Austin360 blogs > Austin Movie Blog > Archives > 2006 > September > 10 > Entry
The stars, obscured by clouds or velvet ropes
When you go to a film festival, everybody asks what actors you saw there. But when all you do is move from screening room to pressroom (where ink-stained wretches huddle over laptops to shoot out missives like the one you’re now reading), there isn’t a lot of opportunity to cross paths with the glittery people. I know Penélope Cruz, Will Ferrell and Dustin Hoffman are in town, for instance, only because I’ve seen bits of their press conferences out of the side of my eye on the pressroom TV. Ferrell and Hoffman are on the tube right now, in fact, being charming enough that this blog entry is taking a lot longer than it should.
Sundance is cozy enough geographically that I’ve bumped into famous faces in the restroom and sat next to them at cafes, but so far this doesn’t seem to be that kind of environment, which is fine with me. If I bumped into Ferrell at a party, it would take every ounce of my willpower not to ask him to imitate Dubya for me.
(Whoa! As I typed this, a journalist hunched down in front of the TV, handed her camera to a stranger, and asked to have her picture taken with the TELEVISED IMAGE OF DUSTIN HOFFMAN. What can you say about that?)
Still, amazing as it seems, some of these people who have been made rich and famous by movies actually take time out of their Toronto schedules to see a few of them. Two minutes or so before the press/industry screening of “Little Children,” Michael Moore slipped in and took the seat directly in front of me. He chatted casually when the person to his left asked him a question, laughed at appropriate times in the film and was one of a handful of people to stay until the very end of the credits.
At one point in the story, a man tells a woman that his wife makes documentaries. “Oh, like Michael Moore?” she replied, and the audience cracked up. (To my left and right, pens popped out immediately to note the incident. Mine was already at hand.)
About “Little Children,” which will be the eighth or so review I’ll file at the Hollywood Reporter: It’s very likely to be the best of the year. Hearing advance hype from a festival is dangerous because if you spend the months from now to its release hearing how good it is, you’re almost certain to be disappointed. So just make a mental note to see it and ignore any hype that comes your way.
Speaking of the Reporter, the other reviews I’ve filed there so far are: the John Waters doc “This Filthy World”; Phillip Noyce’s apartheid suspense film “Catch a Fire”; Will Ferrell in “Stranger Than Fiction”; the Polish crime flick “Palimpsest”; stand-up performance documentary “Wild West Comedy Tour,” hosted by Vince Vaughn; the “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”-obsessed romantic comedy “Love and Other Disasters”; and “The Journals of Knud Rasmussen,” made by the team behind the extraordinary “The Fast Runner.” Boy, are my fingers tired. They’re not the only thing.
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