at his theater in the months to come.

As someone who has worked in the movie exhibition business for over half his life, he also knows a lot of the industry players who make the pilgrimage to Toronto each fall to watch movies, attend production company parties, and occasionally hobnob with celebrity actors and directors.

(I’ve never been too good at hobnobbing, but Arnold, who is kind, intelligent, curious, and remarkably socially uninhibited, quickly befriended Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro last year during a Fox Searchlight Pictures party for The Shape of Water).

First, The Movies

Arnold and I each try to see around four or five movies per day when we’re at TIFF. While anyone with the time, money, and cinematic interest can purchase tickets to TIFF screenings that play at nearly 10 different theaters throughout downtown Toronto, Arnold and I mostly stick to the press and industry screenings.

Those take place in the towering, 14-screen Scotiabank cineplex on Richmond Street, which from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day of the festival turns into a melee of movie critics, theater owners, film distributors, and other industry personnel juggling popcorn, notepads, and schedules as they rush from screening to screening.

The theaters are huge, each seating well over 300 people. The screens seem even bigger, with some measuring more than 70 feet wide and more than 50 feet tall.

Some previous years’ TIFF highlights for me include Barry Jenkins’ coming-of-age drama Moonlight, Darren Aronofsky’s allegorical psychodrama mother!, and Pablo Larraín’s First Lady biopic, Jackie.

The first day of the festival started strong with four movies I can all recommend. I’ll stick to just two for now.

My first movie of the day, and my favorite of the nearly four I’ve seen thus far, was Monsters and Men, the feature film debut of director Reinaldo Marcus Green. The movie follows three young men of color in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn whose lives are forever changed when a neighborhood stalwart, an unarmed African American man selling loosies outside of a corner store, is shot and killed by the NYPD.

The movie is tender and unobtrusive in its depiction of how the traumatic incident affects each man, drawing out the wariness and weariness, the anger and fear that comes with racial profiling and police violence.

The central figure in the movie is a black police officer named Dennis, played by John David Washington, whose body seems to tremble with pained ambivalence as he balances his respect and pride for his profession on the one hand and the shooting, let alone his own harassment by local police, on the other. If you liked Washington as the lead in Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman, Washington has somehow ten times better and more mature of an actor in this one. And I loved that Spike Lee movie!

My second movie of the day was Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s Loro, a two-and-a-half-hour skewering look at a slightly fictionalized version of Silvio Berlusconi, the grotesquely hedonistic and corrupt media mogul who served as the Italian prime minister for over ten years.

The movie is sprawling and messy, diluting its satirical bite with a few too many cocaine-fueled montages of gyrating female flesh. But Toni Servillo’s anchoring performance as a clownish, duplicitous political salesman whose fear of obsolescence is matched only by his fear of self-reflection makes for many a satisfying, if unsettling, parallel to politics closer to home.

To read quick takes on the two other movies I saw on Thursday, Asghar Farhadi’s Everybody Knows and Mike Leigh’s Peterloo, check out my Twitter feed @tomwbreen. That’s where I’ll be posting about every movie I see throughout my six days in Toronto.

Arnold In Toronto

Arnold Gorlick loves life, he loves people, and he loves movies. Traveling with him to a film festival, one learns a lot about all three.

He also possesses a quality unique to affable, intelligent extroverts that allows him to walk into a room of strangers and immediately strike up hour-long conversations about the architectural wonders of Machu Picchu, the delightful complexity of Vietnamese food, and about how the conversion from film to digital movie projection and the rise of on-demand streaming services have forever changed the movie exhibition business.

After taking the train from Toronto’s airport to its downtown Union Station on Wednesday afternoon, Arnold and I walked a half mile up to The Rex Hotel, Jazz & Blues Bar, where he checked into his room and we stopped for lunch.

Sitting at the wood-paneled bar in his fuscia, ​“Madison Art Cinemas”-labeled collared shirt, Arnold had within minutes convinced the bartender to visit the Ommegang Brewery in Cooperstown, N.Y., the next time he travels stateside so that he can try what Arnold believes is some of the best ale around.

He also struck up a conversation with a Toronto lawyer named Adam, who told Arnold about his seven-year-old son’s frenzied little league baseball schedule in between sips of whiskey sour.

When Arnold told him that he owns a small, independent movie theater and has worked in the business for nearly five decades, Adam spent the next half-hour quizzing him on the ins and outs of cinema exhibition.

He asked Arnold how long of a lead time he gives himself between seeing a movie and booking it for his theater.

“It’s risky pulling the trigger too soon for a two-screen theater,” Arnold said, noting that if he makes a mistake in his selection of one movie at any given moment, then half of his theater’s business for the duration of that movie’s run is put at risk.

He told Adam that the primary audience for nearly every movie theater in the world is 17-to-21-year-old males. At Madison, he said, he’s figured out a way through careful programming, savvy marketing, and using his big personality and old-school showman chops to attract audiences that are older, more educated, and predominantly female.

His marketing tactics have included writing lengthy, impassioned letters on his website about movies that he loves, like Moonlight, and raffling off two free passes to the Mystic Aquarium during his run of 2002’s Whale Rider.

Adam asked if Arnold has to pay studios one flat fee to screen a movie at his theater, or if he has to pay a percentage of what he earns through ticket sales. When Arnold said a percentage, Adam asked if that percentage is consistent across studios and distributors.

“Yeah,” Arnold replied. ​“It’s getting consistently higher.” He said that film rentals used to be loaded at the front, when the earliest weeks of a movie’s run would have the highest grosses, and he would have to pay the highest percentages. Then, as attendance tapered in later weeks, he’d have to pay less and less.

Now, he said, most studios and distributors approach him and want an aggregate, which ensures that the price does not go down now matter how low the movie goes.

“That’s neat,” Adam said after listening to Arnold expound upon the movie theater business. ​“Really neat. Makes my job sound fucking boring. Want to trade?”

Overheard At TIFF

Although much of one’s time at TIFF is spent sitting in a movie theater and staring at a giant screen, one also a not insignificant amount of time standing in lines outside of different auditoriums, waiting to be seated for the next screening.

As there are thousands of press and industry people from throughout the world who attend the festival every year, standing and listening as you figure out which three movies to cram in over the next eight hours can be an education on the movie industry in and of itself.

Here’s just a taste of a few comments I overheard while waiting for that next movie to begin.

“For some reason, they scheduled all of the long movies for this morning and afternoon. I see this one is a tight 2:30.” – a film critic waiting in line to see Loro. One hundred and fifty minutes is not a particularly ​“tight” run time for a movie.

“It’s about creating community, and not about just showing films like clockwork.” – a film programmer talking about the role that local, independent, arthouse movies theaters play in small cities throughout the United States.

“When it’s freelance, there’s no other way to do it. Otherwise, you can’t sell them.” – a film critic talking about why he mostly interviews name-brand actors and directors because, as a freelancer, few outlets will buy interviews with lesser known filmmakers.

Independent reporter Thomas Breen hosts the film program ​“Deep Focus” on WNHH FM.