Viggo at TIFF

You are welcome!

Thanks so very mush Snowy, I really do love them they are so wonderful.

Does anyone know the exact dates the 2 movies are being shown?

I do know it starts Sep 04 and lasts 10-14 days. I want to know the dates of the movies.

From the Canadian Press:
Pitt, Malkovich, Norton, Farrell set to attend Toronto film festival



31 minutes ago


TORONTO — Heavyweight movie stars Brad Pitt, John Malkovich and Edward Norton are among the celebrities slated to attend the Toronto International Film Festival next month.

Organizers say Pitt, Malkovich and Oscar-winning filmmakers Ethan and Joel Coen are set to bring their dark spy-comedy "Burn After Reading," also starring Tilda Swinton.

Norton will be in town with Colin Farrell and Jon Voight to support their film, "Pride and Glory," a gritty portrait of a multi-generational police family.

Meanwhile, there's word that stars of previously announced films will also attend - including Viggo Mortensen and Renee Zellweger with their western "Appaloosa" and Mark Ruffalo, Julianne Moore and Gael Garcia Bernal with their tale, "Blindness."

Late additions to the roster include the period comedy "Dean Spanley," starring Peter O'Toole and Jeremy Northam.
The 10-day movie-lovers' bash runs from Sept. 4 to 13.

From Doc Blog

Wow, What a ViggoFest this year

August 19, 2008

TIFF 08 Total Doc List Announced Posted By Thom Powers At 10:12 AM

Today, TIFF announced three new documentaries in Real to Reel – The Heart of Jenin; Paris, Not France; and Sounds Like Teen Spirit: A Popumentary; along with two new Mavericks conversation events related to non-fiction films – The People Speak and Picasso and Braque Go To the Movies. These are the final documentary additions to the festival, making for a whopping total of 41 titles, one of the largest non-fiction line-ups of any major international festival. On August 26, you can check back to tiff08.ca to see detailed descriptions of each film. For now, you can make due with these short synopses:

MAVERICKS CONVERSATION SERIES

The People Speak (pictured above right)

Toronto Film Festival kicks off fall movie season

Roger Ebert
Universal Press Syndicate
Thursday, September 4, 2008

TORONTO -- In the beginning it was happy to sell out a 500-seat theatre. Now the Toronto Film Festival requires 35 theatres and assorted screening rooms, starting with the 2,800-seat Roy Thomson Hall. If you're a moviegoer in central Toronto and want to avoid the festival, you've got your work cut out for you.

The 33rd annual festival, which began Thursday night and runs until Sept. 13, will open, as it always does, Oscar season. But with the independent film world in disarray, it serves not only as a launching pad but as a lifeboat. Half a dozen important distributors of indie and foreign films have closed shop in the past year, the North American market is increasingly dominated by mainstream blockbusters, and it becomes ever more expensive to open a film.

Since the festival essentially acts as a convention for the continent's film critics and showbiz specialists (some 1,000 press in all), a great small film can open here and emerge as a winner. That happened years ago with Diva (1981), which helped put Toronto on the map and vice versa, and look at what happened in 2007 to Juno after it played here.

At any film festival, the directors get as much attention as the stars -- maybe more, except from the purveyors of celeb info bites. Look at a few of the names on this year's list: the Coen brothers, Spike Lee, Jonathan Demme, Mike Leigh, Atom Egoyan, Kevin Smith, Darren Aronofsky and Richard Linklater (whose Me and Orson Welles stars Zac Efron as a teenager who finds himself being directed by the great man).

I hate making predictions, but my money is on Sally Hawkins as a best actress nominee for Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, where she plays a woman who is improbably and delightfully cheerful, until she needs to defend herself with unsuspected depths of no, not strength, but what might be called empathetic courage.

Since the Coens' masterful No Country for Old Men premiered here in 2007, their Burn After Reading has to be one of the most-anticipated films this year. It's a spy comedy starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt and John Malkovich, and more than that I don't want to know because the International Herald-Tribune saw it at Venice and reported that to reveal its plot "would be a crime against cinema-going humanity."

The high point of my festival is when I wander into a completely unheralded film and emerge enthusiastic. That happened with Smiling Fish and Goat on Fire (1999), a winning low-budget comedy by Kevin Jordan. It was written by Derick Martini, who is here this year with his own directing debut, Lymelife, a family drama starring Rory Culkin and Alec Baldwin.

And look at Ramin Bahrani, who has made two films among the best of recent years: Man Push Cart (2005) and Chop Shop (2007), which premiered at TIFF07 and is circling to land in my Great Movies series. He's here this year with Goodbye Solo, described as more of a comedy, which will be interesting. Does he sound like a foreign director? He was born of Iranian-American parents in North Carolina. Making a guess with my fingers crossed, I expect this to be one of the festival's best. He's so good I'm willing to crawl out on that limb, although no director always hits home runs.

Most of the entries remain to be viewed. One of today's movies I have seen is Ed Harris' Appaloosa, a wonderful western, which takes an age-old plot (new sheriff confronts outlaw rancher) and finds new drama and deadpan comedy in it. The quality of the direction will come as no surprise to anyone who remembers Harris' debut film, Pollock (2000). One of its treasures is the acting.

Harris plays the sheriff, Renee Zellweger plays the new woman in town, and there are two stars so deep in their roles I found them almost unrecognizable: Viggo Mortensen as the sheriff's deputy and Jeremy Irons as the evil rancher. All of these actors reinvent the types they play, none more so than Zellweger, who is neither the town's new schoolmarm nor its new prostitute (the standard female roles in westerns), but a sprightly lady who gets off the train and hopes to support herself on one dollar. She starts out cute, and then the waters deepen. Irons is most satisfactorily vile, and Mortensen is inspired as a sidekick who, for a change, is smarter and more insightful than his boss.

People are always asking me how they can get tickets at Cannes. The answer is most of the time you can't. Toronto now rivals Cannes in selection, and you can get tickets, although some hit movies are already sold out. That's the point: Shop the Discovery series, the indies, the docs, the films you've never heard of. Toronto has a large cadre of expert programmers, and no film gets invited here unless a couple of them thought it was good. The festival even used to be sort of cheap because of the low value of the Canadian dollar. Now it isn't (hollow laugh). But at least it's a heck of a lot cheaper than Cannes. And New York, for that matter.

Starry nights and days at film fest in Toronto

Friday, September 05, 2008
By Barbara Vancheri, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

TORONTO -- As the national anthem proclaims: "O Canada." Although it's more like "Oh, Canada!" this week and next.

The Toronto International Film Festival got under way yesterday, turning "The Dark Knight" and other summer sensations into mere memories.

This is where many fall and holiday movies have their world premieres, where the seeds of Oscar campaigns are planted, watered and fertilized with movie Miracle-Gro, where sleepers such as "Juno" awaken and where bad or mediocre movies happen to good people.

Imagine five look-alike Heinz Fields, with every seat filled, plus a few stragglers in the parking lots still sucking down the last drops of beer. That's how many admissions -- 340,000 plus -- the festival expects this year.

That number reflects both the public and industry, with film critics looking for this year's "No Country for Old Men," distributors hunting for another "Diary of the Dead" or "Thank You for Smoking," and regular folks simply aiming to have a good time in the dark or daylight.

Although there has been some grumbling that the festival has "gone Hollywood" in recent years, it still opens with a Canadian film and this year will count 29 Canadian features and 38 Canadian shorts among its overall roster of 249 features and 63 shorts.

The finalists emerged from 4,209 submissions and represent 64 countries. Three dozen screens scattered around the city, in conventional theaters, on university campuses and in buildings housing shops, restaurants and other tenants, will flicker with films through Sept. 13.

It's the Super Bowl of festivals, with hotel rooms at a premium, restaurants, bars and coffee shops jammed with visitors, and all the movies, star-gazing, sightseeing, shopping, dining and drinking that the exchange rate will allow.

The festival opened last night with "Passchendaele," starring, written, directed and produced by Canadian filmmaker Paul Gross.

Set during World War I, it tells the story of a soldier who is brutally wounded in France and returns home to Calgary emotionally and physically scarred. While in a military hospital, he falls in love with a nurse and feels compelled to return to the battlefield to protect her younger brother, now fighting in Europe.

"Passchendaele" kicks off 18 galas at Roy Thomson Hall, a 2,800-seat theater that will be turned into a slice of Hollywood heaven for the next 10 days. The red carpet will be rolled out for tonight's "The Secret Life of Bees" gala at 6:30, with "Burn After Reading" guaranteed to set the crowd on fire at 9:30 p.m.

"Burn After Reading" is the latest Coen brothers movie, and it not only stars Brad Pitt, scheduled to promote the movie in Toronto, but also George Clooney, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton and John Malkovich. Wherever Pitt goes, people, paparazzi and free publicity follow.

As usual, there is a Pittsburgh connection to the festival, and this year it's "Zack and Miri Make a Porno," directed by Kevin Smith, starring Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks, and set and filmed in Monroeville and other Pittsburgh locales. Word has it that tickets for the first public screening are "beyond scarce," indicating widespread interest, curiosity or both.

"The Road," also filmed in Western Pennsylvania earlier this year, will not be screening in Toronto, but star Viggo Mortensen is expected to promote "Appaloosa," a Western directed by Ed Harris.

Mortensen also appears in a fest movie called "Good," based on the play by CP Taylor, about a German literature professor in the 1930s who writes a novel advocating compassionate euthanasia and unexpectedly comes to the attention of the Nazi party.

The list of notable guests runs more than two pages long and includes such names as Peter O'Toole, Gerard Butler, Matt Damon, Guy Ritchie, Greg Kinnear, Debra Winger, Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Hudson, Julianne Moore, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rachel McAdams, Queen Latifah, Rachel Weisz and Zac Efron.

It doesn't get much bigger or better than this.

TIFF 2008

The Appaloosa panel:



Jeremy, Renee, Viggo and Ed



Renee and Viggo



All photos copyright to Reuters/Mike Cassese

Phiotos copyright to CNW Group/VISA Canada

Lovely pictures Jen! I just love that man!
He looks good in just about anything and sometimes
nothing at all!
Is it me or does it seem that most of Viggo's
leading ladies are blonde or dyed blonde women.
Well.....maybe it is just me!

Sorry about the small type in the above reply.....I didn't know it would be that small.

Reuters/Mike Cassese



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