Passchendaele

From battlefield busts to a CanCon-killing hockey musical, a look back at TIFF’s gala gaffes

Which attitude ultimately seems more healthy and likely to encourage improvement—Lindsay Blackett’s, or Kirstine Stewart’s?

Tireless CanCon advocate Paul Gross plays a lecherous devil in the new series ‘Eastwick’

It never rains, it pours. This week the big screen is teeming with history and politics. From America, fairly recent events are mythologized in two docudramas: Oliver Stone spins an instant-replay of George W. Bush’s life and times in W., which could be subtitled Attack of the White House Clones. And Stuart Townsend dramatizes the anti-globalization movement’s 1999 baptism of fire in Battle in Seattle, which conjures a pre-9/11 era of uncomplicated protest. In Canada, meanwhile, Paul Gross launches Passchendaele, his strained but valiant attempt to honour Canadian heroism in the First World War. These three films are radically different in tone and substance, but they are message movies—movies on a mission. And they all attempt to fuse entertainment with politics with mixed results.

Start your engines, and let the madness begin. For the next ten days, TIFF turns Toronto into the Cannes of North America, but rather than promenading down the Croisette by the beaches of the Côte d’Azur, those rushing to premieres will be sidestepping construction sites along Bloor St. in a city so thoroughly excavated it’s beginning to look like a Designer Walk war zone. Never mind. For those on their annual fall search for the cinematic grail, that’s just another obstacle. Navigating a major film festival is always an extreme sport. Scrambling t score a tough ticket or uncover a hidden gem is the name of the game. At TIFF, the stakes are high: no film festival in the world has a richer program. Which doesn’t mean all the films are great, or even good. No, with 312 films—including 249 features—from 64 countries, TIFF can seem like a motion picture paradise, or the industrial outlet mall of world cinema. The trick is to be at the right film at the right time.

The heroic memory of Vimy Ridge was almost buried in a dismal swamp with a lovely name—Passchendaele