Three years ago I interviewed Arnaud Desplechin about his new film, A Christmas Tale, for Paste Magazine. As grateful as I was to have an outlet that would let me write about such things, the talk itself wouldn't fit neatly into however many words I was given. It's a cinephile's film, packed with cinematic references, strange reverberations, and loose threads, and since Desplechin seemed willing to talk about every facet of the film, the interview, too, was herky-jerky and wildly allusive. But I kept having ah ha moments as we talked, the way you do when you unpack a dense-enough work, and I've long meant to share these tidbits.

So a transcript follows. I'm sorry it's so late.

Let me set the scene: We were in the last half of the annual Toronto International Film Festival, just past the point of exhaustion. Desplechin spoke a clear, somewhat manic, often skittering English. We turned only occasionally to the translator. And even in the media-rich environment of a film festival, where movie writers pack in four, five, sometimes more films every day, I found Desplechin's love of the medium both rare and energizing. Though we explored the film's ideas only lightly, the way he described his playful approach to its many fragments sent me sailing through the final days of the fest.

I've flattened his voice into text, but I hope you get something similar.

Robert Davis: When you see a bunch of films in a festival, in a short period of time, you start connecting them in your head and seeing common themes. And in this festival I've seen a lot of family dramas and family reunions. But yours is very different. There's more-- there's more energy and more acid, I think.

Arnaud Desplechin: [laughs]

RD: Could you tell me what your original idea was for the film?

AD: What you said, you know, more energy, more-- Just to be brutal. Really, it's coming from films, you know? Yes, I had the governing lines of the plot, but empty lines, which means I didn't know anything about the marrow transplant or-- Just the movement of it, the idea. OK, this amount of characters, they will be gathered in that house, in a large house. The title, the idea.

Do you have in Canada or the US these sort of houses during Christmas? We call them "les calendrier de l'avent". And, you know, each day of the month before Christmas you open a little window?

RD: Yeah.

AD: And you have a small gift, which is not a gift it is just glowing, you know. And so the kids open 21, 22, 23, 24, Baby Jesus. So that kind of shape, with scenes like little rooms. Plus in the set, little rooms for each character. So I had this shape in mind, plus I saw -- I guess I saw it when I was a kid but I didn't get it -- but when I saw Only Angels Have Wings by Howard Hawks, those characters were so brash, you know. And I thought it was so modern, and I thought, OK, let's think about the last films I saw this year. They are much more cowardly than the Howard Hawks movie, which was made in the 1930s! And the speed of it [snaps his fingers: snap snap snap]. And that speed in the movie-making was driven by the speed of the characters themselves. You know what I mean? In this Howard Hawks movie the guys are all aviators?

RD: Yes!

AD: Yeah, yeah, so they're risking their lives each day. I mean really risking-- I mean the opening is amazing. You have a main character. He's with a girl. Oh, i would love to spend some time with you. Let's try, let's go in a restaurant. OK, I'll take a plane. Boom, the guy's dead. You know, feels like ten minutes of movie! It's just so-- you understand that they don't have time to lose. So they go straight to the point at the opening of each scene, which gives this pace, you know, that is so speedy, because the characters are all experiencing an emergency situation.

So I was trying to find the emergency, and it became cancer, which is the big risk, and this idea of the transplant, you know, which is this idea of the danger, the threat, that forces all those characters to be that brash and impolite.

RD: I remember in Only Angels Have Wings, the way Cary Grant would grab the arm of-- who's the actress? uhh--

AD: Two actresses. It's wonderful in a film to have two love stories between the male and two actresses. There's the blonde girl and his former, ex wife or--

RD: Yeah, that's right, that's right. He would grab their arms and rush them off to some room, and it always seemed so harsh the way he would take hold of them.

AD: Yeah. By the way, I want to sleep with you. [motions as if dragging someone away] No, you say, you can't do that in films. Yes, but I don't have the time because I'm an aviator. Wow! It's so brutal, you know. So I thought it would be nice to have a family of big mouths like that, acting that way.

RD: What was your concept behind the music in the film?

AD: Several ones. When I finish a film, when I start editing, as soon as I don't understand a scene, meaning I can't figure out where the most intense moment is, what's the best shot, what it's about-- When I encounter a situation, I remove the sound. I just put some music, any kind of music, something that I happen to be listening to at the moment, and I edit like that visually, just like a silent film, with just the music.

And after that I put the sound back, and the dialogue always sounds right. I mean it's never pointless. If you have question-and-answer it always works. Because if the acting is good, it's good. It doesn't need sound for that. So, the music is the tool that helps me to understand what I did during the shooting, you know?

I will just take one very simple example. At the very opening you can see Junon. She's alone. It's quiet because now she's old and retired, it's in the provinces, small city. And she's fixing the tea for her husband. So it's cool and nice. And I [was listening to, editing to] some beautiful ragas, but I said why am I doing it, why does it work? I start to ask myself this question, why does it work? Which drove me to the answer, you know which is Jean Renoir's The River, you know? It's a film about family, it's a quotation of The River, Jean Renoir's movie, because it's about death, failure, stuff like that. But you have to express it in a sweet way, so those ragas were perfect. Each time you could see Junon, she was The River, she was Jean Renoir's movie, which is a movie about a family gathering in a house, you know? So it just matched. It permits me to understand what I shot, you know?

But before that, I knew for sure I would use the Mendelssohn score because here and there, there were some quotations of Midsummer Night's Dream, so I thought the Mendelssohn music would be appropriate for the firecrackers, you know?

And after each time it's something like that.

RD: And another movie that sort of hovers musically is Vertigo.

AD: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, this one I knew I would have to quote that sound, you know, because Henri's character is about-- He's a widower, he's the eternal widower. He had this wife, the Italian one, she just died, two weeks after [they were married]. And his mother will die, you know?

And then the mother is in this museum, and the name of the character is Madeleine. So it's about women and loneliness and the fact that when you love a woman it means that you always loved another one before. So it's quite deceptive, but it's nice. Let's be practical, because it does happen. [laughs] And so this feeling, yeah, the Vertigo, yeah, it just -- you see what I mean, so it sort of. Yeah.

RD: And the Charles Mingus song that's in the movie is "Reincarnation of a--"

AD: ... of a bird, yeah.

RD: "of a Lovebird." It all fits.

AD: Yeah. I think it was appropriate for the scene. [laughs] So each time it's a way to try to dig the meaning of the scene, you know. Plus the character who had this letter, which is so violent, so brutal, and when Henri is writing to his sister, the lines are really brutal, and when we discussed that on the set with Mathieu, we knew that we wouldn't be brutal, that in a way it was much more interesting to act it like a sort of regret, you know, to say--

And plus to focus on the very last lines, "little sister," the fact that he's sorry for his sister, you broke up your toys, you know, I'm really sorry, you want to fix them.

So to be full of love instead of full of anger, you know. And so I thought Elizabeth would have such a bad time during the movie, then to offer her a lullaby would be nice. So I tried the lullaby by Gerswhin, you know, and I knew this wonderful French jazz player [Armel Dupas], you know, and so we used the [quateure?]

And he added some improvs on the lullaby.

So, not to be mean to Elizabeth's character, that was it. It was a way to take care of her and her son. So it's always things like that.

RD: The way Mathieu speaks the letter to the camera seems theatrical enough that I wondered at first if it were real. I mean we see the letter, but later he says, since when do I write letters?

AD: [laughs]

RD: as if-- I wondered, for a minute, did he really write this letter?

AD: Just after that he adds a little, "Oh yeah, I wrote to her--" Actually the letter does matter a lot in the movie, but for the character, "Oh yeah, I just wrote it--"

RD: He barely remembered.

AD: That's it. But for him-- It's such a big deal in the opening, but the guy he just didn't realize how violent he is, you know, because the letter was quite violent. Yeah yeah, come on I wrote a letter. It's strange.

RD: I wonder, too, if he got some of that from his mother, who also has very harsh things to say, to him especially, about how her body is going to reject-- She doesn't want his bone marrow.

AD: Yeah, or the opposite when she says -- I love this line -- "Henri came from my womb, so I'm taking back what belongs to me." Wow, she's speaking like Schwarzeneggar, you know? And it's funny because they are so sure they hate each other and that they don't match each other, but they look alike, Junon and her son.

RD: And even the final scene, their final exchange at the end in the hospital, it almost seems tender. Even though the words are harsh, just the fact that they're together seemed a little bit tender.

AD: Yeah yeah yeah.

RD: Abel, the father, is a really lovable character in the film, and I know you made a movie previously about your father and about a house, and I haven't had a chance to see that yet, unfortunately, but I wonder if any of your own father is in the Abel character?

AD: I'm sure he would love it, he would be proud. [laughs] No, it's a different kind of character. And, yes, I'm a good son, I do love my father. [laughs] It's quite different, quite different. It sounds more like, uh-- [pause] Perhaps, does it sound more like my grandfather, the father of my father? Yeah, there are a few things, the fact that-- perhaps it's just because my father was like les pères qui maternent [mothering fathers], you know, that kind of character?

RD: Yeah. So in addition to Madeleine, there is another character we never see, but who is sort of a ghost in the story, and that's Henri's brother.

AD: Joseph.

RD: That's right, Joseph, the child who died. And there's also this wolf in the basement. I like how there are things just outside of the frame, things the characters are all aware of--

AD: Yeah.

RD: and that still affect their lives, even though they're long gone.

I was going to mention one other thing about Vertigo, which is-- I know your film is going to be in San Francisco's French series in October. Have you been to San Francisco?

AD: Yeah once-- er twice.

RD: If you haven't already you should go see the Vertigo sites. You can see all these different locations that are in Vertigo.

AD: I had the chance to do some jogging, you know, so each time I have been -- actually I've been three times out there, and my jogging is along the piers, up to Vertigo's bridge [aka the Golden Gate Bridge], and if you make a little loop, you can go in front of this place where the old arch, where you have this famous wide shot where-- you know-- Yeah! Plus, I was staying at the hotel just in front of Madeleine's place.

RD: Oh, cool.

AD: Yeah, just in front of the corner where he's parked and waiting for the first time, the first time that he's following her. I was staying in the hotel just beside. And I could see the place. It's amazing. But I couldn't stop thinking of Harry Callahan, too. Dirty Harry.

RD: Oh yeah, yeah.

AD: So sometimes I was seeing Dirty Harry and sometimes here it was Vertigo. It's quite a cinematic city.

RD: There's a moment in Vertigo when they're walking in the Muir Woods, and there's nothing special going on, but because the music is really eerie, it gives it this sort of ghostlike quality. And in your film, A Christmas Tale, there are many scenes, like when the two women are shopping, when the music is very tense, like something is about to happen, something sinister, but it isn't necessarily a sinister situation. I like how the music can provide a counterpoint in that way.

AD: Yeah, it's funny because it's a scene where the two women are quite-- I guess they try to impress the other one. OK, you're gutsy, I will be-- I will show you, I'm gutsy. I will show you how gutsy I am. You know, they are-- You're a bitch, I'm a bitch. Come on. Look. There's something like that between the two girls. You're funny. I can be funnier. You know, there is something like that.

Plus there is a real friendship between them which just happens. Why are we friends? It is just there in the middle of them, but Junon escaped. She escaped because she doesn't want the marrow transplant any longer, you know, she doesn't want to risk anything, she's bored with sickness, she's bored with the fact that she will die, she's bored with the fact that she's getting old, you know. OK, next year I will have this leukemia, and it's the last dress I'm buying. I won't be a woman any longer, I'll just be a pitiful human being, you know, shitting in my bed in the hospital. I won't be light and-- you know.

So there something, there is a sort of emergency pace in it, which is: it's the last time I'm doing it. Because I'm getting too old, it's the last time that I can pretend that I'm light and free, so that's why I thought the music was not to cheat with the scene but was revealing a facet of the scene which is relevant.

RD: One of the few things the family does together, is-- they stop for a minute to watch Cecil B. Demille's The Ten Commandments.

AD: [laughs]

RD: Why do you think it's important that they watch that movie and that scene? It's the parting of the Red Sea.

AD: If I was telling you the truth you would be horrified. I'm not sure that I'm allowed to say it, because it would sound so pompous and intellectual and like an obscure joke that I'm doing just with myself. I don't want to impose that [on] anyone in the audience.

First, I know for sure that-- I'm allowed-- I feel that I'm allowed to say it because I was raised as a good Catholic boy, you know, [the] Jesus character on screen is boring to me. I'm not saying for the other spectators, but to me he's boring because he will lose, you know. And I always thought that Moses was a better character on screen.

RD: [laughs]

AD: It's just like that, you know? When I was ten years old, I thought all the films with Jesus-- I know Passolini's film is so great-- but [in other films] to me it was a weak character. I was not that interested. Plus I couldn't relate because the guy is always saying that he's the son of God. OK, fine, so, I'm not the son of God, I'm just a human, so it was difficult for me to relate to a character so powerful, so it was quite difficult, so-- yes, I love the Biblical movies.

Yeah, but I remember because it doesn't shock anyone in France. OK, slightly, but people do not notice. But when you're in America -- perhaps not in Mexico but in Canada or in the US -- people notice it. I remember when I sent a list of movies that the family Vuillard would look at on TV, I had this very close friend of mine, an American, who said to me you can't put The Ten Commandments because it's an Easter movie, it's not a Christmas movie. It's an Easter movie. Specifically that scene. It's an Easter film. You know, [he said] we release it on American TV but just during Easter. But in Europe it's not the same--

So after that I start to think about it, and now I know why that scene. but I don't feel-- [pauses]

It's about circumcision, if you want me to be honest.

You know, that's what it means, the separation of water in the Talmudic way. You know, what does it mean when Moses crosses that sea and the sea is split? It's a metaphor for the circumcision that God will propose to the Hebrew people as an alliance between the eternal and the Hebrew people, you know, it's a pre-vision of the law that he will give in the Sinai.

So that's what the film is about, because you know Henri will go into the hospital on the first of January, and for a Catholic, first of January is the circumcision of the Christ, you know, so it's a sort of stupid game I play like this around meanings, you know? [laughs]

Plus, I knew I had this image this tracking shot of Henri walking toward the window, and doing this absurd exploit. I'm going through the window. it's so absurd. Instead of taking the staircase, you know, I'm going [down] the wall. Big deal, you know? And he feels like Moses, he's opening new lands, new promises. [mocking] What kind of a promise? Just take the staircase!

But he is doing something heroic for his people, which is to go through the window, and so you know there was something pathetic. And yet nice. I don't know. I don't know. So all these motifs.

RD: There's also something kind of abstract about the idea of the splitting of the sea and the way the-- the way the sea divides the land. There are lots of divisions in the movie [A Christmas Tale] between people and between eras and--

AD: Yeah yeah. And suddenly you can hear the sound. I love the sound effect. You can hear all the Vuillard's house submerged by the sea. You know, sort of, but it's silly and unimportant at the same time.

RD: Right.

AD: And finally, I'm saying to you, that it's Catherine Deneuve's father who dubbed the movie. He was a director for dubbing films.

RD: Oh really?

AD: Yeah! He was an actor, not a big actor. He was an actor. So for his living, he [directed the] dubbing of the great American movies into French. He hired actors and directed them in front of a screen to have a French dubbed version of it.

So the first time she saw the movie, her father said, "By the way, I have a big piece to show to you. We have tickets because I dubbed it. I did the dubbing," and it was The Ten Commandments, so when she told me that, I thought, yeah, it's nice for her, because she's looking at that and--

RD: It's perfect.

AD: --she can remember when she was six and she saw the movie. It was perfect.

RD: You have a lot of fun with film grammar in the movie, too, with irises, for example, and there's this neat effect that you do during some of the dialogue, a slow dissolve, a series of dissolves. It's almost a sleepy quality. How do you decide when to use that and when not to?

AD: During the shooting, mainly. Even the dissolve, I guess. The dissolve is-- the main things are done-- the iris, everything is done during the takes.

RD: In the camera, while you're shooting?

AD: Yeah. I knew-- I don't remember the first time I used it, but I knew because I used it when I was in the cinema school. And I loved the first time that Scorsese worked with the French DP from Cuba, Néstor Almendros, you know it was on this short feature film in New York Stories [called Life Lessons], and I remember so clearly the first time I saw the film in a theater, you know, Scorsese working with this DP I loved so much. Both of them together, and it was the story of this painter played by Nick Nolte.

RD: Yeah, I remember that.

AD: And they used the iris because he was coming from France, and I knew because each time you are going to rent a camera, if you say, "By the way, could you just give me an iris? How much is it?" It's nothing, an iris is like that [holds thumb and index finger a few inches apart to show how big the box is]. No one uses it. Oh you can have it for free! It's nothing. You just put a bit of tape around the lens, voila, and everybody does their work, the traveling, the focus, the diaphe, and I can do like that [motions with his finger as if pulling a little lever around the lens] and it helps focus the attention, without adding any pathos. It's not like a zoom, but all of a sudden attention is focused without telling a spectator what they're supposed to feel.

So let's say it's a tribute to Scorsese [laughs]. When he was working with Almendros.

RD: [laughs] Right.

After jotting down some initial impressions of Claire Denis' wonderful, warm-hearted new film, I sat down for a conversation with Denis in Toronto. As Stephen Holden wrote in the New York Times recently, 35 Shots of Rum is "a movie of few words and little psychology that relies mostly on the physical vocabulary of faces and bodies to convey feelings too complex to be verbalized."

That's often true of Denis' films, and when I talked with her I found that this one has a very personal connection, as well. She spoke about the great Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, about her grandfather, and about the interplay of work and family that appears in Ozu's films, in her own film, and even in her band of regular collaborators.

35 Shots of Rum plays March 13 and 15 at the Walter Reade Theatre in New York as part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema series.

Robert Davis: I saw your film yesterday for the first time, and I'm going to try to see it once more before I leave Toronto, just because I always feel like your films take a little bit of time. I like to figure out how to watch them. It's such a beautiful movie.

And what I discovered as I was watching is that it's an homage to Late Spring and Ozu!

Claire Denis: Yes. [smiles] I think I would not have been pushed or—

I've been dreaming for many years of making an homage to Ozu, and this particular film was possible for me to use as an homage to Ozu, because actually it's the story of my grandfather and my mother. She was raised by her father. And once I took her to see a retrospective of Ozu, and she really had a sort of shock to see that film [Late Spring]. That was like maybe ten, fifteen years ago, and I told her, "Maybe, once, I will try to make a film like that for you."

On the other hand I was a little bit afraid, and when I saw Hou Hsiao-hsien's film, the film he made in Japan—

RD: Café Lumière?

CD: Café Lumière, the homage, I thought maybe it's simpler to make an homage to Ozu. Maybe my shyness should be reconsidered. Maybe it's possible.

RD: What was the fear, do you think? Just that he's a master, that he—?

CD: No, my fear was that I'd be fulfilled with my love for his film and therefore not create a real relationship with my film. I realized this was a little bit stupid, because the minute I was in the film and with my characters and actors, I can't say I forgot Ozu, but on the other hand I was concerned by that story, those characters.

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Cynics like me think of the Academy Awards less as a celebration of quality filmmaking than as a promotional tool, both for the nominated films, which coincidentally tend to come into the marketplace just at the time when "Awards Season" hype puts their titles on people's tongues, and for Hollywood as a whole. But it wasn't always so. Announced 80 years ago this week, the first-ever Academy Awards for the 1927-1928 business year were decided upon not by a large voting pool but a small cabal of judges in a smoke-filled room, handpicked by Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences founder (and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio chief) Louis B. Mayer. The surprising thing is that the winners really were some of the best cinematic achievements of the year.

Mayer had instigated the creation of the Academy as a means for staving off unionization efforts in Hollywood. As the story goes, his attempts to use MGM workers to construct his new Santa Monica beach house were foiled by a 1926 union contract which made studio laborers prohibitively expensive to employ for outside projects, even those strong-armed by the Big Boss. Mayer was outraged; he had been able to use MGM art director Cedric Gibbons to design his beach house because designers, as well as writers, directors, actors and producers, had not yet organized into guilds. By inviting prominent members of each profession into a fraternity (and it was mainly men at first; Mary Pickford was one of three women among the founding 36 members) known as A.M.P.A.S., Mayer staved off the further alphabet-souping of Hollywood talent into the S.A.G., D.G.A., W.G.A., etc. for several years.

Awards were an afterthought in the initial A.M.P.A.S. meetings, but they soon grew to become a crucial strategy of studio/employee relations. "I found that the best way to handle [moviemakers] was to hang medals all over them," Scott Eyman quotes Mayer in his biography of the mogul. "If I got them cups and awards they'd kill themselves to produce what I wanted. That's why the Academy Award was created." This quote might help explain why that first year, the statuettes (also designed by Gibbons) were often given out for a body of work, not for a contribution to a particular film. For example, Janet Gaynor won the first Actress award for her work in three films: 7th Heaven, Sunrise and Street Angel. German star Emil Jannings won the Actor statuette for two roles he played during his brief stint in Hollywood: The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh, which is the only Academy-Award winning performance in what is now considered to be a "lost film" — if you find it please inform the Academy Film Archive!

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Every year, the lists. Lists lists lists.

And with each one comes trouble. For example, do we include films that we saw this year or films that were released this year? And how do you define "released?" Rules rules rules.

But more interesting than legalities are the inevitable philosophical problems. For instance, if my list omits a film that many other respected film watchers and blabbermouths have included on their best-of lists, does that mean I didn't like it or didn't see it?

I could answer that question in the accompanying remarks, but even an informative didn't-see-it seems to reinforce the year-end canon, a brick in the wall that keeps out the little movies that few people saw. Bricks. Walls. Slippery slides into oblivion. Make your own metaphor.

There's no solution, of course, but let's see if we can think of a new way to examine the field. Daily Plastic wasn't around last year, but with any luck this will become our tradition: we're going to dig into a number of year-end lists that we find interesting, one by one, day by day, and we'll examine not what they've left out (which will be covered implicitly by our own year-end lists) but by what they've included.

It's "2008 in Negative," not negative as an attitude but negative as a bas-relief.

At the end of the series we'll reveal our own favorites of 2008. I like to eject mine from the movie Jeep as the ball drops on New Year's Eve; my Plastic colleague J. Robert Parks prefers to mull the options well into January. Until then, we'll look at the early birds, the canaries in the mine.

• Roger Ebert
• James Quandt
• tangent: titular ink
• Kent Jones and Benjamin Button
• more coming

And finally, our own lists:

• Rob's Favorite Films of 2008
• J. Robert's Favorite Films of 2008
• Rob's Favorite San Francisco Rep Screenings of 2008
• J. Robert's Favorite Older Films Seen in 2008

A couple weeks ago, I mentioned how 11 of the 30 movies already scheduled for next summer are sequels or prequels. I know what you’re thinking--that leaves a lot of room for original stories. Fortunately, however, there are a lot of blockbusters based on other things we’re already familiar with. Like TV shows! Who can forget delightful TV adaptations like Charlie’s Angels II and The Beverly Hillbillies? So in the great tradition of The Mod Squad, next summer will give us The A-Team. I pity the fool who doesn’t go see that movie!!

I was starting to get nervous that Hollywood was running out of TV shows to make into movies, but then I heard they’re making Land of the Lost. Of course! Saturday morning live-action TV shows! We could be watching those movies for years to come! Even better, Will Ferrell is starring in this one. That’s kinda cool because he usually doesn’t have any movies in the summer. I’m a bit surprised, though, as I don’t remember Land of the Lost being a comedy when it was a TV show. But I guess with this and Semi-Pro, Ferrell is tired of making us laugh and hopes to make us cry, too. You go, big guy!

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A whole bunch of sites have been posting their previews for the fall/winter movie season, but who really cares about that? It’s just going to be a bunch of depressing family dramas, war movies, and stuff about history. The Oscars themselves are awesome, but watching the actors try to win Oscars sure isn’t. Anne Hathaway is already getting buzz for her performance as some kind of addict, but I wish she’d just give America what it wants--another Princess Bride sequel. Apparently, Mickey Rourke is playing a washed-up celebrity. Why doesn’t he stick to what he knows best?

Me, I’m still basking in the glow of this past summer. I mean, how often do we get Adam Sandler and Eddie Murphy in the same summer? I saw Made of Honor three times, The Love Guru four, and College five. My favorite, though, was Wanted. The plot was a bit complicated, but the chance to see a beautiful pregnant woman slaughtering whole cities doesn’t come around every day.

So rather than waste time trying to figure out what you should see these next couple months, I thought I’d look ahead to next summer’s lineup, when the real action will heat up!!!

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People used to tell me when to watch TV. They'd print up complicated charts for me to study so that I could always be in the favor of their dictates. Thursday night at 8:00pm. Be there. We're not waiting for you, so finish dinner quickly or eat it on the couch.

I don't travel with that kind any more. For the last year I've been testing a couple of solutions that break the schedule's stranglehold and give me control over what I watch and when I watch it. And they've given me a taste of what I assume will one day be the norm: I think of a movie or TV show I want to watch, I press a button, and a few seconds later I'm watching it on a plasma TV. And I watch it without commercials.

That's the future, but it's closer than you may think. The biggest shortfall at the moment is that not everything I think of is available -- not by a long shot -- but so much of it is that I'm not sure I could ever consume all that's available to me through this pipe. We've passed some kind of threshold.

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Every festival goer makes his own festival and finds her own themes. Half way through this year's Toronto International Film Festival -- which wrapped up on Saturday -- it was clear that I'd accidentally scheduled movies about families.

Then in the second half, film after film continued to round out this theme, whether it's because I was looking for it or because a coin flipped seven times will sometimes produce seven heads. (It was probably a little of both.) I'd have grown tired of the family reunions and blow-ups if the films hadn't been so honest and true, many of them not only exploring interesting subject matter -- deeply and personally -- but also exercising film as an art form. Denis's musical minimalism and Desplechin's cinematic vortex, each in its own way, found new ideas in a century-old toolbox. All of my favorites were fresh takes on the familiar, so every time a black sheep would darken the family's door or a shoebox of photos would appear from beneath the bed, I'd smile instead of roll my eyes at the repetition.

In that box of photos, Darren Aronofsky's wrestler finds a photo of his daughter and turns it over to find a list of phone numbers, all but the last one struck-through. The daughter in Claire Denis's 35 Shots of Rum finds an old letter that concerns her. The house in Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale has pictures of the black sheep's first wife, the mysteriously-named Madeline, now dead. Instead of a shoebox full of photos, Olivier Assayas's film, Summer Hours, has an entire house full of keepsakes, and Assayas considers his characters by measuring their affection for these objects: the stuff of museums and dollars on one end, mementos of sentimental value in the middle, and things that will remain in daily use forever, the past repurposed for youth.

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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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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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