Funny How Fallin' Feels Like Flyin', For a Little While

First, a correction to my last post: Colin Firth plays George VI in The King's Speech, not Edward VI.

Well, all my predictions about the secret screening blew up in my face. The thing turned out to be Everything Must Go, a drama starring Will Ferrell as an alcoholic who loses his executive job on the same day that his wife tosses all his possessions out onto their front lawn and changes the locks. With said wife conveniently away, the guy obstinately arranges the furniture and stuff on the lawn like it's his living room and sits there stewing away and drinking lots of beer. Man, we've had so many depressive drunks in this year's festival. Ferrell is really good in a more or less straightforward role, and he plays well off a talented supporting cast that includes Rebecca Hall as a pregnant neighbor and Christopher Caldwell (Biggie Smalls' son in real life) as a kid who helps him sell off some of his stuff. The movie is based on Raymond Carver's short story "Why Don't You Dance?", but it's funnier and it ends more hopefully. I'm not sure how the movie will do in the general release that it's scheduled for next year; not much happens in it, particularly because the main character is trying to keep things from happening to him. Yet Ferrell's performance and the movie's subtle humor are enough to make it worth a look. The film was shot in the Phoenix area; writer-director Dan Rush reported that the houses he used were some of the only ones in the city that had a grassy lawn. Most of the houses there have rock gardens and desert landscapes out front, which does cut down the city's water usage.

I've never attended the music events at LSIFF before, but I stopped by 8.0 to catch Jeff Bridges and T-Bone Burnett. T-Bone took the lead on "Honkytonk Angel" and "Don't You Lie to Me," while guitarist Colin Linden did a fantastic job fronting four songs by the likes of Howlin' Wolf and The Band. The crowd was there to see Bridges, though, and he didn't disappoint. He and Burnett played the Bad Blake songs from Crazy Heart, and they are as good as I remembered them. Bridges fittingly dedicated "Brand New Angel" to the late Stephen Bruton. All in all, it was pretty awe-inspiring having these distinguished artists take the stage at 8.0. The festival organizers seem to be pretty good at tying these musical events into the movie world so that moviegoers will be interested. I'm looking forward to next year's closing-night concert, for which I fully expect LSIFF to book Gwyneth Paltrow and the cast of Country Strong.

Let's see if there are surprises on the last day of the festival tomorrow. — Kristian Lin

Waking Up with T-Bone

Started off the morning by going to an appearance at Fort Worth Public Library by the one and only T-Bone Burnett. His legendary discomfort with interviews showed, but he was quite gracious. He talked up his recently released albums with Elvis Costello (National Ransom) and Elton John and Leon Russell (The Union). He wasn't that revealing on his work in films, but he's not too high on the digitalization of music. He said that he happened to be very close to a digital TV that had a World Cup match on last summer, and he noticed that the ball looked square from his viewing position. "That's what digital is," he said. "A square ball."

The shorts program this afternoon was rather undistinguished compared with the other two I've seen. Lauren Wolkstein's Cigarette Candy didn't say much new in its story about a Marine returning home, though it had a fine lead performance by Jonny Orsini. Daniel Trevino's Amateur was very slight, too, about a guy who freaks out during an encounter with a girl in a bikini who turns out to have a penis. Jonathan Shepard's documentary The Sharecropper interviews a series of chicken farmers who were screwed over by Pilgrim's Pride. I wanted more rigorous journalism from this piece. The only short that really impressed me was Pablo Larcuen's Mi Amigo Invisible, a Spanish-language comedy about a fat nerdy young man who's so pathologically shy that he can't even speak to his own parents. (He never speaks on camera, but he narrates the story in voiceover.) That changes when an invisible friend comes to him, a shirtless dude wearing tight shorts, a cape, and an Admiral Ackbar mask. Nice piece of deadpan humor.

I'm left to speculate on the secret screening I'm supposed to see in less than two hours. I thought I had it pegged; with Jeff Bridges in town for a tribute, I figured it might be the Coen brothers' remake of True Grit, which would be a huge get for LSIFF. (Using similar logic, my second choice was Tron: Legacy, which would be a huge get for entirely different reasons.) However, my picks were blown out of the water by a note in the program saying that our mystery film played at the Toronto Film Festival earlier this year. That scratches both of the Bridges films. It also rules out Country Strong, which would have made a nice companion with the screenings of Crazy Heart and The Blind Side that played at the festival earlier today. It also would have made sense because writer-director Shana Feste had her debut film The Greatest unveiled at last year's LSIFF.

So what are the possibilities? Most of Toronto's bigger items have already hit the movie theaters, but the ones that haven't include John Cameron Mitchell's Rabbit Hole, a heavy drama starring Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart as a couple dealing with the death of their young son. Then there's Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine, starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams as a couple who fall in and out of love. (The movie recently got rated R by the MPAA, which caused everyone who had seen the film to go "Whuh?") There's also Robert Redford's The Conspirator, a period piece about the criminals who took part in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in the days immediately after the president's shooting. Tom Hooper's The King's Speech has been getting all sorts of Oscar buzz lately, starring Colin Firth as King Edward VI of Britain and Geoffrey Rush as the speech therapist who taught him to overcome his stutter. My fondest wish, though, is that the mystery film might be Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, with Natalie Portman as a star ballerina who's going insane. If LSIFF has that one, I'm going to bow down to them. We'll find out soon, and I'll let you all know how it turned out.