All the mothers of TIFF 2019
There are many problems for mothers in this year's Toronto film festival movies, but Jay Stone finds that his real-life mother is still going strong
By Jay Stone
TORONTO — The other night I played hooky from the Toronto film festival to have dinner with my mother, who lives in north Toronto. She’s 97, but she’s in terrific shape. She works out every day at the gym, and, as she tells it, the people at the retirement home are less amazed by the fact that she can still get down to stretch on the Pilates ball than they are by the fact that she can get back up.
This gives me a tremendous genetic advantage in life: Robert Benchley once wrote that one of the keys to a long life is to keep one’s parents alive, at gunpoint if necessary. It also gives me a huge edge over a lot of people in movies at the festival, many of which feature plots revolving around mothers who have just died, although they continue to haunt their offspring with varying dramatic ...
Beautiful day in the Oscarhood: Academy Award hopes of TIFF
The Toronto film festival features several movies that could be in the discussion for this year's top movie awards, Jay Stone writes
By Jay Stone
TORONTO — The Toronto film festival is known as a launching pad for Oscar movies. Here are a few of the early contenders.
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: The re-evaluation of Fred Rogers — from figure of fun in a thousand parodies of his children’s program to American hero in a famous Esquire magazine article to secular sainthood in the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? — continues in this movie that’s actually based on that Esquire article. Tom Junod, an investigative journalist, was assigned in 1998 to do a short profile of Rogers (Tom Hanks) and emerged with a 10,000-word cover story that painted him as an unexpected wise man, a life coach whose simple wisdom could heal fractures of the heart. It was as if Being There had come to life as a puppet show for children.
In this ...
Fascism, Feminism and the big buzz movies at TIFF19
Movies: #TIFF19
The Toronto International Film Festival is the equivalent of Christmas morning to a movie critic, and oftentimes, the most appreciated gifts are the ones in humble packages, writes critic Katherine Monk
By Katherine Monk
TORONTO — For film critics, the Toronto International Film Festival feels like waking up on Christmas morning. Pretty, promising packages bathed in sparkling light and and a tangle of reflected tinsel have arrived at the foot of the Bell Lightbox, just waiting to be torn open. They will either be loved and cherished, or completely forgotten, disposed of with the next day’s trash.
There’s no way to predict the reception, but after a few decades of scrolling through schedules, pondering publicists’ press releases, and reading between the glowing lines penned by festival programmers, you start sifting, and making lists.
The first list is always the buzz sheet: What movies are coming to the festival with some advance hype — either from ...
The dark recesses of TIFF19 and some great expectations
Movies: #TIFF19
Smelling something familiar in the air? It’s the gentle fragrance of auteurism, leavened with the sharp odour of Oscar bait. In other words, it’s the dawn of TIFF19. Jay Stone places his bets on Tom Hanks, Nicole Kidman and Ed Norton’s directorial debut as a detective with Tourette’s.
By Jay Stone
SOMEWHERE ON THE WAY TO TORONTO — And here we go again, heading to the Toronto International Film Festival with a suitcase packed with black clothes and a head filled with dark hopes. Will our feet hold up? Can we stay awake through those evening screenings? Will we ever eat dinner before midnight? Did someone remember to pack the Lipitor?
Also: Will the movies be wonderful?
Some of them always are, but you never know: the hot buzz titles can land with a clunk, while the unknown thing you walk into because you have nothing else to do or the title grabs you — I always remember the unheralded documentary Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business as the ...
