TIFF 2012 - Hyde Park on Hudson and Disconnect

Tuesday's first movie was Hyde Park on Hudson, starring Bill Murray as FDR and Laura Linney as Margaret Stuckley, his (5th or 6th) cousin, companion and lover.  Most of the action takes place over a 1939 weekend visit of the King and Queen of England.

The movie had grabbed my attention because I had heard really great things about the performance of Bill Murray.  And it's very good, to be sure, but I don't think that it warrants the accolades it seems to be getting.  The story is mostly told from Margaret's point of view, and Linney is typically excellent.  It's a pretty simply told story, and after a rather slow meandering pace seems to wrap up in a hurry.  After Colin Firth's Oscar winning turn as King George VI it was almost distracting to see someone else in the role, and the King and Queen don't come off quite as well here as they did in The King's Speech.  A good movie (B-) but not a great one.  I left the theatre mostly thinking...is there any president in history that wasn't a philanderer??

Disconnect is the first feature film from documentary filmmaker Henry Alex Rubin (Murderball) and is all about the ways that the internet and technology can screw up your life, told in three loosely intertwining stories.

In the first story, Jason Bateman and Hope Davis play parents to a young boy who is tormented and bullied both at school and over social media websites.  The second stars Alexander Skarsgard and Paula Patton as a couple who are the victims of identity theft, further complicating their already complicated marriage and lives.  Finally, Andrea Riseborough plays a reporter doing a story on young kids getting pulled into an internet porn business.

It's a really good movie (A-) and I was tense and on the edge of my seat as these characters tumbled towards potentially traumatic outcomes.  Well paced, acted and relevant.

Bateman, Grillo, Patton and Rubin attended and hosted a Q&A after the screening.  They discussed their characters and how their lives had been affected by the film in terms of their relationships with technology.  Rubin discussed the differences between making a feature and a documentary.  One of the things he did to make the movie feel more real was to find a 'shadow cast' of people who had actually been through these situations for the cast to talk to, which I found an interesting approach.  After being asked a few questions about the script and storylines he pulled screenwriter Andrew Stern up on stage to field them.  Bateman was predictably charming and funny (and completely charmed me) and he appropriately finished off the night by congratulating Rubin on the movie.