THERE is a widespread theory that repeated exposure to screen violence desensitises the viewer to the harsh reality behind what's depicted in movies. An incident at my Toronto hotel last Sunday night firmly disproves that. I had spent days watching movies at a festival where mortality is a recurring theme and any number of people die onscreen, often assisted by ingenious special effects.
It was distinctly unsettling, however, to wake up Monday morning and hear on a news bulletin that three people had been killed on the 19th floor of the Delta Chelsea Hotel, three floors below my room. The facts have yet to be established, but early police reports indicate that a man and a woman were murdered by stabbing, and that the killer then turned the knife on himself.
The hotel moved guests off the 19th floor, which the police described as a "horrific" crime scene and "a bloody mess". As I left the hotel for the first movie of the day, the lobby was crawling with news crews. Most of the guests assumed they were covering the film festival.
Jordan directs Jodie
Neil Jordan has been a regular guest at the Toronto festival with, among others, The Crying Game, Michael Collins and last year, Breakfast on Pluto. This year he has been busy over the border in New York, directing his 15th feature film, The Brave One, featuring Jodie Foster as a radio show presenter turned vigilante when her fiancé is murdered.
Most unusually for Jordan, the screenplay was not one he initiated, but was offered by producer Joel Silver. "I usually prefer to do my own stuff," Jordan told the New York Times. "I read the script, and I put it down. But then I kept picking it up again. It was very basic, but there was something compelling there in this urge for revenge and reflection.
"It's a very American movie, a little like Don Siegel or Sam Fuller, a driving narrative that hits somewhere between psychology and myth. There's the awfulness of what she's doing. You don't want her to go there, and yet you understand it, and you can't stop watching."
You can start watching The Brave One when it opens next autumn, quite feasibly preceded by a launch at the Toronto festival.
Because we're worth it
I could go on and on about all the agonising scheduling clashes in the Toronto programme, but what can one expect when the festival persists in showing over 250 new feature films in just 10 days? My only serious complaint relates to the press bag we all got when we registered this year.
After last year's smart little black number, the 2006 bag is a hideous bright blue with garish yellow lettering. And then there are the contents, which imply certain assumptions of the festival regarding the media. The bag includes a box of breath-freshening mints (hmmm), a 14-day guest pass to Bally Total Fitness (even though I'm much too busy sitting in cinemas and restaurants) and a jar of Garnier "anti-wrinkle firming night cream" (which, happily, I don't need, but I know a few people in The Irish Times who might welcome it).
Thank you for smoking
Toronto introduced stringent anti-smoking laws long before Ireland, but it seems that movie stars of a certain stature - Oscar winners, perhaps? - are exempt, to judge by all the photographs of Sean Penn puffing on his weed during the All the King's Men press conference at the Sutton Place Hotel, which is festooned with "no smoking" signs from the front door to the restrooms.
Posterior kept for posterity
Brad Pitt brought downtown Toronto to a standstill when he turned up for the Babel screening last weekend, but Penelope Cruz rivalled him for column inches in the Canadian media.
In Toronto with Volver, Cruz insisted that she did not keep the prosthetic buttocks Pedro Almodóvar gave her to wear as she sashayed down the street in Volver. She revealed that it is Almodóvar who has retained possession of these special effects, proudly displaying them in his Madrid office. So now you know.
mdwyer@irish-times.ie
