TIFF: Triple play Monday

Monday was my annual full day of films when I take the day off of work and hit three movies in one day.

The first was The Other Man, a film directed by Richard Eyre who most recently did Notes on a Scandal. The director kindly showed up to do a Q&A for this 9am on a Monday showing and was eloquent and entertaining discussing the film and his actors. The film stars Liam Neeson as a husband who finds evidence of his wife's (Laura Linney) infidelity on her computer and searches out the titular "other man" Ralph (Antonio Banderas). The film was in what has become familiar 'good but not great' territory so far this festival.

Then it was off to meet Denise for brunch before we got into line for the next screening of the day. The movie was Religulous, which had premiered at the festival Saturday night and I had noticed the "protesters" of the film as I left the screening immediately preceeding. The documentary, directed by Larry Charles and starring Bill Maher, takes a satirical look at the idea of organized religion and has Maher interviewing subjects from a variety of backgrounds. The film seems to work a bit too hard to be deliberately provocative and push peoples' buttons but it still works. It's worth seeing if only to be a starting point for discussion. Larry Charles showed up after the film to answer some questions and he was fine but to me seemed to be bored to be there. I'm sure he's getting a lot of the same questions about the film but I got a bit of a "I'm the smartest guy in the room" vibe from him that was a bit offputting.


My final film of the day wasn't until 9:45 so I had a fantastic afternoon nap and watched the premieres of Entourage and True Blood at home (I could get used to the not working thing).

I picked up Kate and we headed down in the rain for the premiere screening of Gigantic. Thankfully the rain slowed to a near sprinkle while we waited in line outside the Bader. Gigantic is a movie from first time filmaker Matt Aselton which stars Paul Dano (who also has an executive producer credit on the film) as a mattress salesman who stumbles into a relationship with the daughter of a customer played by Zooey Deschanel. He's also in the process of trying to adopt a baby from China, dealing with his own family and has his own personal stuff going on. Dano and Deschanel have fantastic chemistry (she's really great with everyone isn't she?) and the respective fathers (played by Ed Asner and John Goodman) are larger than life and entertaining. The film would definitely fall under the 'quirky' description. I won't say too much more so as not to spoil it, but there is definitely a polarizing plot within the movie, and Aselton knows it based on his delivery of "I've never had that question" to the first question asked during the Q&A. He and Dano attended and took a number of questions after the screening, which lead to me getting home after midnight and not looking forward to getting to the office in the morning :-).