Austin360 blogs > Austin Movie Blog > Archives > 2006 > September > 08 > Entry
One for three
I got to three films on my first day in Toronto: the quite fun John Waters documentary and two real dogs. The first dud was “Jade Warrior,” a martial-arts mumbo-jumbo saga blending Finnish and Chinese (!) folk tales; the second, a murder-investigation flick with aspirations to meaty psychodrama, bore the unfortunate name “Palimpsest.”
They take the “International” part of the “Toronto International Film Festival” name seriously here. Leafing through the program drives home the fact that, despite the best efforts of groups like the Austin Film Society, our town is still the boonies where world cinema is concerned. I count about 20 different countries represented by films that played on the first day alone — and that’s before the end of the lunch hour.
Of course, being from another country is no guarantee of a film’s quality — “Palimpsest,” a Polish policier, could have been made by advertising professionals in Burbank — but there are serious artists here, who have followings in other parts of the world, whose work is only available to Austinites via DVD. More on these filmmakers as I get to see their work firsthand.
Till then, I’m still convinced that Austin has an audience for more diverse material, if only some genius exhibitor could find the magic combination of venue, publicity and repertoire. John Waters had some ideas about how university film programs could be made exciting again, but none of them can be printed here …
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