• When the Toronto festival draws nigh, we spend a lot of time at GreenCine Daily scanning for the words "Venice" and "Telluride," hoping to find out what to see and what to skip in Canada. In particular, we spend a good long while with Michael Sicinski's one-of-a-kind preview of the Wavelengths series of experimental films. (And, as we implied previously, we studiously avoid entries that mention Claire Denis so as to approach her films clean. I'm not hearin' nothing.)
• You could always turn to CBS News for such coverage. Take this little article, for starters, about Natalie Portman's directorial debut, a short film that appears in New York, I Love You, a sequel of sorts to Paris, Je t'aime and a prequel to Dubuque, I Like You But Not Like That (2009) and Modesto, You're the Tops Behind Paris, New York, and Frankly Dubuque (2010). In the CBS article, two paragraphs (of eight) are about the color, shape, and density of the items that Portman was wearing and clutching. The article also says that Portman, strangely, showed no interest in talking to this clutch of reporters about her film!
• Don LaFontaine, whose voice can be heard in thousands of movie trailers, has died. Over at Glenn Kenny's blog, Aaron Aradillas has posted some of his favorites. I like the one for the original Friday the 13th, which -- little known fact -- was first shown on a late-spring episode of Sesame Street.

Zeitgeist Films

Kim Rivers Roberts and Scott Roberts in Trouble the Water

Over Labor Day weekend, a major hurricane seems to have just missed New Orleans. But exactly three years ago, when another strong-but-not-record-breaking storm just missed New Orleans, much of the city was under water a day later. The national lack of curiosity about how and why that happened, after the arrival of a storm that was well beneath the supposed limits of the levee system, is astounding. When they speak about it publicly, government officials most often blame Mother Nature while critics of those government officials blame the lack of leadership in a time of crisis.

If you drove your car at 75 miles per hour down the highway and the wheels flew off sending your family into the ditch, you'd expect a better answer than, "Well, 75 is really fast." Or: "It's horrible that the ambulance took an hour to arrive." Yes, but. Nearly every American lives within reach of a major piece of infrastructure built by the same group who designed and built those levees, the Army Corps of Engineers. So you can even set aside compassion, if you want, and tether your inquiry to good old fashioned self-interest. Our mysterious national lethargy doesn't arise from either impulse.

Trouble the Water, a documentary by Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, exposes one small part of the tragedy and highlights the fact that the storm was just one chapter in a story that continues to this day. It's the story of Kimberly and Scott Roberts who didn't have the means to get out of New Orleans before the hurricane arrived. They rode out the storm, and the movie's buzz has centered around the footage that Kimberly shot as the water rose to the rafters of her Ninth Ward home. It's a compelling eye-witness account, even though the picture is as jerky as a video camera in a hurricane, but the footage serves mostly as the introduction to a movie whose heart lies beyond the storm and beyond New Orleans proper.

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It’s funny how you can read or see something, and suddenly you start noticing references that you would have completely overlooked beforehand. As I wrote a couple weeks ago, I read Howard Zinn’s provocative A People’s History of the United States this summer. Now, almost everywhere I look someone is paying tribute to Zinn or invoking his famous book.

The latest example is the hour-long video Profit motive and the whispering wind (lack of capitalization is intentional). Directed by film curator and scholar John Gianvito, it explicitly echoes Zinn in its attempt to reawaken our grasp of progressive history and the heroes who blazed the trails before us. Gianvito accomplishes this by shooting gravesites and other markers of memory all over the United States. Some are tombstones of famous people: Henry Thoreau, Harriet Tubman, Cesar Chavez. Others are less well known, though history fans and readers of Zinn’s book will recognize the names of Anne Hutchinson, Daniel Shays, and Eugene Debs, among others.

Although some footage of signs detailing labor strikes and battles will inform those who don’t already come with the necessary background knowledge, Gianvito provides little context for his shots, obviously believing that merely recalling the dead will honor them and provoke the viewer to find out more. There is an implicit trust in the audience, which has inspired some critics, but I couldn’t help wondering whether most viewers (at least those not already part of the “choir”) would just find the exercise baffling and unproductive. Admittedly, there’s little of the patronization that comes with PBS documentaries, but there’s little of the information either.

Not that providing information need be a primary goal, but the movie’s formal structure is also wanting. Intercut with the 3-5-second shots of gravestones and other markers are repeated shots of nature, specifically wind blowing through the trees. Gianvito has spoken of his pantheistic perspective, but there’s little rigor to his choices. I have no idea why he chooses certain locations and times for the trees, and I fear Gianvito doesn’t, as well. And certain motifs pop up (decaying tombstones, signs of big business) only to disappear as if Gianvito had an idea but then got distracted by something else.

Several critics have invoked James Benning, but Benning’s editing is much crisper, much more intentional. A cynic might wonder if Gianvito edited his nature shots by picking them at random. I’ll admit the film creates an almost hypnotic effect as it reaches its conclusion, with the pleasant use of ambient sound washing over the audience. And it has its heart in the right place. But if you didn’t know who Sojourner Truth was (or others like her) before you came in the theater, I can’t imagine that this movie will have any impact on you.

Ari Folman and David Polonsky/Sony Pictures Classics

Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir

The multiplex is a dead zone in August. In recent weeks we've managed to find a few films worth seeing in theaters (see the higher altitudes of the movie grid for a few), but in general it's a wasteland. You know it, I know it, and everyone brought up by decent parents knows it.

But it's coming to a close, and how can I tell? Because I'm getting excited about what's left to see this year, and here in North America, nothing kicks off the last trimester like the Toronto International Film Festival. Running from September 4-14, it showcases over 200 new films from established international masters and Hollywood hacks alike. There, in Canada, the twain shall meet and share a cup of tea.

The festival kicks off on Thursday, and we'll be blogging from the ground, but while we're waiting around, muttering, let's get the lay of the land. J. Robert, is there anything you're particularly looking forward to, or are there any films in the schedule that you can comment on today?

Before I run down the list of films I'm most eager to see, I can offer brief impressions of eight films that have already screened for press in the U.S. or have played at earlier festivals, three of which I enjoyed a great deal:

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