Although my web page appears to be best known for the weekly Siskel & Ebert / Roger Ebert & The Movies capsule summaries and my annual awards / Oscar race coverage, I confess that it's my annual coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival at which I look with pride, and it's certainly the feature on my site which provides me the most enjoyment and satisfaction. As in previous years, I'll be attending the festival and posting daily assessments of the pictures screened. (These ten days will be a rather frenzied period of activity, so please forgive me for not responding to e-mail as promptly as I'd otherwise prefer.)

The Toronto International Film Festival has grown in both size and stature to the point where it's indisputably one of the most important film festivals in the world. Hollywood's majors and mini-majors are increasingly using this venue as a platform to launch their Oscar contenders -- among last year's Oscar-nominated pictures, a good number of them played Toronto (Life Is Beautiful, Hilary & Jackie, Central Station, Elizabeth, A Simple Plan, Little Voice, Pleasantville, etc.) Given that a fair percentage of my reader(ship) are interested in this sort of thing, as per last year, I plan to include a post-festival summary of potential Oscar-bait pictures and performances in this year's festival lineup.

Due to the increase in attendance over the past few years resulting in rapid sell-outs (and the peripheral complaints which come with the territory), the organizers of the Toronto International Film Festival have significantly revamped the ticket ordering process this year. They've dropped the first-come, first-serve process of the past in favour of the adoption of a new "democratized" procedure where ticket orders are processed in a psuedo-random order. While this technically dispels with the requirement to line-up well in advance in order to drop off one's ticket order (while the box office would open at 9am on drop-off day, people would begin to queue as early as 9pm the previous day), this new procedure is one which has alienated and outraged many of the faithful TIFF regulars (a few have boycotted the event altogether this year in protest), and I tend to concur with their displeasure -- my feeling is that if one isn't willing to invest the time and effort to ensure that all of their ticket selections are successfully fulfilled, one should be prepared to find that desired screenings are already sold-out. As it stands now, there is no means to ensure that one gets tickets to the films wanted -- it's a true random affair. You're no longer paying to see the movies that you want to see -- you're basically plunking down your money for the random chance of seeing your desired films.

By levelling the playing field through lowering it altogether, this "democratization" of the process penalizes the hardcore film buff in favour of the casual film festival attendee that pops in for two or three films during the 10-day festivities, which is sort of like biting the hand that feeds you; TIFF clearly could not have as successful as it has without the support of its faithful devotees. I hope the TIFF organizers reconsider this wrong-headed scheme for next year.

As a direct result of this new process (and my typical bad fortune with the ticket processing lottery), I was unable to obtain tickets to a fair number of the pictures I'd planned to see -- most notably, Atom Egoyan's festival opener, Felicia's Journey, and Soren Kragh-Jacobsen's Mifune, reportedly deemed by some to be the best Dogma picture to date. (In the wake of the splendid Thomas Vinterberg film, The Celebration, that's some heady praise.)

In addition, there were a number of interesting films which, for one reason or another, I just couldn't fit into my schedule. Among them are Woody Allen's latest, Sweet And Lowdown; István Szabó's three-hour epic, Sunshine, with Ralph Fiennes leading a promising ensemble cast; Carlos Diegues' Orfeu, which was well-received at Telluride; Wayne Wang's Anywhere But Here, which is rumoured to have an Oscar-calibre performance by Natalie Portman; the latest Abbas Kiarostami, The Wind Will Carry Us (which is doing well at Venice as of this writing); Juha, from Aki Kaurismäki; Chen Kaige's epic The Emperor And The Assassin, which turned heads at Cannes 99; the Japanese animated film Princess Mononoke, which Roger Ebert recently touted as a viable Best Picture Oscar candidate; Frederic Fontaine's Une Liason Pornographique, currently drumming up raves at Venice; and numerous others, including a work-in-progress screening of Norman Jewison's The Hurricane, detailing the real-life story of wrongly-imprisoned boxer Ruben Carter (now a Toronto resident; I'd always thought this was a fascinating story).

I'm going into the festival with guarded optimism. While I was a little disappointed that some of the major year-end releases will not be playing Toronto -- I'm particularly surprised that Paul Thomas Anderson's highly-anticipated Magnolia won't make a bow, given that his breakthrough picture Boogie Nights was launched to great success here in 1997 -- there are a number of pictures which appear to herald great promise. Among the films for which I have the highest hopes or expectations are: Rosetta, the Palme D'Or-winning film from the Dardenne brothers; Boys Don't Cry, the fictionalization of the story of Brandon Teena that recently received an outright rave in Variety; American Beauty, touted by many as an masterpiece (though many of my more cynical / guarded colleagues deem this as mere hype); and Le Petit Voleur, the follow-up to The Dreamlife Of Angels by director Erick Zonca.

Alex Fung (aw220@freenet.carleton.ca)

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