Toronto slumming, wrestling and other contact sports

By Steven Zeitchik

We're not one for festival milestones -- not those that don't involve record-breaking party hopping, anyway -- but the last twenty-four hours here have gotten seriously surreal.

You have to stop and pause just at the timing of it all: two of the most-hyped film-festival movies in years -- Darren Aronofsky's "The Wrestler" and Danny Boyle's "Slumdog Millionaire" -- not only premiered at exactly the same moment but have now sold to exactly the same company (and one that's a surprise, at least on "The Wrestler" front).

While Fox Searchlight's marketing and publicity staff and other execs were debuting "Slumdog" and celebrating that pic's debut Sunday evening (behold topper Peter Rice, coolly holding court on one side of the Toronto hotspot Flow just hours before his company would make a move on the biggest Toronto buy in three years), acquisition execs were rolling up their sleeves making their pitch to "Wrestler" producers and filmmaker Darren Aronofsky.

And all this while across the street, CAA and producers were celebrating "Wrestler" with WWE footage and the indomitable presence of Mickey Rourke.

Not only does it have to be up there with one of the most colorful fest nites of all time -- that night at Sundance at the Cinetic condo that Tom Bernard was circling the building, Harvey was on the ground floor and Ruth Vitale in the basement may just edge it out -- but the consequences for the biz are pretty significant too.

After looking like they'd mostly sit out this year, the company of "Juno" and "Little Miss Sunshine" is, in the space of a few weeks, now in the mix with two of the most buzzed-about titles of the fall, not to mention two of its trickiest releases. ("The Wrestler wound up selling for between $3-4 million in the wee hours of Monday, and Searchlight agreed a few weeks ago to distribute and go in 50-50 with Warners on the former Warner Independent project "Slumdog.")

Of course both movies deserve much of the buzz. For "Wrestler" see our compatriot Borys Kit's take below (we're seeing it later today). For "Slumdog" -- which, tersely stated, is a coming-of-age tale of a poor and tragedy-stricken Bombay boy who goes on to win millions on the Indian version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" -- we'll say that it's gritty, even Dickensian, in its early stages, much more so than we expected, but that only makes the movie's redemption that much sweeter. It's not an easy movie to watch in spots, but it manages to combine action, comedy and class themes in one intoxicating mix.

And the strucuture -- cutting back and forth from the questions of "Millionaire" to the pivotal events in the main character's life -- would be cloying if it weren't in the hands of the startlingly talented Boyle, who may very well have offered up his best direction since "Trainspotting."

At the premiere, Boyle said he just re-cut the movie slightly after it debuted at Telluride, jokingly tried
(like Aronofsky premiering across town) to lower expectations and also offered "a big thank you to all the people at Warner Independent who lost their jobs."

It was one more surreal moment at that kind of festival.

Comments

[Mark Largen]

WWE had NOTHING to do with this movie. Two days of it (including the final scene) were shot at Ring of Honor (ROH) shows in New Jersey. And Necro Butcher, who appears with Rourke in the film, is a ROH wrestler.