Welcome to Wilnervision

Okay, so the grammatically correct slug would be “Cover: Mine”, but you get what I’m going for, right?

NOW’s gala pre-TIFF issue hits the street today, featuring my very first cover story for the paper — a feature on the Canada First! entry “Coopers’ Camera”. You should check it out.

And yes, this is what brought me to the “Daily Show” studios last month: Face time! With Jason Jones and Samantha Bee! And their infant son! (And Jon Stewart’s dog!) For a movie that’s actually quite good, and deserves all the ink it can get!

Seriously, people: The next time I complain about my stressful career — and even money says that’ll be happening real soon — please point me in the direction of some perspective. I have the best goddamn job in the world.

Let’s see … it’s late August, I’m seeing bizarre German movies about 14th century teenage boys who get drafted into Satanism … yup, we must be midway through the press screenings for the Toronto International Film Festival.

TIFF doesn’t officially get going for another week, but by then I’ll have filed something like fifty reviews for NOW’s expansive coverage — which starts in tomorrow’s issue, with a cover story by yours truly — and suffered at least one psychotic episode.

But right now, I’m chugging along on sugar and caffeine, and cranking out all sorts of coverage. Here’s my annual Sympatico/MSN festival overview, as well as a gallery of TIFF’s more memorable events … which has somehow been re-branded as the festival’s “most shocking moments”.

I’m not really sure what qualifies as “shocking” about the 1999 run of premieres that subsequently went on to dominate the Oscars, but I guess you have to get people’s attention somehow.

My latest Sympatico/MSN DVD column — the last one until after TIFF, if you’ve come to depend on them — celebrates two very excellent movies from previous festivals that were more or less ignored during their theatrical runs.

“The Last Winter” and “Son of Rambow”, take your bows, please … seriously, you could do worse than to bring both of these home tonight, though I’m really not sure they should be screened one after the other.

Well, maybe if you start with “Rambow”.

But still, probably not.

“The House Bunny” may not have conquered the box-office over the weekend — “Tropic Thunder” held onto the #1 spot — but Anna Faris’ giddy comedy did almost as well as the leader, and as Buzz Aldrin once said, second comes right after first.

And based on the unanimous critical praise for Faris’ performance — hell, some of us even went that extra mile for her — the movie has achieved its artistic goal: Anna Faris is finally a star.

It’s almost like there was some kind of plan at work here.

Interesting.

And encouraging. Sounds like Obama’s picked someone who can throw a few punches, which is bound to come in handy in an election cycle quickly defining itself as little more than open race-baiting and charges of elitism that turn out to be, well, misapplied.

You know, I really hope the rumors about a McCain-Lieberman ticket pan out — Biden will take that sanctimonious douchebag apart at the veep debate.

This is always the way it goes — the TIFF press screenings are in full gear, my every spare minute is devoted to clearing my pre-festival deadlines … and distributors are still cranking out ten theatrical releases a week. Who’s going to see all of these? Who has the time?

Okay, there’s an upside: Now that I’m at NOW, I only have to cover five of them. So let’s get right to it:

“Beaufort”: Israel’s entry for the foreign-language Oscar — well, after “The Band’s Visit” was disqualified for mostly being in English — finally gets a Canadian theatrical run. Adam finds it somewhat underwhelming.

“Boy A”: A young man (Andrew Garfield) tries to re-enter society after spending most of his adolescence in juvenile detention in John Crowley’s TIFF ‘07 entry, which got dropped into theatrical release so quickly that none of us were able to prep a review. I heard good things in London, though.

“Death Race”: Jason Statham gets behind the wheel of Paul W.S. Anderson’s remake/update of the Roger Corman classic, which apparently bears no similarity to the original beyond having some racing in it, and also death. Over at Film Freak Central, Walter Chaw frames his disappointment in the proper context.

“Elegy”: Ben Kingsley beds Penelope Cruz in director Isabel Coixet’s latest meditation on the unknowable majesty of the human heart, or something. I had very little patience for Coixet’s previous films, “My Life Without Me” and “The Secret Life of Words”, so Susan takes this one.

“Frozen River“: As a working-class mom who starts smuggling human cargo across the Canadian-American border, Melissa Leo gives a wholly unsentimental performance in Courtney Hunt’s Sundance award-winner; thing is, the movie around her is kind of lousy.

“Hamlet 2“: In which Steve Coogan play a sexy Jesus who rocks us. It’s really that simple.

“Henry Poole is Here“: Luke Wilson is about fifteen years too young for the role of a wet-eyed mope who experiences a spiritual redemption in Mark Pellington’s wretched, smarmy melodrama. I kept thinking David Duchovny would have been a much better choice. And then I started thinking about that episode of “The X Files” that Duchovny and Wilson did together, and how much more I’d rather be watching that.

“The House Bunny“: I think I’ve made it pretty clear how much I heart Anna Faris, so it’s nice to see her latest starring vehicle actually make it into theaters this time. The movie isn’t much, but she’s wonderful in it — as are Emma Stone and Kat Dennings. But if you wanted to wait for the DVD, I can’t say I’d blame you. As soon as my review goes up on the NOW site, I’ll link to it here. UPDATE: Click away!

“The Longshots”: Fred Durst directed a movie. The Limp Bizkit guy. And it stars Ice Cube as a surly football has-been who coaches his phenom niece to greatness. Fifteen years ago, would any of us have ever imagined something like this? Rad swears he saw it, but I still suspect we’re being punk’d.

“Tuya’s Marriage”: Here’s another film I was hearing about in London last year — a Mongolian drama about a young woman searching for a new husband who’ll take on the keep of her injured ex as well as herself. It sounded very interesting, but I never managed to get to a screening; Andrew ultimately got it covered.

Oh, and because I neglected to link to it on Wednesday’s post, here’s my review of “The Rocker“, too.

I’m a big fan of Steve Coogan. His deluded chat-show host Alan Partridge is one of the most fully realized (and most disturbing) television characters of the last two decades, and the BBC series that featured him are the first indications of the cringe-comedy wave that came to full flower with “The Office”. There would be no Ricky Gervais, I suspect, without Steve Coogan.

More important, though, is his evolving work as an actor. In Michael Winterbottom’s “24 Hour Party People”, he accomplished the meta-fillip of playing Partridge’s actual inspiration, the Granada TV personality Tony Wilson, and even appear in the frame with the real Wilson without ripping a hole in the time-space continuum.

In Winterbottom’s “Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story”, he further meta’ed around as both the digressive hero of Laurence Sterne’s revolutionary novel and the actor playing him.

He has a key role in “Tropic Thunder”, and in “Hamlet 2″, which opens tomorrow, he plays a struggling Arizona drama teacher with a low sperm count and a few closet monsters who tries to save his job by writing a musical sequel to “Hamlet” that involves time travel and Jesus. So he’s pretty much fearless.

Boy, I wish there’d been room for all of this in the setup to my interview with Coogan in the new issue of NOW. Anyway, check it out. There’s audio!

Remember last year, when I wondered why anyone would make another “Scorpion King” without The Rock? Well, now we can see the results of that folly, as featured in my latest Sympatico/MSN DVD column.

I miss The Rock.

Oh, and speaking of things that sound like “The Rock”, Rainn Wilson’s new comedy “The Rocker” opens today.

My review runs in tomorrow’s NOW, but here’s a sneak preview: Doesn’t suck.

Sad news breaking today, which I first found on The House Next Door: Manny Farber has died. Never met him, always hoped to. Crap.

Glenn Kenny has assembled a fine list of appreciations and obituaries over at his new blog, Some Came Running. Check ‘em out.

And if you don’t know who Manny Farber was, start here. As soon as possible.

It looks like George Lucas’ inexhaustible “Star Wars” money machine is finally running out of steam. The animated midquel “The Clone Wars” opened to just $15.5 million over the weekend, well behind “Tropic Thunder” and “The Dark Knight”.

I knocked Lucas around some for his craven strip-mining of my beloved childhood memories at Sympatico/MSN over the weekend — Josh, you’re right, I was a hair too old to get into the Transformers, so Michael Bay’s movie was an annoyance rather than a wholesale assault on my youth.

And I wasn’t alone. Jim Emerson, over at the American MSN site, made the same argument at a much greater length in this fine essay.

And speaking of making the same argument, did you catch Michiko Kakutani’s article in yesterday’s New York Times about Jon Stewart and “The Daily Show” becoming as trusted a news source as, well, the news?

It’s a fine piece — of course, I’m a little biased, since I made the same point in Starweek four years ago. Nobody believed me then, but if the Paper of Record has come around to my point of view, well, I feel all nice and vindicated.

Also, I have met Jon Stewart’s dog, and he is a sweetie.