Letters from Toronto

Decapitation fascination.

By Cheryl Eddy

MY SIX DAYS at the Toronto International Film Festival were packed with 22 movies and nearly as many cups of coffee (which I don't even drink in real life). It was my first time at the fest, so my wide-eyed approach tended toward seeing as many films during my waking hours as possible.

First things first: The very best thing was Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee's bittersweet cowboys-in-love drama that absolutely erases any bad cinematic karma the director built up after The Hulk. Another Hollywood entry was the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line, which has the kind of flaws most other biopics have – as well as the added corniness of having to literally illustrate the lightning strike of inspiration (oh, so that's how "Ring of Fire" was written!). Joaquin Phoenix is suitably magnetic as Cash, but it's a brunette Reese Witherspoon as soul mate June Carter who really owns this thing.

Cameron Crowe's latest, Elizabethtown, was screened with a caveat before the lights went down: It was still a work-in-progress. Good to know, especially since the final third was dominated by a tedious road trip that made you forget that the previous two-plus hours contained moments of genuine emotion and hilarity.

Toronto's slate of Asian films was crowded with directors whose work I consider essential viewing, even if their films usually creep all too slowly into San Francisco theaters. Takashi Miike's "family friendly" The Great Yokai War follows the adventures of a little boy who becomes mixed up with monsters plucked from Japanese folklore, not to mention a beehived villainess played by Kill Bill's Chiaki Kuriyama. Nowhere to Hide director Lee Myung-se's Duelist uses a counterfeit-money conspiracy to set up the star-crossed couple at its center (she's a master-of-disguise detective, he's a blade-wielding assassin). Duelist is marred by an uneven tone – high drama mixes with lines like "We'll go quietly, like a silent fart." Worse, most of the action is rendered in slooow motion.

A much more satisfying swordplay story comes courtesy of Tsui Hark (Once Upon a Time in China), whose Seven Swords kicks off with the kind of fightin' words that fully sustain the 150 minutes that follow: An imperial edict has decreed that all martial arts are outlawed, under punishment of death. Packs of bounty hunters roam the countryside, massacring entire villages for profit. Naturally, only fantastically constructed weapons from Mt. Heaven, wielded by a posse of expert swordsmen (and one woman), provide any chance at winning this war, which runs red with betrayal, severed limbs, and statements like "Heads will roll!"

Molasses-o-vision is also not a problem for Wilson Yip's SPL, a Hong Kong police drama that involves gangsters (led by a dapper Sammo Hung), dirty cops (led by Simon Yam), and the new guy on the force (Donnie Yen, who's also in Seven Swords, and is here dressed exactly like Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park). You know when Hung and Yen (who directed the action sequences) are on opposite sides of the law, the movie's gonna have some amazing fights – which, of course, it does. No less brutal is the final film in Park Chan-wook's revenge trilogy, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, which puts a feminine (though still totally deadly) spin on Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Oldboy. Let's just say justice was never so rightfully served on a killer of children (played, ironically, by Oldboy avenger Choi Min-sik), nor was red eyeshadow so gracefully modeled (by the wonderfully cool heroine, Lee Yeong-ae).

Short takes on some other Toronto selections: Lars von Trier's Manderlay is pretty much Dogville all over again, albeit without the benefit of Nicole Kidman's acting chops; Tommy Lee Jones's contemplative neo-Western The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, written by Amores Perros and 21 Grams curveballer Guillermo Arriaga, lives up to its Cannes Film Festival hype. On the documentary front, two standouts were A/k/a Tommy Chong, Josh Gilbert's portrait of the self-described "doper comedian," with a focus on his recent legal troubles; and the Canadian-made Metal: A Headbanger's Journey, an ebullient, globe-trotting study of heavy metal's impact on popular culture that's stuffed with the kind of fun moments only the likes of Ronnie James Dio can provide.