I would like to punch Variety in the face for writing "preem" instead of "premiere," as in "Spike Lee's WWII pic Miracle at St. Anna will world preem at the Toronto Film Festival." Yeah, I know, they use this sort of cutesy Hollywood "inside baseball" terminology left and right -- I find all of it irritating, but preem? Seriously? That is nothing if not horrible. And it's all of three letters shorter than the whole word.

Anyway, the unnecessary slang obfuscates what I want to write about: Miracle at St. Anna will have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in early September. The other big get Toronto announced yesterday is the world premiere of Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist, the indie kid romantic comedy starring Michael Cera. I'm much more excited about that one, to be honest. Prestige war movies are a dime a dozen; Michael Cera playing "a member of the queercore band 'The Jerk Offs'" is something special.

Also announced: Kathryn Bigelow's Iraq actioner The Hurt Locker, a drama called Disgrace with John Malkovich, and a few others. This is in addition to the 27 films announced last week.

This will be my first year attending Toronto (back-to-back with Telluride, where I've gone four times now), so needless to say I am aquiver with anticipation.

Mike Jones over at Variety's The Circuit Blog posted yesterday the first 27 films announced for the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF)and, not surprisingly, most of them hail from previous fest premieres at Cannes, Berlin and SXSW.

The Gala Presentation will be South Korean director Kim Jee-woon's The Good, The Bad and The Weird, which I saw at Cannes earlier this year and loved. Somewhat reminiscent of Tears of the Black Tiger, the film is a crazy, busy Western that centers around a map to a treasure happened upon by a (seemingly) bumbling fool, who ends up being pursued by a good-guy law-enforcement type, a wicked bad guy dressed in black, and, at one point, an entire army. It runs a little long, but it's funny and sharp, with a spectacular chase sequence near the end and a nice final payoff. Toronto film fans should really enjoy this one.

Last year, the Toronto International Film Festival opened with Jeremy Podeswa's World War II film Fugitive Pieces -- an opener that elicited descriptors from "smart choice" to "leaden and pretentious." This year, we're going to get more war, but this time around, it'll be a few years earlier for WWI and it comes from a surprising source.
The NY Post reports that Paul Gross' Passchendaele will kick off the festival on September 4. Yes, this is the Paul Gross of Mountie-clad Due South, who starred with now-director Peter Berg in Aspen Extreme, and recently was one of the Men with Brooms. He wrote the feature, and stars as Michael Dunne -- a man injured in France who comes home to Calgary. However, a romance with a nurse inspires him to go back to France to protect her younger brother, who is embroiled in the third battle of Ypres, otherwise known as Passchendaele.

Unfortunately, even though Gross has a ton of light fare under his belt, this film should prove to be just as heavy as last year's selection. Passchendaele wasn't a battle that ended in great strategic gains, but rather a battle that gained a little bit of land in exchange for the deaths of approximately half a million men. (And most of the territory was regained by Germany the next year.) Still, kudos to you, Mr. Gross, and I can't wait to see what you've done!

We thought it would arrive as part of After Dark's 2007 event, but since unrated flicks cannot screen as part of AD Horrorfest, at least there was a good reason for the delay. And now with the U.S. release of Xavier Gans' Frontier(s) only a few weeks away, it only stands to reason that we'd be treated to a new poster, trailer, and website for the freaky French fright flick.

May 9 is when the stylish horror salad bar will hit the cinemas, but if you're not presently a part of the release pattern, fear not: You can pick up the DVD only a few days later. Click here to delve into the nutty, nasty world of Frontier(s), which is full of dangerous downloads, powerful pictures, and some decidedly violent videos. And then, since you're already hanging out at Cinematical anyway, feel free check out my review of the flick right here. Word is that the DVD will contain some extra goodies for the horror freaks; I shall update this post as soon as I receive an official note from After Dark.

Bonneville, opening today in limited release after mostly sitting and stewing in its own juices since it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival way back in 2006, is another of those "do this before you die" flicks, melded with a road trip movie for spunky older chicks. Take the "great older actor" Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson roles in The Bucket List, replace them with a trio of "great older actresses" in the form of Kathy Bates, Joan Allen and Jessica Lange, throw them in an old Bonneville convertible for a road trip, and toss in the ruggedly handsome and ever-reliable Tom Skerritt as a love interest, and you've got all the makings of a flick that practically telegraphs being aimed at the older demographic.

Things get started with the death of Joe, husband of Arvilla (Lange). Arvilla and Joe had been together for 20-something wonderful years filled with travel and adventure; now Joe's daughter, Francine (Christine Baranski, who's not given much to do beyond being shrewish and shrill), wants her father's ashes back so she can bury them next to her mother. Arvilla wants to keep Joe's remains for herself, but Francine gives her an ultimatum: return my father's ashes, or I'll take away the house you lived with him in for all your life together.

Diary of the Dead, George A. Romero's first independent zombie film in over 20 years, follows a group of student filmmakers who, making a low-grade horror film in the woods, drive back to civilization ... only to find it isn't there anymore. We watch the film unfold as footage they shoot travelling through desolate and deadly buildings, neighborhoods, towns, cities -- coming to grips with the fact that the dead are walking and hungry and everything they knew is over. Shot outside of Toronto, where Romero now lives (but, as tradition demands, set near Pittsburgh), Diary of the Dead played both the Toronto and Sundance Film Festivals; Scott Weinberg's review from Toronto can be found here, while Jette Kernion's review is here.

Writer-director George A. Romero spoke with Cinematical about his zombie film legacy that stretches back to 1968's Night of the Living Dead, his concerns about the possibilities and perils of user-generated media, which Presidential candidate he thinks would have the best handle on attacking armies of the dead, and the undying popularity of the undead he created. " (If) I created anything ... it was the "neighborhood zombie" ... the guy with Nikes and a sweatshirt. ... Neighbors are scary, and when they're dead they're a bit scarier. But once you have that, it's idiomatic ... I half expect the zombies to show up on Sesame Street hanging out with The Count. ..."

Cinematical: I've read several notes and quotes from you saying that Diary of the Dead essentially felt like a new beginning.

George A. Romero: For me, it was a new beginning; I made four zombie films before this, and they sort of tracked, they were along a single storyline, even though they were 10 years or more apart, each of them. And they were just getting too big. The last one (George A. Romero's Land of the Dead) was a studio-supported film, which, you know, I turned around and looked at it: They let me make the film I wanted to make, I loved working with Dennis Hopper and Leguizamo and people like that, but I felt the film and I had sort of lost connection with the origin of the series, which was a little guerrilla movie that a bunch of amateurs made in Pittsburgh all those years ago. And I wanted to go back to ... I wanted to see if I had the chops and the stamina to make a little guerilla movie. I happened to have an idea that I wanted to do something ... all of my zombie films have had this kind of socio-political satire underneath them, and I've always used them as snapshots of the time in which they were made.

I got an idea that I wanted to do something about emerging media, with the mainstream losing its power and Joe Blow from Oshkosh taking over on the blogosphere. And it all sort of fell into place. And I thought 'Well, I can make a little film, do it pretty inexpensively, about students who are out shooting a student film when the sh*t hits the fan, when zombies sit up and start walking around.' I said 'We can go back to the very first night, and we can try to pretend ' -- even though that was 1968 and this is now --- 'that this is the same first night, when this phenomenon first begins to happen.'

A few months back I knocked the After Dark Horrorfest guys for not booking Frontiere(s) as part of their second annual sorta-festival. I quickly received a very cordial response from an AD representative who told me basically precisely this: "I'm emailing in regards to your article about "Frontiere(s)" and Horrorfest. Basically, I just wanted to let you know we absolutely are not going to cut this film up in any way. We have not accepted any rating for it so far and at this point we do not know if it's going to be released NC-17 or unrated. We haven't decided. But I promise you it will get released theatrically and in its originally intended form."

He also explained how an unrated / NC-17 film could not play as part of Horrorfest, given the existing contracts between the event and its venues. OK, fair enough. But the horror geeks are getting royally gore-teased by the Weinsteins on Inside, so when can we get a peek at this freaky Frontiere(s) flick already?

May 9, according to ShocktyDrop.com, is when Lionsgate will be releasing Xavier Gens' whacked-out horror stew in theaters. It will no doubt be a contractually-mandated very limited release pattern, but here's some strange-yet-good news: It seems that the DVD will arrive only four days later. Gee, now there's some incentive to get out to the theaters, eh?

(Since Juno is now screening in limited release, we're re-publishing Kim's review of the film from Telluride. We'll also publish a new review of the film when it goes wider later this month.)

I've been waiting to see Juno for a long, long time now. I first heard that Jason Reitman was going to be working with Ellen Page on this film shortly before Sundance this year, and I talked briefly to the young actress about Juno at Sundance. At the time, Page was promoting An American Crime; that film, in which she played Sylvia Likens, a young girl brutally murdered while under the care of a foster family, was emotionally wrenching for Page, and she told me then she was looking forward to taking on some lighter fare with Juno, and especially to working with Reitman, who was still riding the waves of success from his feature debut, Thank You for Smoking.

I was lucky enough to get to see Juno at a jam-packed sneak preview here at Telluride today; it was utterly charming in every possible way, and is getting the most positive buzz I've heard about any film so far at the fest. Page stars as Juno, a smart, quirky, 16-year-old girl who, after a sexual encounter with her best friend, Bleeker (Michael Cera), finds herself pregnant. Right from the start, we know this isn't going to be your average "after-school-special" film about a teenager getting knocked up and facing Big Decisions. Scribe Diablo Cody (aka Brooke Busey-Hunt) sets the tone from the opening scene, with tiny Page chugging a gallon of Sunny Delight while she looks at an abandoned easy chair and tells us, "it all started with a chair." Three pregnancy tests later, Juno accepts that she is, in fact, pregnant, and from there has to decide how to handle it.

After a series of impressive smaller roles in projects like HBO's Band of Brothers and The Chronicles of Narnia, Glasgow-born actor James McAvoy first demonstrated his leading-man potential on a broader canvas in The Last King of Scotland -- and while co-star Forrest Whitaker's turn as Idi Amin garnered raves, McAvoy's centered performance earned him quiet but sincere praise. Now, in Atonement, McAvoy's at the heart of one of the year's most buzzed-about films -- and bracing himself for a different kind of attention when the megabudget, big-action comic-book adaptation Wanted hits screens in summer 2008, where he'll be playing opposite Morgan Freeman and Angelina Jolie. McAvoy spoke with a roundtable of journalists in San Francisco (McAvoy on arriving in San Francisco: "It's nice; you don't have that immediate foreboding of work, like you do when you land in L.A. Whenever I land in L.A., I don't feel like I've come to America; I feel like I'm just coming to work. But I come into San Francisco, and I'm like "Hey, man! Alright!") about Atonement, the acting challenges in one of the year's most intricate films, Britain's obsession with class and how Wanted might change his 'working-class' life; Cinematical's questions are indicated.

Cinematical: After seeing Last King of Scotland and Becoming Jane -- and even, to a certain extent, The Chronicles of Narnia -- for a while, you seemed to have this sideline in playing who knew exactly how bad they were; who were conspicuously aware of their own failings. Was it a relief, with Atonement, to jump into something a bit more straight-forward?

James McAvoy: The exact opposite; it wasn't a relief in any way. I find great comfort and I find myself in very comfortable artistic territory when I play people with internal conflict; when I play people who are arseholes, or pricks and kind of know it, or they know they're doing something bad. And in this role (in Atonement), I wasn't able to do any of that. Basically, every character I've ever played, I've based entirely on internal conflict. And I love doing that, because I think it's very human. And I found this character (Robbie) ... he wasn't particularly representative of the human race, because he's so good, and he has so little conflict in him. And I didn't really recognize him as a member of the human race to begin with. And I think that that's fair to say, because he is a slightly idealized human figure; and that's necessary, because the story's a tragedy. And there are so many flawed characters in it, and I think that to make a tragedy work, you have to have bad things happen to good people. And if all the protagonists are so flawed, you've got to have one that is particularly unflawed to make it a tragedy. He becomes flawed; he becomes someone much more suicidal, and I think therefore much more representative of the human race. But for the first half of the film, it wasn't a relief; it was a worry of mine that I wasn't going to be able to portray him in an interesting fashion.

The ever-astute Anne Thompson, over on her Thompson on Hollywood blog at Variety, has an analysis up of the Oscar buzz around Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood. I've not yet seen the entire film though I did see a 20-minute sneak-peek at Telluride that was more than enough to whet my appetite for the film (Cinematical's Scott Weinberg saw it at Fantastic Fest, much to the jealousy of the rest of our reviewing team) Thompson has seen the film twice now and recommends highly that people see it twice in order to fully digest it.

Thompson recently went to a WGA screening of the film, where the audience gave a standing ovation to director Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis afterward. Day-Lewis is looking like a cinch for an Oscar nom for Best Actor, and I'd be pretty surprised not to see the film get a Best Picture nod as well. What I'm really more interested in is whether Paul Dano gets a nod for his dual role as twins Eli and Paul Sunday. Dano was one of the best parts of Little Miss Sunshine, and in the part of his performance in There Will Be Blood that I caught at Sundance, he more than held his own playing opposite Day-Lewis -- and that's saying something.

There Will Be Blood continues to stand firmly in fifth place on the Oscar watch list for Best Picture over at Movie City News' Gurus o' Gold, with Atonement still pretty firmly in the top slot. Beneath Atonement, the Gurus have No Country for Old Men, American Gangster, and Charlie Wilson's War. Gurus 2.0, in which our own James Rocchi is participating, has four of the five same top films, but has There Will Be Blood up in second place right behind Atonement, followed by No Country for Old Men, American Gangster and Into the Wild.

For some reason (well, partly because I skipped out on going to Toronto this year) I've not seen any of these films save Into the Wild yet, but I'll be catching them all over the next couple weeks as the For Your Consideration screeners flood the mailbox ( I think my DHL guy is convinced I'm into something illegal here -- every day when he brings me yet another package he gives me a weird look -- he just ought to be glad no one is delivering me packages of sexy panties and pigs-head masks like some people).

Cinematical Reviews of Oscar Watch films:

Atonement
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
American Gangster
Into the Wild -- Kim Voynar's Telluride Review
Into the Wild -- James Rocchi's TIFF Review