You’d think that having done Toronto for six years now that I’d have it all figured out. But somehow I forgot what five-film days are like and scheduled three of them in a row. Not smart by me. So I wake up this morning tired. No, exhausted. Yet the first movie is one of the more acclaimed films to come out of Cannes. How can I pass that up? So I roll out of bed for a 9 a.m. screening. Somewhere the scheduling gods are chuckling.

In a more miserable world, the movie would stink, but not this time. Hunger earns its praise with a strong, unusual narrative and striking directorial choices. The movie is about Bobby Sands’s hunger strike in 1981 when he was imprisoned for crimes he committed with the Irish Republican Army. Interestingly, though, Sands is rarely onscreen for the first third of the movie. Instead, director Steve McQueen (no, not that Steve McQueen) focuses on a British prison guard, then two other I.R.A. prisoners. In this way, he conveys what a horrible situation this is for prisoners and guards alike.

This also removes every pitfall over which bio-pics often stumble. This isn’t hagiography. It’s also not an attempt to encapsulate all of Sands’s life or even find great inspiration in his deeds. Instead, it’s a capsule of the bitter conflict between the I.R.A. prisoners, who demanded political status and the rights that went with that, and the British government, who considered them terrorists and refused to give in. And by focusing exclusively on the prison, McQueen shows how those two positions created a cycle of violence that had ramifications well beyond those cells.

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Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum is one of those films that I hesitate to say too much about for fear of breaking the spell. It’s a marvelous story of a father, a daughter, and ... I don’t know. Friends. Lovers. Co-workers. It’s about a place. It’s about growing old. Falling in love. Family, both the blood kind and the neighborly ones. It’s about Life. That may be a cliche with some movies but not this one.

The story is obliquely told, Denis assuming that we can keep up, that the actors are good enough to convey with just small glances and smiles what we need to know. Of course they are. This creates moments of incredible beauty and power, as it dawns on us what’s about to happen or maybe what happened twenty years before, as we fully understand what we only partly guessed.

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I unfortunately feel a bit of pressure early on in a festival if I haven’t seen any great movies yet. I start to wonder if I’m expecting too much, given the time and money it’s taken to get here. I ponder if seeing five movies in one day is conducive to fair judgment. And then I see a movie like Goodbye Solo.

Directed by Ramin Bahrani, who also made the fantastic Chop Shop, Goodbye Solo is about a friendly cabbie from Senegal living in Winston-Salem, NC. As the movie opens, a curmudgeonly old man (a wonderful stoic performance from Red West) has offered Solo a large amount of money to take him on a journey in a couple weeks to the top of a mountain. Solo’s playful curiosity about the trip’s purpose soon reveals that the man plans on committing suicide. Solo being who he is, he decides to persuade the man not to go through with it. How? By drawing the old man into his own life.

What follows is an exquisite story, with rich characters, spot-on dialogue, and beautiful pace. Unlike other movies I’ve seen at the festival, where I wondered why certain scenes hadn’t been left on the cutting floor, every moment of Goodbye Solo is integral to the story, every scene propels the narrative forward. Grounding it all is a star-making (and Oscar-winning, if there were any justice) performance from Souleymane Sy Savane, who is absolutely charismatic as a man persistently trying to save another man. But Bahrani has such a way with actors that the non-professionals, especially the young Diana Franco Galindo as Solo’s stepdaughter, keep up as well.

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In an earlier post, I wrote that I wasn’t going to discuss all the films that aren’t here at Toronto, but most critics agree that this year’s lineup is unusually thin. At least when it comes to big-name directors, whether that be Hollywood prestige types like Clint Eastwood or hardcore cinephile such as Lucretia Martel. Some have blamed it on the writer’s strike, others point to the lack of quality films at Cannes and especially Venice. Of course, one doesn’t preclude the other.

That lack of high-profile films can be seen in my choices for today. While I’m excited to see both the Coen brothers and the Wavelengths program of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jean-Marie Straub, my other three films are selections I probably wouldn’t have made in previous years; they would’ve been superceded by something more interesting. Of course, that doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily be bad, and there are few things more exciting than discovering gold where you expected bronze. Would I strike gold today?

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The festival gets started on Thursday, but it’s not exactly a full day of movies. There aren’t any afternoon screenings and a relative paucity of evening ones. I suspect a lack of available theaters is to blame, but what it means is that the few available films are hot tickets. Since I always seem to have bad luck in the lottery, the result is that I rarely get an opening day ticket. On the first try, that is.

One of the things I love about TIFF is that the festival organizers usually set aside a certain number of tickets for each film’s rush line. This is where you can wait as long as you want, if you get there early enough, for however many rush tickets become available. A few minutes before the show’s about to start, the people in charge figure out how many empty seats there are, and then give that many people a chance to purchase a ticket. The first people in line obviously get the first tickets available. So if you really want to see something and you can’t get a ticket the regular way, you just have to be willing to wait in the rush line for a second chance.

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Ah, Toronto. I only come once a year, and then I spend more time in dark rooms than roaming the city, but the very word ‘Toronto’ inspires anticipation and delight. For a film critic, it means a festival lasting ten days in early September, and that means movies--30, 40, even 50 of ‘em, depending on your stamina. I’ve been going six years now, and some of my favorite films of the decade are ones I saw here first: 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days; You, the Living; Still Life/Dong; Be with Me; Tropical Malady; and Shara.

Waltz with Bashir won’t crack that list, but it’s close. It’s an animated documentary--an unusual combination--done in a style that recalls a cross between Richard Linklater’s Waking Life and certain graphic novels. Writer and director Ari Folman attempts to reconstruct what happened during the infamous 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre. Folman was an Israeli soldier when Israel invaded Lebanon. Three months into the invasion, the Lebanese Phalangist party entered the Palestinian refugee camps and slaughtered hundreds of refugees. Whether the Israeli army was complicit in the killings has always been disputed. Israeli soldiers were surrounding the camps, but it’s unclear how much they realized of what was going on, though later an Israeli government commission found General (later Prime Minister) Ariel Sharon “personally responsible.”

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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.

We here at Daily Plastic don’t plan on converting into a political blog anytime soon, but I couldn’t let the contrast between last night’s brilliant Obama speech and McCain’s perplexing vp choice go unmentioned. I’m a fervent Obama supporter (he’s my neighbor after all), but I understand why many Americans might choose McCain on Nov. 4. There are certain policy positions that people hold dear, and Obama doesn’t always match up with those. Fair enough.

But I am genuinely baffled by McCain’s pick of Gov. Sarah Palin. You stake your entire candidacy on your experience and measured judgment, and then you choose someone who hasn’t even been governor for two years? Two years?? And let’s be honest. It’s not like she’s the governor of California or Texas or some other big state. It’s Alaska, for crying out loud. I’m sure she’ll talk about the hard choices she’s made in being the hands-on manager of the state and having to balance a budget and so forth and so on, but let’s be frank. Alaska has less than 700,000 people in it. There are dozens and dozens of cities in the U.S. that are bigger than that.

What kind of foreign policy experience does she have? Well, let’s let McCain himself explain:

As the head of Alaska's National Guard and as the mother of a soldier herself, Governor Palin understands what it takes to lead our nation.

I am utterly speechless. I just don’t know how to respond. Those are her qualifications? McCain said that with a straight face??

And it’s not like this is a moot point, where the vice president doesn’t matter. McCain is an old man--if he serves out two full terms, he’ll be in his 80s. On top of that, he’s had health issues in the past. The possibility of the vice president having to take over for McCain at some point is real, and Sarah Palin is who we want in that position? Even Republicans have to be a little nervous. I know I am.

If nothing else, this should assuredly end all that crap about whether Obama is experienced enough. Palin makes Obama look like the second coming of FDR.

Last month, the British film magazine Sight & Sound presented an entertaining feature on dream double bills, asking various writers to describe a provocative or fun hypothetical pairing of movies. It goes without saying that this inspired bloggers galore. I’ve never been particularly good at that kind of parlor game, though it’s always fun to play. Last week, however, I stumbled by chance upon a particularly interesting double feature. I had the opportunity to experience Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon for the first time and then, a few hours later, followed that up by seeing the new Brideshead Revisited feature.

• Both are set in the past and use the past as a subject. Although their settings are 150 years apart, they resemble each other more than Brideshead resembles our own time, especially in how class completely dominates interpersonal relations.
• Both take relish in the spectacularly opulent use of castles and estates to signify wealth and impress the viewer.
• Both are costume dramas. The costumes for Barry Lyndon are especially fancy, but great care has obviously been used in creating the post-Edwardian fashion of Brideshead.
• Both use a voiceover. In Barry Lyndon, it’s a droll, sometimes ironic omniscient narrator, while in Brideshead Revisited, it’s the main character, Charles Ryder, looking back on his life.
• Both are about strivers, men hoping to raise their class position. Both succeed by marrying much richer women. In neither case does it end well.
• Both are about painting. Let’s start there.

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“Misanthrope seeks misanthrope” is the craigslist personals ad that Wilson, a screenwriter recently arrived in L.A., places the day before New Year’s Eve. Vivian is the blonde, unemployed starlet who answers his ad and bullies him into a date just hours before the clock strikes midnight. In Search of a Midnight Kiss is the movie that follows these two cynical but hopeful romantics through the streets of Los Angeles. It has the problems that afflict many an indie dramedy, but it also captures a certain vibe that’s winning and affecting.

The film does not start well. Our protagonist (played by Scoot McNairy in an adequate performance) is caught masturbating in the living room ... to a photoshopped nude picture of his roommate’s girlfriend ... and he’s caught by the roommate who finds the situation more comical than creepy ... and the girlfriend finds it “sweet.” Hmmm.

There are other moments in the film that don’t ring true. At one point Wilson and Vivian stand on an empty proscenium stage improvising a play. I don’t need to tell you that the skit is their cute way of working out their relationship. But writer/director Alex Holdridge must think he’s got something special, because the scene drags on and on.

Yet much of the movie has a different ring, of authenticity. I’ve only spent three days in L.A., but this movie is how I imagine the place to be. Despite the film’s low budget, the black-and-white street cinematography (courtesy of Robert Murphy) is well used, and Holdridge creates a sense of place that’s critical to the subtle desperation both Wilson and Vivian feel. And while some of the dialogue falls flat (it’s not clear whether the script or the lack of retakes is to blame), other scenes have a quiet power. I particularly like a morning-after sequence, as two people try to figure out what happens next.

Even in low-budget films, the actresses are usually attractive, a reminder that there are an awful lot of beautiful women struggling to make it in Hollywood. Fortunately, Sara Simmonds is more than a pretty face. She gives a standout performance as the brash but ultimately vulnerable Vivian. The chemistry she finds with McNairy builds as the movie closes in on midnight, with both leads beautifully conveying the emptiness that loneliness can bring. The secondary characters aren’t quite as interesting, and the story gives way too much time to Vivian’s hysterically angry ex-boyfriend. But when it’s just Wilson and Vivian trying to make it till “Auld Lang Syne,” I was happy to root for ‘em.