Matt Dillon, Crash
Besides Charlize Theron’s no-show and Kevin Spacey's show sporting a dyed scalp, the 2004 edition of the Toronto Film Festival has had its share of controversies thanks to writer-director Paul Haggis' Crash (Haggis also wrote Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby) and George Butler’s documentary, Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry.
Haggis' well-received Crash shares the same title — but not the same plot — as the 1996 David Cronenberg movie about car crashes, mutilations, and kinky sex. According to the Toronto Star, those behind Cronenberg’s work are now threatening to take legal action against the producers of the new Crash. Set in Los Angeles, Crash features Matt Dillon, Jennifer Esposito, Don Cheadle, Sandra Bullock, and Ryan Phillippe.
Going Upriver revolves around U.S. presidential candidate John Kerry’s seemingly never-ending Vietnam War years. Butler told the Associated Press, "I truly believed the moment I saw him: This guy’s going to be president. Nothing in the intervening years has changed my view. He had real bearing, he had a presence. It was beyond his years even then."
Not surprisingly, some are expecting a backlash against Going Upriver. Perhaps hoping for the sort of controversy that has catapulted Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 to the top of the box-office charts, Butler added, "In 1965, a thousand people had died in Vietnam. In 2004, as of last week, a thousand people had died in Iraq. … Overwhelmingly, this film’s metaphorical purpose is to remind people what they might be getting into in Iraq. The errors of it and the parallels just seem very striking." (Now, I can’t quite tell whether the controversy will erupt because Butler is comparing Iraq to Vietnam, or because Butler failed to consider as "people" the 10,000+ Iraqis who have died since the beginning of the American-led invasion.)
Also at Toronto, Casuistry: The Art of Killing a Cat has drawn protests against (and unfortunately lots of free publicity for) this documentary about three Canadian men who reportedly videotaped their skinning a cat alive. (A CNN report, however, states that the cat was skinned after having had its throat slit.) According to one of the documentary makers, the video was "an artistic experiment" intended to highlight society’s hypocrisy in regard to the killing of animals for human consumption. (As per reports, the bloodthirsty artistes later decapitated and disemboweled the cat, keeping its remains in the fridge for a future meal.)
Rumors that the three men’s next artistic experiment will be a short video protesting capital punishment in which each of them will execute himself by hanging, electrocution, and lethal gas are absolutely — and, some might add, sadly — untrue.