A couple of things are distinct about TIFF. First, the festival opened a permanent space known as the TIFF Bell Lightbox in 2010. Located in a centrally coveted Toronto neighborhood, the expansive facility serves as the organization’s headquarters and heart of the festival but also as a center for archival research, media education, and cultural events throughout the year. Second, TIFF is a public festival open to anyone and everyone without a formalized film market as is the case with its peer festival of Berlin or Hong Kong. The majority of attendees are the general public with only a small percentage holding industry credentials. On the one hand, essentially anyone can go online or to a theater venue to buy tickets for any film featured in one of the sixteen film series. On the other hand, access is still a major factor. For films with significant buzz or bigger stars, tickets may sell out quickly for any of the two to three public screenings. Yet, audience members can “rush” a screening an hour or more prior to the start time to purchase any available tickets. Industry credentials provide another layer of access and are available to professionals including buyers, sellers, filmmakers, producers, and more recently scholars. Access to an industry badge reveals a more multi-faceted view of festival activities beyond public screenings and red carpet premieres. Industry passes allow entry to closed press and industry screenings as well as a separate industry conference with a week of panels discussing the current state of the film business.

Finally, TIFF is classified as a non-competitive festival. Film selections are not categorized as “In Competition” nor does it offer competitive prizes awarded by a high profile jury in the case of Cannes, Berlin, or Sundance.[1] The major award emerging from TIFF is the People’s Choice Award. General attendees vote over the ten-day period by dropping a film ticket of their choice into a voting box gathered by festival volunteers. The Irish-Canadian co-production Room (2015, dir. Larry Abrahamson) won the 2015 People’s Choice Award. Some festival films often exchange or parlay premiere coverage and critical reception into a Hollywood award season run from industry guild awards to the Academy Awards. Upon the announcement of Room‘s People’s Choice win, Deadline Hollywood and The Hollywood Reporter began speculating about the film’s Oscar prospects. The capital or value garnered from a film’s TIFF positioning and subsequent promotional campaign may unfold over time through a subsequent industry award season performance to a successful theatrical and/or home entertainment release. In other words, the lifespan of a film’s financial, cultural, and industrial impact only begins in Toronto.

Beyond its impact on the local economy, urban redevelopment, and Canadian film industry, one of TIFF’s function is to position and launch recent film premieres of large-scale Hollywood studio productions like Ridley Scott’s The Martian starring Matt Damon or Scott Cooper’s Black Mass featuring Johnny Depp. TIFF also programs and supports a number of international art house fare and first-time filmmakers including Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang or Simon Fitzmaurice’s My Name is Emily, respectively. As a media industries scholar who primarily utilizes fieldwork, industry interviews, and participant observation, I was struck by the varied networks of promotional activities during the event. I ground this initial discussion in a rich tradition of film festival studies that incorporates ethnography and insider positionality to explore film festival dynamics. Particularly, using the case of Room, I was able to trace the film’s circulation and promotional activities across the festival’s short period by attending a number of events from the initial press conference encompassing around 40 journalists to a press screening full of critics, journalists, buyers, and so on. Each festival space operates by its own distinct rules and culture yet is bound by a similar trajectory of promotion and spin. The tightly controlled press conference Q&A featuring the director, screenwriter/author, and central cast was structured differently and offered a unique tone from the largely casual morning press screening or highly ritualized public premiere and celebratory Q&A afterwards with director and cast.

In addition to my own investment in exploring an on-the-ground methodology, I had a pedagogical opportunity to experience the festival alongside a group of my Oakland University undergraduate students. My colleague Brendan Kredell and I spent the past year organizing a student trip to TIFF to correspond with a team-taught course on film festivals that we are teaching during the fall 2015 semester. A group of 18 students, comprised of junior and senior Cinema Studies students from our university, attended screenings, industry conference panels, red carpet events, and OU-organized master classes. Since there are over 400 films screened each year at TIFF, each student curated or created their own experience shaped largely by the chosen film series, panels, and events they attended. As part of our film festivals course, the students conducted their own fieldwork keeping research notebooks, posting daily blog entries, shooting footage for a short documentary, and participating in a class podcast. The trip served as a pilot program combining an interactive festival experience with creative production projects, film criticism, industry research, and professionalization opportunities.

By combining my interest and investment in the media industries as a teacher-scholar, Toronto International Film Festival offered a number of opportunities to examine festival structures, film cultures, reception activities, cultural geographies, and industry dynamics for myself, my colleague, and our students. As the Toronto-based event evolves each year, so does the scholarly and pedagogical project. For example, the festival introduced a series this year called Primetime featuring television dramas. While the relationship between television and film festival is not a new one, it does signal a shift in TIFF’s structural organization and how it may be reimagining its brand. As TIFF evolves to reflect the changing nature of the media industries, it provides a temporal learning experience and experiment for exploring the complexities and dynamics of global media as well as expanding our classroom beyond the walls of the university.

[1] A new film series—Platform—was introduced this year and featured a dozen “best of international cinema” selections bound outside of any country quotas. In celebration of the festival’s anniversary, a jury was chosen to judge the Toronto Platform Prize for best film in this category. As I learned from a conversation with my colleague Brendan Kredell, the international film festival body FIAPF grants TIFF a special “non-competitive” status unlike peer competitive festivals Cannes and Berlin.

The reference to Lost is not arbitrary, of course, as its showrunner, Damon Lindelof, was also one of Prometheus’s writers. It’s pretty obvious halfway through the movie that he and others are simply drawing on Lost’s playbook—throw out a few interesting characters, a few promising narrative possibilities, and a whole lot of messy gaps. Then, wait until later to figure out what it all “means” (or hope the fans do it for you). This is why some turned on Battlestar Galactica in later seasons—when it started to think about “meaning,” when it shifted from tight sci-fi action to broad intro-level philosophy, some got turned off. Prometheus, meanwhile, is a collection of several possibly good story beginnings instead of one truly great finished one.

So, half-baked babble or post-television cinema? I’m inclined to say the former, if for no other reason than the fact that no one involved with Prometheus will ever actually have to back up its unfulfilled potential. I don’t see three or four more movies coming out of this—the kind of epic narrative canvas that would begin to deepen this film’s easy ambiguity. The degree to which one likes the new film seems in rough proportion to the degree to which you are drawing on the kind of post-network television narratives like BSG and Lost as your point of reference, or whether or not you are approaching it from the standpoint of the Alien franchise it’s so disingenuously aping.

What’s most frustrating is how Prometheus is trying to have it both ways in relation to the larger brand. The film instantly became an elite A-list project once Scott attached himself to it, which not only returned the legendary auteur to his early sci-fi roots, but also ensured a certain expectation of big budget polish in a franchise reduced to B-level junk like the Alien vs. Predator series. But, early on in the film’s production, there was clearly a mixed message at work in its paratextuality—Scott and company seemed to be going awkwardly out of their way to say it’s not an Alien film.

Yet, it’s absolutely part of the Alien franchise—explicitly existing within the same universe, filled with identical characters and iconography, and structured in obvious and subtle ways just like the original 1979 film. And, has anyone else noted that the premise—archeologists on Earth find clues in the ice that point towards an alien intelligence, causing dying rich guys from the same family to pursue a larger meaning to life—is exactly the same premise as the one in the much-maligned Alien vs. Predator (2004)?

At the time, I read the Alien ambivalence as fanboy contempt, but also auteurist pride—Scott didn’t want to admit he was retreating to well-worn territory, the site of one of his two greatest accomplishments. Although I didn’t feel this way, the decision to return to Alien could be read as creatively lazy, or worse, desperate, especially in the “Event Film” era where all of the old school is doing elaborate CGI blockbusters now. So I read the not-Alien Alien messages as a careful negotiation of that.

Now that Prometheus is out, I think all that white noise about not trying to be an Alien film was more to inoculate it from all forms of criticism. I’ve repeatedly read in the last few days some variation on the “it’s trying to be something else (or more)” defense—but that’s not the issue people have with Prometheus. It’s pretty clear that, like many recent reboots (such as Star Trek), Prometheus is more interested in creating its own new world under the veil of a pre-sold brand, than in doing anything insightful with what’s already there.

The oft-circulated idea that it’s not an Alien film, or that it’s taking on grander ideas (as though the two are mutually exclusive) becomes an attempt to hide the obvious—that Prometheus is just another mediocre big-budget summer genre exercise. And I think the problem people have with this post-televisual film is that it doesn’t know what it does want to be.

But Angry Russell Crowe is no more.  The transformation and rehabilitation of his image has occurred just in time for a massive publicity tour for Robin Hood, which opens tomorrow. He’s traded in his haughty airs and generalized angry-man-syndrome for genial chats and endearing, innocuous flirtations.  It’s as if the tough, muscle-bound guy from L.A. Confidential suddenly switched movies and became the relaxed, contented Provence-dweller at the end of A Good Year.

In the gossip universe, image rehabilitation is usually accomplished vis-a-vis public confession/apology or, even more effectively, through marriage and children.  (See: Angelina Jolie, Katherine Heigl, Nicole Richie, McSteamy and the Noxema Girl).  But Crowe was married in 2003; his two sons were born in 2003 and 2006.  While he doesn’t hide his family, they’re certainly not the subject of People Magazine cover stories.  In other words, he’s not using cute pictures of his loving family to make him look like a nicer guy.

Instead, Crowe’s using good old fashioned charisma.  Over the course of his month long press tour, he’s joked about “the continuous death battle” with his aging body; he’s related a hilarious anecdote about taking his easily-bored sons to pre-screen Robin Hood (“Dad, when are you going to get a horse?); he’s used all types of bows and arrows, some of the Nerf variety, to jovially demonstrate his Robin Hood archery skill, including a ‘surprise’ visit (in casual hoodie) on Ellen.  He makes fun of the Australian accent at length on Letterman; perhaps best of all, he VERY SERIOUSLY GIFTS OPRAH WITH A SWORD AND LONG BOW.

Now, this type of promotional activity is by no means anomalous in Hollywood, but such hokum is usually reserved for the likes of Tom Cruise.  And while I do think that Crowe is consciously attempting to rebrand his image – illuminating the ‘softer,’ emotional side of the hard body – I’d also venture something else is motivating his best behavior.  Specifically, fear.  Robin Hood has been built up as a savior of sorts: first and foremost, for Universal, which has recently endured a string of dismal big-budget failures.  And after the relative disappointments of Body of Lies and State of Play, Crowe himself needs a hit.  This role – in a heavily presold property, directed by long-time creative partner Ridley Scott, playing a version of the Maximus role that authenticated his stardom – should be the answer.  But if it fails to win the box office this weekend, it will undoubtedly get lost in the sea of forthcoming blockbusters.

What’s more, Universal, Ridley Scott, and Crowe all know that they’re staring down a sexy, enormously attractive beast, and that beast’s name is Iron Man 2. Ultimately, it’s not just a showdown between two distinct types/styles of action movies, but two types of rehabilitated bad boy stars.  Yet Aaccording to Anne Thompson’s Tweets from Cannes (where Robin Hood is opening the festival), Crowe is back to his old ‘arrogant’ ways, perhaps realizing that the fate of the movie, whatever it may be, is sealed.  His actions likewise underline the fact that the soft, family-friendly Crowe was, in fact, just as much of a construction as medieval sets used on Robin Hood.

Crowe may have indeed softened with age; he may have taken anger management classes.  What the ‘real’ Crowe has done doesn’t really matter.  What does matter, then, is the ease with which we, and the media at large, have accepted the narrative of his transformation.  A star image resonates when it seemingly embodies ideologies that are unattainable or contradictory in practice; in this case, Crowe’s image bespeaks the notion that anger — and bad boy-ness — can indeed by ‘fixed’; and that that fix corresponds with 1.) attention to family and 2.) a return to jobs (roles) in which traditional masculinity (bow hunting, horse riding) is cultivated and valued.   Ultimately, the rehabilitated Crowe image is likable because we so want to like, and believe, in what it represents.  So does the transformation work for you?  Do you buy it?