America Celebrity 1: TIFF 2011: Forget New York City, London and even Hollywood. Beginning this week, the starriest city on Earth will be in Canada

Forget New York City, London and even Hollywood. Beginning this week, the starriest city on Earth will be in Canada.

The 36th annual Toronto International Film Festival kicks off on Thursday, and the celebs are headed up north in droves.

Among the A-listers? George Clooney, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Salma Hayek, Keira Knightley, Gerard Butler and even Madonna are scheduled to be on hand for the North American premieres of their much-anticipated films.

Check out some of THE movie critic's picks for the most buzz-worthy films of the festival:

W.E.
For her directorial debut, Madonna takes on a woman arguably as iconic (and even more controversial) than herself: Wallis Simpson. Andrea Riseborough stars as the wife of Britain's King Edward VIII (James D'Arcy), for whom he abdicated his throne and shocked the world. W.E. garnered mixed reviews at its Venice Film Festival premiere last week, so look for it to stir conversation in Toronto.

The Ides of March
Already generating Oscar buzz, this political thriller stars (and is directed by) George Clooney as a dynamic presidential candidate looked after by a wide-eyed campaign staffer (Ryan Gosling) caught between loyalty and ambition. Gosling does double duty in Toronto, by the way, with his gritty, stylish noir drama Drive also unspooling at the festival.

The Descendants
It's Clooney again. (You just can't escape the guy – not that you'd want to.) Only this isn't the dazzling, dapper George we usually see. In The Descendants he plays an average joe whose wife has a boating accident in Hawaii. In the aftermath, he discovers painful secrets about his marriage and tries to reconnect with the daughters he sees every day but barely knows.

Moneyball
Brad Pitt's baseball movie has seen its share of drama already. Directors have come and gone, shooting was shut down at one point, and then there's the basic problem of how you make a movie that's essentially about statistics. Those are the knocks. But what Moneyball has going for it is strong early buzz, a great cast – including Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright and Jonah Hill, who plays a genius in the science/art of sabermetrics – not to mention Aaron Sorkin's name on the screenplay. The last thing he wrote? A little movie called The Social Network.

Pearl Jam Twenty
Director Cameron Crowe (Almost Famous) continues his cinematic love affair with rock and roll, bringing his documentary about the seminal band to Toronto for its world premiere. With concert scenes, interviews, and rarely-seen footage, Crowe chronicles Pearl Jam's meteoric rise and rocky years in the spotlight.

Martha Marcy May Marlene
It's the first feature film for writer/director Sean Durkin and it's been kicking around since the Sundance film festival ... last January. So what's the big deal with this tongue-twister of a movie? Only that's it the unveiling of a new star: Elizabeth Olsen. Olsen, younger sister of Ashley and Mary-Kate, plays a young woman who's lured into a cult and psychologically (and in all other ways) tortured by the charismatic cult leader (Winter's Bone's brilliant John Hawkes). She finally flees to her estranged sister (Sarah Polley), but soon realizes that she may have left her sanity behind. Here's my take: If Olsen doesn't receive award-season recognition, something is rotten in Hollywood.

TIFF 2011

How Davis Guggenheim stumbled upon U2’s breakthrough moment

If the 1991 album Achtung Baby was, as front man Bono described it, the sound of “four men chopping down The Joshua Tree,” we might consider Davis Guggenheim’s new film – the opening movie of the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival – as the vision of one filmmaker to update the 1988 rockumentary Rattle and Hum. American director Guggenheim, whose documentary From the Sky Down looks back at the making of U2’s game-changing reinvention Achtung Baby, spoke to The Globe and Mail about creativity, distance and the Irish quartet’s mysterious ways of challenging physics.

The Toronto International Film Festival kicks off with a decidedly rock and roll opening Thursday, with the world premiere of Oscar winner Davis Guggenheim's From The Sky Down, a portrait of U2 during the making of the group's watershed album, Achtung Baby.

The anticipated film, which chronicles the Irish band's struggle to redefine its sound 20 years ago, is the first documentary ever chosen as TIFF's opening night gala.
It was an "irresistible" choice to start the star-studded annual cinematic celebration, which runs Sept. 8-18, said TIFF co-director Cameron Bailey.
Point one in the film's favour was its director. Guggenheim, who won an Academy Award for An Inconvenient Truth, had previously brought two other titles to Toronto: the U.S. public education exposé Waiting for Superman and the guitar-rock doc It Might Get Loud.

Recalling Achtung Baby

"We like his work a lot and he has a way of getting inside the working relationship of very prominent people," Bailey told CBC News.
"We like the fact that [the film is] about the process of creativity, which is what we're about as a festival. And I'm a U2 fan. I love that album, so it was kind of irresistible."
In recent years, a growing musical undercurrent has also been running through the festival, admitted TIFF CEO Piers Handling, with high-profile documentaries shining a cinematic spotlight on recording artists like Bruce Springsteen, The White Stripes and Joy Division. Other TIFF 2011 films showcasing musicians include Cameron Crowe's Pearl Jam Twenty, Jonathan Demme's Neil Young Journeys, Albert Maysles' The Love We Make and Paul Williams Still Alive by Stephen Kessler.
"Music has actually been a theme for the last number of years for me and some of the festival programmers. It's been fascinating to watch [films about] so many of these great bands we used to, you know, listen to as kids," Handling said.
"It's very exciting because I think so many of the most interesting films being done today are actually documentaries."

High-profile films, international stars

Though not tied to a music film, pop icon Madonna will visit TIFF with her latest directorial effort, the romantic drama W.E.
Her film is one of the premiere titles to be showcased at the festival, joining David Cronenberg's psychoanalysis drama A Dangerous Method, George Clooney's political film The Ides of March, Michael Winterbottom's modern literary adaptation Trishna, silent film drama The Artist, Luc Besson's bio about Burmese activist Aung San Suu Kyi entitled The Lady, fast-paced crime thriller Drive and the baseball tale Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt.
Along with Cronenberg's film, notable Canadian offerings include Sarah Polley's marital dramedy Take This Waltz, Mike Clattenburg's dark, wartime comedy Afghan Luke, Bruce McDonald's mockumentary sequel Hard Core Logo 2, cross-cultural hockey comedy Breakaway, Jean-Marc Vallée's dual love story Café de Flore and Léa Pool's fundraising exposé doc Pink Ribbons, Inc.
Aside from the music docs, the non-fiction lineup also includes the latest from prominent documentarians Wim Wenders (Pina), Werner Herzog (Into the Abyss), Nick Broomfield (Sarah Palin — You Betcha! ), Alex Gibney (The Last Gladiators), Jessica Yu (Last Call at the Oasis), Gary Huswit (Urbanized) and Morgan Spurlock (Comic Con: Episode IV - A Fan's Hope).

Altogether, the 11-day festival will screen 336 movies (short and full-length), across 17 different film programs.
Showcasing new Canadian films, international titles from 65 different countries, emerging directors as well as veteran filmmakers and stars like Francis Ford Coppola (Twixt) and Christopher Plummer (Barrymore) — all are exciting prospects, said Bailey.
"The range of people and the range of films I think we're going to be able to bring to the audience is what excites me," he said.
"We are launching what we feel are the best new films of the year, here."

Recalling Achtung Baby

Canadian artist and über-producer Daniel Lanois, a key U2 collaborator over the years, recalls the difficult birth of the band's landmark 1991 album Achtung Baby, forged in wintry Berlin.
"It can be very grey, but sometimes the music that you make will go against the grain of the place that you are at … As I hear Achtung Baby now, I hear a lot of hope and a lot of gratitude. There are many, many flavours of that record that are not grey at all. They are fantastically colourful and futuristic," he told Radio-Canada in a recent interview.
Capturing creativity on film
"I've made many records that were not documented on film and I wish they had [been]. I made some records with Bob Dylan — it would be nice to see how they were made. I'm pretty old-fashioned regarding mystery. I like a lot of mystery, so I wouldn't want the film to just expose everything. That's not my idea of great art. But if there is an opportunity to see how something was created, and it's done with good taste and with dignity, I think that could help everybody.
Time to reflect
"A classic only becomes a classic with time, so to show everything you are doing at the time of release, I don't think that's as good as waiting 20 years, as U2 has done [with From The Sky Down].
"It's easy to say, 'Somebody was beautiful and they were great and they were playing fast and they were so amazing,' but what am I left with? You want to be left with something to take home. So U2 always leaves you with a little something to take home in terms of dignity and having celebrated subject matter that we should keep revisiting … It's a very complex tapestry of emotion that comes from those men, but I think goodness is pretty much at the bottom of it."

The Toronto International Film Festival is the Holy Grail for cinephiles.

Francis Ford Coppola will attend TIFF’s 36th edition as will Madonna, George Clooney, U2 and dozens of other A-list celebrities.

“It’s really exciting – it’s too exciting,” Maclean’s film critic Brian D. Johnson tells CityNews. “It’s a lot of work for us, but we shouldn’t let that interfere with the greater glory of TIFF because it is a remarkable event.”

Programmers have scheduled more than 300 features and shorts over 11 days starting Thursday – everything from mainstream to art-house. And it’s the place where an audience can create enough buzz to carry a movie like Slumdog Millionaire to the Oscars.

“When I introduced [filmmaker] Krzysztof Kieslowski at the Showcase Cinema in 1989, the entire audience jumped to their feet,” TIFF co-director Piers Handling says. “Ten days earlier, most of them didn’t even know who he was. That’s the power of this festival.”

Starting with Thursday’s opening night party at the new Ritz-Carlton on Wellington Street, Toronto hotels and clubs will host their own Hollywood-esque parties, including the OneXOne Charity Gala with Harry Connick Jr. and the annual Vanity Fair bash, a paparazzi favourite.

All are a big part of the $170 million the TIFF organization generates year-round.

Johnson, who covers both the Cannes and TIFF festivals, says though the latter has kept its artistic integrity, it has become a more “cold-blooded organization.”

“It doesn’t mean that Cannes is a better festival,” he says. “In fact, [TIFF] has gotten too good. It’s kind of like the industrial outlet mall of movies that matter.”

The storied French event, which was the inspiration for Toronto’s own film festival, has stayed manageable while its progeny has ballooned.

The festival that grew

At first, TIFF aimed mainly to nurture Canadian cinema, Johnson says, but now also serves as a “giant publicity machine” to launch films into the market, to entertain one of the most “astute and dedicated” audiences in the world, and to “bring to the fore world cinema that might otherwise never get seen.”

Though studios and indie players come to sell their “fall lines” – Paris fashion week being TIFF’s sartorial equivalent – films tend to get lost with such a broad focus and, unlike Cannes, no competition.

A scheduling conflict at last year’s TIFF had Johnson choosing between gala screenings of Black Swan and The King’s Speech. And this year he may have to turn down interviews with celebrities he would normally be clamouring to talk to, like Keira Knightley and Sarah Polley.

On its website, TIFF itself acknowledges its place as “the most important film festival after Cannes,” but Johnson says Cannes has in fact become more marginal all things considered.

And, the author of the retrospective Brave Films, Wild Nights: 25 Years of Festival Fever adds, TIFF’s ambitions were always lofty.

“It wasn’t an accident,” he says. “It wasn’t just a little festival that grew. In [founder] Bill Marshall’s mind, it was always a big festival.”

In the decades since it began, there have been only a handful of directors, all of them passionate about film and all acutely aware of the importance of throwing a good party.

Johnson says the celebrity side to TIFF took off in the early ‘80s when the festival staged its slickly-produced tributes to Martin Scorcese, Robert Duvall and Warren Beatty.

“The Warren Beatty tribute – the last of the three tributes – was where you really felt everything shift,” he says. “That was when all of sudden doors where closing and parties started to have velvet ropes for VIP areas.”

Spotting celebrities

Many of those VIPs will be staying at the Ritz-Carlton, which has hired uniformed police officers and brought in barricades to keep stargazers at bay.

It has also ordered 2,000 bottles of wine and champagne and about 450 kilograms of chocolate and enlisted staff from its other properties around the world.

And despite the TIFF Bell Lightbox drawing much of the activity south – and competition from the Ritz-Carlton – it’s also still one of the busiest weeks of the year for Yorkville’s Four Seasons, which has been preparing for months.

One year that meant removing the furniture from a suite and converting it into a full kitchen with induction burners and refrigeration to cater to a star on a strict Japanese diet.

“It’s all hands on deck,” says food and beverage director Marc Dorfman. “It’s a busy week, but very rewarding.”

Selected picks by Brian D. Johnson:

Footnote: The outcome of a great rivalry between a father and son, both professors in the Talmud department of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. – TIFF website

The Artist: “A black and white silent comedy that is wonderful and perhaps one of the most mainstream films I saw in Cannes. You could stick anyone in there and they’d have a great time. You’d think it would be more obtuse, like a Guy Maddin film. But no, it’s incredibly entertaining.” – BDJ

Melancholia: Denmark's most celebrated and notorious filmmaker returns with a fantasy/domestic drama about depression, severely dysfunctional families and the end of the world. – TIFF website

Take this Waltz: Canadian actor and filmmaker Sarah Polley makes a welcome return to directing with her first feature since the 2006 Festival favourite Away from Her. Luke Kirby, Seth Rogen, Sarah Silverman and two-time Oscar-nominee Michelle Williams star in this bittersweet story about a married woman struggling to choose between her husband and a man she's just met. – TIFF website

A Dangerous Method: “I would look forward to anything that Canadian director David Cronenberg has to make, especially something starring Michael Fassbender, Viggo Mortensen and Keira Knightley.” – BDJ

Drive: Canadian actor Ryan Gosling plays a stunt driver by day, getaway driver by night in this lean and mean crime thriller by the director of Valhalla Rising that won Best Direction in Cannes. – TIFF website

Selected picks by Steve Gravestock, TIFF’s associate director of Canadian programming

Pink Ribbons, Inc.: Léa Pool’s devastating documentary about the industry and “culture” around breast cancer addresses the rise of corporate involvement in fundraising for charities and the impact it has had on research into the disease. – TIFF website

“A really smart and in-depth analysis of the impact of corporations on charitable fundraising. I think it will ruffle a few feathers. I can’t remember the last time I left a film that angry.” – SG

Monsieur Lazhar: Bachir Lazhar, an Algerian immigrant, is hired to replace an elementary school teacher who died tragically. While the class goes through a long healing process, nobody in the school is aware of Bachir's painful former life. – TIFF website

“It’s a cliche for me to say it, but it really is a beautiful film. It’s really, really strong.”