Starz Studios: Toronto Film Festival Highlights (2010)

This 12-min Starz Studios featurette capsulizes six top-buzz-inducing movies from the Toronto Film Festival in 10 min then inexplicably tacks on a 2-min montage of Vanity Fair interview snippets that form a jumble of one-line nonsequiturs, mostly with people you won't recognize. (For example, I recognized Javier Bardem and could even understand his English, but without a context, what he said makes no sense.) Back to the six movies: The King's Speech, Black Swan, Beautiful Boy, The Town, Stone, and Hereafter apparently took the festival by storm. Colin Firth is King George VI, a repressed man (and king) with a speech impediment in a repressed society -- recently added to my date-movie wish list though higher now. Natalie Portman is a femme fatale ballet dancer in Black Swan -- likely to follow Mao's Last Dancer as a date movie. Beautiful Boy is about being parents of a Columbine-style suicide killer -- the topic and movie seem chilling enough that I will wait to see it at home. The Town and Stone are taut psychological dramas -- I will see The Town in theaters if there is time. Last but not least, Clint Eastwood's Hereafter recently took second-place on my must-see-in-theaters list. 3 stars.