A Few More Films I'm Seeing at TIFF

A couple of weeks back I did my Mini TIFF Preview (http://davesmoviesite.blogspot.ca/2012/08/my-mini-tiff-2012-preview.html), about the 10 films I knew I would be seeing at this year's festival. Normally, I go to see between 25-30 films, but with a 1 year old at home, I can only go a few days this year. But I did have some holes to fill on those days, and this past Sunday, I was able to fill those holes with three additonal films. So unless I get some tickets from work, the 10 films I mentioned previously and the following three are what I'll be seeing this year.

The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer)
I try to see at least one documentary at TIFF every year, and since two giants of the medium - Errol Morris and Werner Herzog - thought enough of this film to add their names to it as producers after seeing it, that's a good enough endorsement for me to give it a go. The film is about Indosnesian Death Squards, who in the 1960s, wiped out Communists in their country. Unlike other people who commit genocide, they are regarded as heroes in their country to this day. This sounds like a interesting, albeit depressing documentary - and I am especially interested in it because apparently the death squad members have a love of Hollywood movies - the more violent, the better.

Aftershock (Nicholas Lopez)
Normally I wouldn't spend time at TIFF seeing a movie co-written by and co-starring Eli Roth, who for the most part, I hate. But since I will be staying in Toronto only two nights, and want to see the Midnight Madness showing each night, I pretty much got stuck here. Still, this film about a earthquake in Chile, where the survivors who got buried under rubble get to the surface and discover their nightmare is far from over at least sounds interesting. And who knows, maybe with the right atomsphere provided by a pumped up crowd at Midnight, this will turn out to be better than I fear.

Great Expectations (Mike Newell)
While it almost undeniably true that no matter how good this new version of the Charles Dickens' classic is that David Lean's 1946 version will remain the defintive cinematic rendering of the novel, there is always room for a new intrepretation - I actually quite liked Alfonso Cuaron's modern day retelling for example. This one seems to be a more straight forward, period re-telling of the story, but it does have a great cast - Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham Carter, Robbie Coltrane, Sally Hawkins, Jason Flemyng - and director Mike Newell can be very good. I am hoping it is at least an entertaining film, and doesn't feel like a school assignment. But from the preview, the film does look gorgeous.