There was a time when, for whatever reason, some filmmakers liked to see how far into a movie they could put the credits. Watching Amelia, you may find yourself wondering if this was the case here: surely any biography of the famed aerialist would spend a reel or so on her early life?

I assure you that you did not walk into the movie 20 minutes late. Aside from a brief shot of a pre-teen Amelia Earhart in Kansas, looking at a passing plane from a cornfield vantage point and vowing that she would someday fly, this handsome but largely uninvolving movie shows us none of the early struggles of the woman who, for most of the 1930s, was one of America’s biggest celebrities. I mean, I hate to second-guess the film’s capable screenwriters (Ronald Bass (Rain Man, The Joy Luck Club) and Anna Hamilton Phelan (Girl Interrupted, Gorillas in the Mist), working from the Earhart biographies East to the Dawn and The Sound of Wings). Maybe they researched it and Earhart’s early life wasn’t very interesting.

But given that women in our era form only a small proportion of licensed pilots, I can’t help but suspect that a woman trying to learn to fly in the 1910s and 20s must have had a hell of a time of it. As it is, when we first see Amelia (played by Hilary Swank, who bears a strong similarity to the real Earhart) she is being disappointed to learn that the flying stunt she has been hired for is a fraud in which she is expected merely to be a passenger on a plane flown by a man.

The bulk of Amelia, which is framed around scenes depicting the attempted round-the-world flight during which she and her navigator vanished in 1937, is concerned more with her romantic life than her professional career. These are to some extent intertwined, given that her husband (Richard Gere) was the publisher who promoted her career and her lover (Ewan McGregor) was an aviation pioneer and director of the federal government’s Bureau of Air Commerce. But despite her open avowal of non-conformity to her husband, none of it is so compelling as to make up for the stuff about Earhart for which she is remembered today—her passion for flying.

Prettily but blandly directed by Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding), Amelia is at its best in its final reel, which goes into the details of her final hours in the air, based on records of radio transmissions with her plane. It may a bit on the technical side (it seems to come down to a dead battery), but it’s genuinely suspenseful. As for the rest of the movie, it is briskly passed and edited, but overall less dramatic than the musical score, which seems to be working overtime to make up for the lack of a strong script.

Watch the trailer for Amelia:

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Raise a glass in memory of Vic Mizzy, the self-taught accordion player who wrote a lot of music in his 93 years but will be remembered by those of us weaned on the glass teat for two of them: this finger-snapping 1964 classic that I wish the Cramps had covered—

—(does John Astin rule or what?), and this one from two years later, from a show that I probably should be ashamed to admit that I always loved:

Wanna hear more? Check out Mizzy’s website. He may not have been another Raymond Scott or Esquivel, but I’ll bet they’re all hanging out at the same tiki bar in the sky.

Mizzy (center) with "Green Acres" stars Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor.

If you’re one of those people who watches Seinfeld on cable while you’re eating dinner, look closely at the episode airing on WTBS tonight at 6pm. (It’s the one where Kramer decides that butter makes a good shaving cream.) The old guy playing “McMaines” is Everett Greenbaum, a native of Buffalo who became a successful comedy writer. He created the hit 1950s series “Mr. Peepers,” starring Wally Cox and Tony Randall, and wrote numerous scripts for “M*A*S*H,” “The Real McCoys,” “”The Andy Griffith Show,” and “Sanford and Son.” He was a creative consultant on “Matlock,” and wrote a number of films for Andy Griffith and Don Knotts. In the decade prior to his death in 1997 he also appeared as an actor on sitcoms like “3rd Rock from the Sun,” “Grace Under Fire,” and “Ellen.” You can check out the rest of his career at imdb.com

Everett Greenbaum will be one of the recipients of the first Al Boasberg Comedy Awards, named after the Buffalo native who was one of the most influential comedy writers of the 20th century, having had a hand in steering the careers of the Marx Brothers, Burns and Allen, the Three Stooges, Bob Hope, Jack Benny and many others. The Awards will be presented as part of the Buffalo International Film Festival this month; you can read more about them in this week’s ArtVoice.

You can also watch this interview with Everett Greenbaum:

Chatter from a weekend of festival interviews:

—The famously media-shy Coen Brothers show up for their roundtable interviews (for A Serious Man, opening October 2) looking like they just rolled out of bed five minutes ago. For which you gotta love them, especially compared to the hip hop star who was getting her make-up adjusted a minute before the press conference she was a part of started. (In 25 years of press conferences, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before).

—I can’t say I understood their movie much more after speaking with them, but the Coens did admit that they are hoping to get Jeff Bridges to star in their remake of True Grit. That’s right—the movie for which John Wayne won an Oscar is in development to be remade by the guys who gave us Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski. (About the cult that has grown up around that film, known to its adherents as “Dudeism,” Joel Coen simply shakes his head and says, “Nobody’s more surprised than we are.”

—Alia Shawkat, formerly of Arrested Development and here in Drew Barrymore’s roller derby/girl power movie Whip It, when it came her turn to answer an ensemble question about what the most surprisingly thing about working with Barrymore was: “She smells really good.” No one asked the logical follow-up question—“Why were you surprised by that?”

—Comment Most Likely To be Repeated Out of Context: Drew Barrymore says, “I love to get plastered with my friends on Saturday night.” The context is how much work she puts in during the rest of the week as the head of a film production company. Let’s see if that one appears on TMZ.

—It takes a lot to score the biggest laugh when Ricky Gervais is in the room, but Rob Lowe managed that feat at the press conference for The Invention of Lying. Occupying the front row was a geeky-looking fellow wearing what appeared to be a large bicycle helmet with something that looked like an iPod attached to the top of it. Apparently broadcasting a live weblog of the proceedings, he explained that he gear was “the Virgin Radio Head Cam.” To which Lowe responded, “Here’s a word of advice—don’t wear that in public and you won’t be a virgin anymore.”

—Terry Gilliam, whose The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus opens in December, is one of the nicest people I’ve ever interviewed.

It’s weird to turn on the TV or look at the Toronto newspapers, all of which are covering the film festival in endless detail yet seem to be attending one in an alternate universe to the one I’m in. Of course, this is because they have the time, the inclination, and the staff to cover things like the red carpet premieres, when people line up for hours to catch a glimpse of this or that performer getting from the limo into the theater where their movie is about to show. The amount of press trying to get onto the red carpet has gotten so out of hand that the festival has just announced a lottery policy: get there three hours in advance and you can be entered in a drawing under which you might be able to win a chance to stick a microphone in someone’s face.

Real people, on the other hand, spend their days hanging outside the fronts of hotels where stars are rumored to be staying. Unfortunately I have business in these hotels, and I tell you, it’s not fun exiting into a crowd of stargazers and seeing the disappointment on their faces as they register that I Am Nobody.

But I’m here to see movies, and occasionally it’s possible to squeeze a few in amidst the round of interviews and roundtables and interviews. I was surprised at how much I liked Gasper Noe’s Enter the Void, which can best be described as 160 minutes of a dead junkie’s soul roaming nighttime Tokyo seeking redemption. I was disappointed by Whip It, Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut set in the world of roller derby. Much better were Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, aka Heath Ledger’s Last Movie and the Coen Brothers’ weird A Serious Man. (Well, aren’t all the Coens’ movies kinda weird? Yes, but this is the weirdest yet.)

The breakout discovery of the festival so far seems to be The Trotsky, a smart and very funny comedy with a perfectly cast Jay Barushel as a teenager who thinks he is the reincarnation of Leon Trotsky. You don’t have to know much about the real Trotsky to enjoy the movie, which will hopefully get a US distribution deal despite being a Canadian feature. (I don’t know why more Canadian films don’t get released in the US. Except for the ones from Quebec, they’re in English.)

As for the films I’ve missed—well, I’m trying not to think about those. I just came back from trying to see Capitalism: A Love Story, the new Michael Moore documentary, at one of the public screenings, but gave up after I realized I would have to stand in line for at least an hour with no guarantee of getting a seat. It opens in Buffalo first weekend in October, so I guess I can wait that long.

The Toronto Film Festival has had its share of coups in its 34 years, but this one has to be the greatest ever: the late Matt Damon has risen from the grave to do a press conference!

OK, he wasn’t really dead, but there was a persistent—if idiotic—rumor circulating on the internet yesterday. At a very funny press conference for his new movie The Informant! (I don’t know why the exclamation point is part of the title, but it is), Damon first addressed the rumor by “admitting” that he started it himself—“I just wanted some attention!”

But really, he was astonished at how much traction the rumor got. “I had to call my parents and everything. It’s a really reckless thing to do. I don’t even know why someone would think that’s funny. My publicist got all these phone calls from very reputable sources. I got forwarded the story, which if you read it just gets sillier and sillier. By the end this guy that is supposed to be my agent is just quoting the “Fresh Prince of Bel Air” lyrics. But CNN called, the Boston Globe called, all these reputable news sources. The misinformation, it can get around quickly because you motherfuckers are lazy! There, I said it. Bastards.”

Needless to say, he’s telling us this with a big smile on his face. (When someone address a question to “Mr. Damon,” he says, “Sure, now that I’m dead I get respect! Are my angels wings intimidating you?”) There are seven people here representing The Informant!, but it’s Damon’s show, and he’s having a swell time. The movie is based on the story of Mark Whitacre, the highest-ranked whistleblower in US history, who exposed an enormous price fixing scheme at Archer Daniels Midland in the 1990s. But Whitacre was hardly the ideal whistleblower: as became clear only later to the FBI, the biophysicist and executive was bipolar and subject to what can best be defined as a rich fantasy life.

Half of what Damon said this morning has to be put in print with disclaimers noting that he’s only kidding, folks. Like when he answers the standard “Why did you take this role” query with “The only reason I did this movie was for an Oscar nomination.” (He claims to have modeled his performance on Julia Roberts in Erin Brokovich, also directed by Steven Soderbergh, with the same goal in mind.)

To play this goofy character, Damon wore a silly moustache and wig and put on 30 pounds of extra weight. He says that when he asked Soderbergh how he wanted the charcter to look, the director gave him a one-word reply: doughy.

“So those were my marching orders. The rationale behind it, I later found out—I didn’t question it, I just started eating—Steven didn’t want any hard edge to the charcter. he wanted him undefinded. So you couldn’t pin him down.

“I talked to Robert DeNiro, who put on 60 pounds for Raging Bull. He said, the first 15 pounds are really fun, then you have to go to work after that. I found all 30 pounds fun.“

When one journalist seems surprised that he would call DeNiro for this, Damon points out that they worked together before, so it wasn’t like he didn’t know the guy. He imagines how he might have sounded cold-calling: “Is this Robert DeNiro? I’m a young actor…. Did you ever see Mystic Pizza? I’m in that. How about School Ties?”

Pressed to say something about any emotional downsides of such rapid weight gain, Damon is having none of it.

“It felt fantastic, I’ve never had that much fun making a movie. Really. I just ate whatever I wanted to and thought about nothing but the screenplay and the other actors. Especially compared to one of the Jason Bourne movies where I have to come home after a day’s shooting and go to the gym. That takes way too much time away from my family. I just prefer to eat. “

I haven’t yet had time to buy my copy of the official Festival program book, so I do something I always enjoy—going to a movie that I know absolutely nothing about. Well, I do know that Creation is one of the Festival’s Gala (that is to say, Big Deal) films, and that it was directed by Jon Amiel, one of those British filmmakers who went from TV success (“The Singing Detective”) to a middlebrow film career. That pleasant sense of suspense is dissipated in the first frame of the film, where title proclaim it a biography of Charles Darwin on the anniversary of his birth. I watch enough of this BBC Films production to figure out that it will so OK but not tremendous arthouse business before I leave to check into my hotel.

(Maybe that was a bad call: what if the increasingly vocal right-wing nutcases try to get it banned from American theaters for promoting evolution? Stupider things have been happening lately.)

My hotel is at one end of the financial district, and the theater where tonight’s movies will be screened at the other, so I have a pleasant 20 minute walk each way. It’s amazing to see how much bigger and higher Toronto gets every year, with more and ore skyscrapers in development (among them the new home of the Festival, to where it will move from it’s 30 year home in toney Yorktown next year.)

This growth is underscored by the opening material shown before each of the Festival films, which this year includes a sequence from that all-time hoser classic Goin’ Down the Road (1971), the story of two Newfoundlanders who move to the big city of Toronto to make their way in the world. (Plot summary: they don’t.) If you can find it its worth checking out to see how Toronto looked less than 40 years ago.

Tonight’s films sart with are The Invention of Lying, a fantasy written and co-directed by Ricky Gervais about an alternate universe where people always tell the truth. He plays the first man in history to conceive of the benefits of lying, and in the movie’s best scenes becomes a messiah. The parody of religion is terrific, but unfortunately not at the center of what is at heart an oddball romantic comedy.

Next is The Informant, in which Steven Soderbergh mixes his big box office and indie auteur sides to tell the mostly true story of a whistle blower who had more than a few of his own secrets to hide from the FBI agents he was working with. It opens next Friday in Buffalo, and tomorrow morning we’ll see what Soderbergh and stars Matt Damon, Scott Bakula and Melanie Lynskey have to say about it.

I hate to whine (not that you’d know it given the amount of whining I seem to do), but I’ve been in Toronto for barely seven hours and I’m already exhausted.

Gone are the days when I could see 50 movies over the 10 days of the festival. Now that my job is to get interviews first and to see movies second, it seems all but impossible to make a schedule without having major holes in my schedule every day. And I swear that the studios are scheduling their screenings in a competitive way: it’s not good enough that they get you to see their movie, they want to make sure that you miss a big competitor while you’re at it.

That’s probably unduly paranoid, but what’s inarguable is that in the past decade, as Toronto has grown to become a showcase for the kind of movies that Hollywood is proud to brag about (as opposed to the ones they make money from), this festival has become ridiculously toploaded. The festival lasts for 10 days, but most if not all of the high profile films are shown in the first few days. Sure, over the weekend you can get to talk to George Clooney and Matt Damon and Ricky Gervais and Jennifer Garner and on and on. But by Monday afternoon, they’re all on the way back home.

So scheduling for the film journalist who also loves watching movies is a major nightmare. Every choice you makes seems to shut off three other opportunities. That’s why I find it best not to even look at the screening schedule until the last minute: why torment myself with all the movies I’ll have to miss?

The press screenings started at noon today. I opted for Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, which reputedly had ‘em puking in the aisles at Cannes, partly because von Trier will be doing a rare press conference here (albeit by satellite from Europe—he doesn’t fly), but also because I figure the bulk of the press corps will either be at the new Pedro Almodovar movie or ogling Megan Fox in Jennifer’s Body. But Antichrist is sold out, and I sit in the first row of a theater that has seats built way too close to the screen—for a movie that’s going to be in my face anyway. It turns out to be two thirds dull talk and one third unwatchable violence, with a finale that can only be described as a distaff equivalent of the climax of Marco Ferreri’s The Last Woman. (You can’t accuse me of being a spoiler if I reference a movie just about no one has ever seen.)

More later …

On Friday Hallwalls will screen Transsexual Menace, a 1996 documentary about transgendered people defining themselves and fighting for their rights. The film was directed by Rosa von Praunheim, Germany’s most vital contributor to the history of queer cinema and an ongoing favorite at Ways In Being Gay. ArtVoice contributor Ed Grant interviewed von Praunheim in Manhattan last month. His interview will appear in the next issue of ArtVoice; in the meantime, here are some video clips of the interview (which you can also see at Media Funhouse, the blog for Grant’s popular public access show celebrating “High Art and Low Trash”).

Rosa von Praunheim on his 1990s “outing” campaign

Rosa von Praunheim on camp humor-Media Funhouse

by George Sax

Gigi it’s not. The piquantly wry take on high-end Belle Époque French life that animated Colette’s novel, and the Vincente Minnelli movie musical it inspired, is moderately evident at the beginning of Stephen Frears’ adaptation of another, earlier Colette work about the same period. But they soon give way to a more astringent, vulgar and skeptical view of the voluptuously self-indulgent protaganists. The joke is on these two in Chéri, but it’s not by any means a funny one.

The title character (Rupert Guest) is a very young, intensely self-indulgent son of a retired courtesan (Kathy Bates, trying hard but rather out of her element) who asks the youth’s godmother, Léa (Michelle Pfeiffer), to intervene for his own good. Léa’s reluctant attempt to oblige quickly precipitates a six-year-long affair between them, at which juncture Chéri thoughtlessly accedes to his calculating mother’s wish that he marry the eighteen-year-old daughter of a rich former colleague.

Neither he nor Léa admits to the other any sense of great loss, but her stricken response when she’s alone and his grim bearing during the wedding give the game away with little fuss or surprise. What follows is a descent into quiet personal torments and sentimental tragedy. Both of these practical amatory cynics learn about love tragically late.

Chéri reunites Pfeiffer, Frears and writer Christopher Hampton more than two decades after they worked together on Dangerous Liaisons, but the feel and insights of Colette’s little novel seem to have eluded them. Their movie is an efficiently streamlined version of a work that proceeds methodically and with a pointed Gallic irony. Early on, the filmmakers lean a little too heavily on a tone of dry romantic comedy, and in the second half they don’t really convey the emotional trauma adequately.

Pfeiffer’s Léa is a bit too unknowing and vulnerable, and although Guest is petulantly and impetuously persuasive, Frears hasn’t given us much room to develop sympathy for his plight.  The portrayal of emergent emotions that surprise the ill-starred couple is too cursory and flat. When the movie relies on a narrator at the very end to summarize Colette’s sequel (The Last of Chéri) and the significance of what we’ve just sat through, the absent qualities are only underlined.

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