More flicks added to TIFF slate

Aug 10, 2004 by Ian Evans

The 29th Toronto International has announced more of the flicks that will unspool in September.

Vadim Jean’s Jiminy Glick in Lalawood will receives its world premiere as the Closing Night Gala Presentation of this year’s festival, a fitting spot since the festival plays a role in the story.

Starring Martin Short, this highly improvised comedy follows exuberant entertainment critic Jiminy Glick as his dreams of all-encompassing celebrity land him in the comical trappings of an outlandish murder mystery. The film also stars Jan Hooks, Linda Cardellini, Janeane Garofalo, John Michael Higgins, Elizabeth Perkins, Larry Joe Campbell, DeRay Davis, Aries Spears, and Gary Anthony Williams.

Director David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees will also have its world premiere this September as a Gala Presentation. The film features an outstanding ensemble cast that includes two-time Academy Award®-winner Dustin Hoffman, Jude Law, Jason Schwartzman, Naomi Watts, Lily Tomlin, Mark Wahlberg, Isabelle Huppert. This existential comedy is directed by Three Kings helmer David O. Russell.

Academy Award®-winning writer-director Bill Condon’s Kinsey will have its world premiere as a Gala Presentation. Liam Neeson portrays scientist Alfred Kinsey as he sets out to research the sexuality of Americans and finds himself at the height of a controversial media frenzy. The film is supported by a cast that features Laura Linney, Chris O’Donnell, Peter Sarsgaard, Timothy Hutton, John Lithgow, Tim Curry, Oliver Platt, Dylan Baker, and Lynn Redgrave.

Another gala at the festival, Imaginary Heroes, comes from first-time feature director Dan Harris. Starring Sigourney Weaver, Jeff Daniels, Emile Hirsch, and Michelle Williams, Imaginary Heroes is a funny and poignant coming of age story in which the façade of an ordinary American family is peeled back to reveal that nothing is as it seems.

More films have also been added to the Festival’s Special Presentations programme.

Set in modern-day Los Angeles, Crash, an epic and powerful feature debut from Canadian-born writer and director Paul Haggis, weaves together the stories of eight disparate characters whose lives intersect around a car crash and a murder investigation. The film stars Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Jennifer Esposito, Bill Fichtner, Brendan Fraser, Ludacris, Thandie Newton, Ryan Phillippe, and Larenz Tate.

Haven, Frank E. Flowers’ feature debut, is an absorbing crime-drama about greed, love, and vengeance. The film features Bill Paxton and Orlando Bloom.

About Schmidt’s Alexander Payne teams up Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church in Sideways, a road trip celebrating Jack’s final days as a bachelor that careena woefully sideways as they hit the gas en-route to a mid-life crisis. The film also stars Sandra Oh and Virginia Madsen.

James Toback returns to the Festival with When Will I Be Loved with Neve Campbell as a beautiful, capricious, young woman exploring the limits of her sexual and intellectual power.

The Assassination of Richard Nixon, a North American premiere from Niels Mueller, is based on the true story of a struggling furniture salesman, Sam Bicke (Sean Penn), who in 1974 attempted to assassinate the 37th President of the United States. How this American everyman reached such a calamitous decision is fascinating and chilling. Naomi Watts, Don Cheadle, and Jack Thompson join Penn to bring to life this gripping story, set amid the corruption and scandal of the early 1970s.

John Duigan’s Head In The Clouds follows bookish, idealistic Guy Malyon (Stuart Townsend), a student at the University of Cambridge who begins a passionate love affair with the stunning, aristocratic, and hedonistic Gilda Bessé (Charlize Theron). An unlikely couple, they move to Paris and, along with Gilda’s closest friend Mia (Penelope Cruz), live together happily. At the onset of the Second World War, their conflicting ideologies drive the trio apart. Guy and Mia leave Paris to fight in the Spanish Civil War leaving Gilda, and their naivete, behind.

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