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The very first swatch of film footage I saw at the 12th Annual Festival of Festivals in Toronto was, thankfully, emblematic of the whole event. The opening salvo of my first Toronto picture, Pedro Almodovar's Labyrinth of Passions (1982), is a shot of a flaming queen enthroned at a sidewalk café in Madrid, sipping two multi-colored beverages at once, shrieking "Overdose, overdose!" at the top of his lungs. (The Spanish accent clips it into three droll syllables: "O-vehr-dose.") This did a lot more for my early-morning mood than the cup of tepid coffee I was clutching.
It would have been easy to succumb to an overdose of celluloid if you pushed too hard. I always found myself either tuning out or nodding off during the fourth movie of any day. And this was partly because they made it so damned easy for you. The city itself seems designed for brisk efficiency: everything you need, from Chinatown to the gingerbread landmark Casa Loma to the world headquarters of Garth "Vader" Drabinsky's Cineplex Odeon Corporation (a looming fortress of pastel-shaded marble), is handily within walking distance. And Toronto's festival is commonly identified as the world's best-run major film event-as it would almost have to be, to successfully juggle 250 films at 9 scattered downtown auditoriums over a 10 day period in muggy/rainy mid-September.
Most of Toronto's movies weren't high-stepping entertainments, of course. There was new work by Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Raoul Ruiz, Alain Tanner, Maurice Pialat, James Ivory, John Sayles, Juzo Itami, Barbet Schroeder, Peter Greenaway, Francis Mankiewicz, Nikita Mikhalkov, and scads of others. Heavy hitters, all.
The "spotlight" series of all six of Almodovar's feature films, along with several very lively Hong Kong movies in David Overbey's Eastern Horizons program of Asian cinema, were, for me, the exhilarating high points of his Festival to End Festivals. (Overbey was named Winner for Life of an unofficial Paul Bartel Lookalike Comesi. I, the jury.)
Tsui I lark's Peking Opera Blues (1986) is a period action comedy so hyperactive and ingenious (one writer declared) that "it could make Joel and Ethan Coen shit in their pants." (Quote ads, anyone?) And John Woo's A Better Tomorrow (1986) is a romantic, violent, swirlingly stylish gangster melodrama about dueling brotherswith a...