Showing posts with label
Toronto International Film Festival.
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Showing posts with label
Toronto International Film Festival.
Show all posts
From my 9.24.18 Variety review: “The real-life
misadventures of central figures in the 2013 Major League Baseball doping
scandal play like outrageous twists and turns in the seriocomic crime fiction
of Carl Hiassen or Elmore Leonard throughout Screwball, an impudently entertaining documentary that suggests
what might result if the Monty Python troupe were given carte blanche to produce
an investigative report for 60 Minutes.
“It comes to us from Billy Corben, a filmmaker whose previous
chronicles of illicit activity and entrepreneurial drug traders in and around
Miami (Cocaine Cowboys, Square Grouper: The Godfathers of Ganja)
might now be viewed as warm-up pitches for his latest effort. This time on the
mound, he throws heat and scores impressively with help from a lineup that
includes baseball All-Stars, mob-connected lowlifes, tanning and bodybuilding
enthusiasts, free-spending MLB investigators, and an unlicensed anti-aging
expert whose lack of bona fide medical credentials scarcely hindered his
ability to provide, one way or the other, performance-enhancing drugs for his
clients. The latter shady character, Anthony Bosch, emerges early on as
Corben’s most valuable player, in that his astonishingly unfiltered (albeit
chronically self-justifying) account of his starring role in the doping scandal
makes him the indisputable standout among the movie’s cast of colorful
interviewees.”
BTW: Immediately after I saw Screwball at the 2018 Toronto Film Festival, I went to a
sports-themed bar-restaurant near my rented condo for dinner. At one point, I
looked up from my table, glanced at one of the establishment’s many TV screens
and saw one of the film’s “stars” — Alex Rodriguez — offering commentary on ESPN.
No, seriously.
Screwball is now available for
streaming on Netflix. You can read the rest of my Variety review here.
Thought I might not make it back this year, but here I am: All ready to start viewing and reviewing when the press screenings start bright and early tomorrow morning. A sobering thought: I have already attended three-quarters of all the festivals in the history of the Toronto International Fim Festival. I'm keeping my fingers crossed so I'll make it to the 50th annual event. And beyond.
OK, I admit: I was leaning toward seeing Kill Me Three Times next week at the Toronto International Film Festival even before I got a look at this animated poster, since Simon Pegg is a personal fave. But the poster has more or less sealed the deal. Yes, I'm that easy.
So what's it all about? Well, according to the TIFF catalog:
KILL ME THREE TIMES is a darkly comedic thriller from rising star director Kriv Stenders (Red Dog). Simon Pegg plays the mercurial assassin, Charlie Wofle, who discovers he isn't the only person trying to kill the siren of a sun drenched surfing town (Alice Braga). Charlie quickly finds himself at the center of three tales of murder, mayhem, blackmail and revenge. With an original screenplay by James McFarland, the film also stars Sullivan Stapleton (as a gambling addict that attempts to pay off his debts through a risky life insurance scam), Teresa Palmer (as a small town Lady Macbeth), Callan Mulvey (as a wealthy beach club owner simmering with jealousy), Luke Hemsworth (as a local surfer fighting for the woman he loves) and Bryan Brown (as a corrupt cop who demands the juiciest cut). Kill Me Three Times was produced by Laurence Malkin and Share Stallings (the team behind Death At A Funeral and A Few Best Men) and Tania Chambers.
Just one question: Wouldn't it be more gramatically correct to describe Sullivan Stapleton's character as "a gambling addict who attempts to pay off his debts..."?
