The 14 Questions Looming Large at This Year’s Toronto Int’l Film Festival, Where the Sales Market Looks Weak

It’s Thursday, folks, and the Rams just got smashed by the 49ers in a battle of California’s finest football teams (the Chargers are still in ‘prove it’ mode, and don’t get me started on the Raiders).

Tomorrow marks the 25th anniversary of 9/11, which is crazy to think about. I was a high school senior at the time, one who dreamed of attending New York University, so I was pretty shell-shocked when the Twin Towers fell one after the other.

I can’t imagine how I would’ve felt had 9/11 happened just one year later, and I’d actually been in the city. I don’t think my mother would’ve let me stay if we’re being honest.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to deal with the horror of that day in person, nor did my mother, to her credit, allow such an unprecedented attack on American soil to deter her first-born from attending NYU when he was finally accepted. In some ways, New York was the safest place in the world in 2002. There was no way anything would happen there again. I was appropriately wary of the big city, but I wasn’t afraid of it, and I’m grateful to my mother for putting her own fears aside to support my dreams.

Of course, in the fall of 2002, when I first matriculated at NYU, the city was still reeling from 9/11. The wound was still fresh. In some ways, it will always be fresh, perhaps because it is seared into our collective memories. My heart forever goes out to all the families who lost loved ones that day, and to the first responders whose lives were cut short because they ran towards the debris while everyone else ran away.

I hope to never witness another 9/11 in my lifetime, and if history does repeat itself, I pray it’s far, far away from my family and me, for I can’t imagine having the strength to go on. But people did find the strength, and they still do — every day. God bless ‘em. That’s the American spirit for you. It’s unbreakable.

Speaking of unbreakable spirit, I saw Guns N’ Roses rock out at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena on Saturday night, and it was a pretty epic three-hour show featuring roughly an hour of pure shredding. Axl Rose’s voice may not be what it used to be, but he’s still a genuine one-name-only rock star. Imagine having two of those people in one band?

Yes, Slash is still crushing it on guitar, and he looks the exact same at 61 as he did at 31. Slash is probably one of the top five most talented human beings to ever hold a guitar, so it was pretty cool watching him do his thing last weekend — like watching Michael Jordan play basketball, or Richard Pryor do stand-up comedy.

Last night, I saw Na Hong-jin’s Korean creature feature Hope, which was a wild, overlong ride at 157 minutes (three minutes shorter than the version that screened as a work-in-progress at Cannes). The first 40 minutes and the last 40 minutes of this movie are fairly gripping extended action sequences, if a bit repetitive and monotonous. But there’s an hour in the middle of this movie that drags, and you never quite bond with the characters like you do in, say, Bong Joon Ho’s monster movie The Host.

The performances are fine… I just couldn’t get too attached to the characters, and I think part of the problem is that the humor in this movie is a little uneven, and it’s used to keep the audience at arm’s length.

Having said that, Na Hong-jin absolutely crushes the action sequence in this movie, to the point where I think he should be high on certain lists at Marvel Studios. Hope is a rollicking, kinetic thrill ride that doesn’t let up and offers a huge canvas for its characters to play on. The director’s sense of space and his use of space in this movie is seriously something to behold.

The movie may be flawed, and perhaps limited by its budget, but this is nonetheless a directorial feat that should result in studios offering Na Hong-jin multiple English-language projects. Whether he wants to “go Hollywood” is another story, and entirely up to him, but those opportunities will start to materialize after this.

Let’s just hope that if the director does, uh, “go Hollywood,” he doesn’t wind up making forgettable B-movies like The Mongoose, one of two new Liam Neeson movies debuting this fall.

Neeson has a small role in The Fix, which opens this weekend, but he’s very much front-and-center and in the driver’s seat in The Mongoose, in which he plays a military veteran named Fang who is framed for a crime he didn’t commit and forced to go on the run to prove his innocence with the help of his military buddies, including Ving Rhames. The whole time, law enforcement, personified by Michael Chiklis, is in hot pursuit, while his ex-wife (helpfully labeled as such in his phone), Marisa Tomei, watches news reports on TV and talks to him on the phone during breaks in the action.

The Mongoose is strangely watchable — such is the nature of movie stars doing what we love — but it’s also instantly forgettable, and I doubt anyone will be clamoring for a sequel here. Though when it comes to this side of the business, you never know.

The Fix actually fares a bit better, as Zachary Levi (Shazam!) makes a surprisingly effective action hero. He plays the leader of a special ops group (including Quincy Isaiah, who played Magic Johnson in HBO’s Winning Time) that heads back to Tehran on an off-the-books mission to retrieve $25 million in cash hidden in the walls of a hotel room — at least, that’s according to Levi’s former CIA handler (Neeson), who, by the way, has dementia.

Does Neeson remember correctly? Is he flat-out wrong? Or is he playing another game? Perhaps there’s something even more valuable than money hidden in those walls…

Throughout the movie, Levi’s character is haunted by what he must do in the film’s opening sequence — shoot an asset who has been kidnapped to spare him a worse fate. It’s a solid sequence, and most of the action sequences work here courtesy of director Guy Moshe, who served in the Israeli Army, but at 142 minutes, the film grows sluggish. It simply doesn’t earn that absurdly luxurious running time.

As soon as I saw that this movie was 142 minutes, I knew it would be a problem. This is why Hollywood needs a VP of Common Sense. Maybe they could help run my Twitter account…

Finally, on Tuesday night, I saw By Any Means, which has been getting middling reviews — one critic called it the single most crass movie of the year behind Melania — but I happened to enjoy it.

Mark Wahlberg plays a mob-adjacent tough guy from Brooklyn who isn’t afraid to swing a baseball bat at a kneecap or shoot a cop during an unwarranted traffic stop. He’s paired with a straight-laced FBI agent (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) who learns that if he really wants justice, he may need to crack some heads to get it.

I don’t care how ridiculous Wahlberg looks with a prosthetic nose; he’s absolutely delicious in this movie. You have to buy him as a stone-cold killer, but something of a teddy bear deep down, and Wahlberg walks that fine line between menacing and maniac. You root for him, and Abdul-Mateen II continues to show new sides of himself s a leading man.

I was a big fan of Elegance Bratton’s LGBTQ drama The Inspection, and while By Any Means isn’t quite as refined, it’s still an interesting story told in an entertaining way. I just wish the main villain (Ethan Embry) got what was coming to him. It took 30 years for the long arm of the law to catch up with him, but catch up with him it finally did.

On the news side, THR reports that Asa Germann (Scream 7) has been cast as Angel in Marvel’s X-Men movie after initially auditioning for Cyclops, and he certainly looks the part with that baby face, while Deadline reports Sacha Baron Cohen has landed one of the leads in Quentin Tarantino’s new stage play, The Popinjay Cavalier. If you’ll recall, Baron Cohen was poised to co-star in Django Unchained as a man from Broomhilde’s past, but he was forced to drop out due to a scheduling conflict with The Dictator, and the scene was ultimately cut prior to filming.

I suppose if you’re making a British comedy, and you’re Tarantino, who lives in Israel, it makes sense that Baron Cohen would be among the first people you’d call. I just wish I lived in London so I could see this in person. The first time I ever saw Tarantino was in person in a stage adaptation of Wait Until Dark (he played the Alan Arkin role).

Tomorrow, I’ll share my Final Emmy Predictions, but first, today marks the start of the Toronto International Film Festival, and I’m bummed I can’t be there. I simply had too much going on this year — apologies.

I hope everyone making the trek north of the border has a great time and sees some great movies, but I’ve got 14 questions ahead of the festival, which should provide a clearer picture of the Oscar race in the days ahead.

Premium subscribers may now enter the Sneider-Verse to continue reading and find out what’s on my mind as I put TIFF’s presumed awards contenders under a magnifying glass…

Subscribe to Premium to read the rest.