Big screen pop stars,
Eric Clapton, Tragically Hip and Lady Gaga just some to grace TIFF’s big screens
There’s a little more pop to your TIFF than usual this year, as a passel of big names from the world of music prepare to mingle with the movie stars during the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival.
Lady Gaga, Eric Clapton, Grace Jones and beloved Canadian rockers the Tragically Hip all feature in documentaries making their debuts at this year’s fest. Being dead for several years will deter neither Michael Jackson nor Sammy Davis, Jr. from making beyond-the-grave appearances. Eminem has a producer credit on a TIFF film ( Bodied), as does Drake, who also appears on-screen in his project The Carter Effect.
Here’s a quick rundown on some of the musicians set to rub shoulders, both literally and figuratively, with Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, Kate Winslet, Idris Elba and the many other Hollywood types in town to strut the red carpet and titillate the paparazzi until Sept. 17. Eric Clapton The iconic guitar-slinger is the subject of a star-studded documentary entitled Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars, helmed by Rush director Lili Fini Zanuck that promises an in-depth look at his tumultuous five-decade career and occasionally tragic life through up-close-and-personal interviews with Clapton, his family and friends, and peers both living and dead, such as Steve Winwood, George Harrison, Jimi Hendrix and B.B. King.
Clapton will face the public at a news conference on Sept. 11 that will be live-streamed for the curious on the TIFF website. No word yet, however, on whether Slowhand will deign to furnish us with a few hot licks while making the promotional rounds in Toronto.
Screens Sunday at 6:15 p.m. at the TIFF Bell Lightbox and Monday at 3:30 p.m., Wednesday at11:15 a.m. and Saturday at 5:45 p.m. at Scotiabank Theatre. The Tragically Hip Taking their first collaborative crack at a rock-’n’-roll concert picture, codirectors Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier — the duo behind the acclaimed documentaries Manufactured Landscapes and Watermark — got on the bus, in the dressing room and up onstage with the treasured Kingston quintet for the duration of last summer’s Man Machine Poem tour to make Long Time Running, a chronicle of what most assume will be the Tragically Hip’s final trip across Canada, given frontman Gord Downie’s diagnosis with terminal brain cancer two springs ago.
“We said if he wanted to do it, we would drop everything. He did, so we did,” the directors say in a statement released with the film, promising “a fluid dialectic of audience and performance throughout, punctuated by intimate moments behind the scenes and reflection from the guys” captured en route to the Hip’s last, nation-enthralling hometown gig at Kingston’s K-Rock Centre in August 2016. There will be no dry eyes in the house.
Screens Wednesday at 9 p.m. at Roy Thomson Hall and Thursday at 3:30 p.m. at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. Grace Jones The gender-bending New Wave poster child, actress and fashionista opened up TIFF’s 2017 documentary programming on Thursday as the subject of Sophie Fiennes’ decade-in-the-making Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami. To top off all the biographical material unearthed in the film, Jones staged an entire concert expressly for the cameras, so this is likely the next best thing to actually seeing her play live.
Screens Friday at 6:15 p.m. at the Scotiabank. Michael Jackson Jacko’s still rather smashing 1983 creep-show video clip for his “Thriller” single, directed by John Landis, gets a spiffy restoration and a “4K 3D” upgrade just in time for its elevation to the big screen. To pad out the program, it will be shown in tandem at TIFF with a digitally restored cut of Jerry Kramer’s 1983 documentary The Making of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Dancing zombies await!
Screens Tuesday at 9 p.m. at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. Sammy Davis, Jr. The Candyman gets a fond tribute from fans and friends such as the late Jerry Lewis, Whoopi Goldberg and Billy Crystal in a look at the triumphs and troubles of the sole African-American member of the Rat Pack in Sammy Davis, Jr.: I’ve Gotta Be Me. Director Sam Pollard ( Slavery by Another Name) mingles the discussion of Davis’s trail-blazing assault on racial barriers in the entertainment industry with “a stunning array of archival performances for newcomers to discover.” Fingers crossed for some boozy shenanigans involving Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, too.
Screens Monday at 9:45 p.m., Wednesday at 6:45 p.m. and Friday at 9 p.m. at the Scotiabank. Seth Smith Not nearly as well-known as the above musicians, Seth Smith of the criminally underrated Halifax noisepop outfit Dog Day graces this year’s Midnight Madness bill with his second feature, The Crescent, a surreal, supernatural horror flick about “a woman haunted by encroaching otherworldly entities and keeping it together while drowning in grief.”
As with his first film, 2012’s unsettling Lowlife, Smith has help on the production side of things from his partner and Dog Day bandmate Nancy Urich, and works from a screenplay by Darcy Spidle. Rest assured, this will be a weird one.
Screens Thursday at 11:59 p.m. at the Ryerson Theatre and Friday at 6 p.m. at the Scotiabank. Kanye West No, Kanye’s not actually in the film, but he is the subject of a short animated fantasy exploring what might happen if the world’s most notorious hip-hop egomaniac and the world’s most famous theoretical physicist shared some deep thoughts about their personal failings and the nature of the universe while enjoying a picnic together on a beach in An Imagined Conversation: Kanye West & Stephen Hawking.
We would also happily pay to see the real thing.
Screens Thursday at 6:30 p.m. at the Scotiabank. Lady Gaga Hot off a pair of dates at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre, Miss Monster lingered long enough in our fair city to fête the release of director Chris Moukarbel’s biopic Gaga: Five Foot Two on Friday. The flick catches her turning 30 while hard at work on last year’s Joanne album, and is billed as “the closest, most intimate look yet inside the world of Stefani Joanne Germanotta,” a young woman who has managed to keep her private life fairly private over the years despite her theatrical tendencies and ravenous appetite for “the applause, applause, applause.”
The sole TIFF screening was, alas, Friday. See tiff.net for ticket information.