There was no hotter ticket at the Toronto International Film Festival in September than The Wrestler, Darren Aronofsky's new drama about a washed-up professional body-slammer played by Mickey Rourke. I vividly recall the press screening, where every seat in the fest's largest theater was occupied by eager journalists, many of whom had sworn they'd miss whatever other films they had to as long as they could see this one.

It paid off, too -- the acclaim for the film was nearly universal. (Read Cinematical's James Rocchi's rave review here.) Now, in advance of the film's limited release on Dec. 31 (just in time to qualify for Rourke's inevitable Oscar nomination), Fox Searchlight has released the first trailer. Variety has it, and we've got it here, at the end of this post.

The trailer is good in the sense that it accurately conveys the tone of the film: moody, reflective, and only partially set in the wrestling ring. Bruce Springsteen's theme song is a nice touch. We get a few glimpses of Marisa Tomei, who plays Rourke's stripper friend (you'll catch more than a glimpse of her in the movie itself, if you know what I mean), and Evan Rachel Wood as Rourke's estranged daughter. Their performances are terrific, too, as is Aronofsky's direction -- man, I really hope this gets the Oscar attention that everyone thinks it will. It deserves it.

What do you think of the trailer? Does it make you more or less interested in the film? Let us know in the comments.

Opening today in select markets is a film I'm sure will carve out a spot on a host of top ten lists at the end of the year (including mine): Slumdog Millionaire. Directed by the spirited and always-versatile Danny Boyle, Slumdog shoots its way into the city of Mumbai (aka the Maximum City) like liquid from a syringe, as it tells the life story of one poor boy from the slums and the girl who always seems to escape his reach.

Directing a film that's both chaotic and beautiful at the same time is not easy, and shooting on location in one of the busiest cities of the world was a task Boyle welcomed with open arms. Cinematical sat down with the director of such films as The Beach, 28 Days Later, Trainspotting and Sunshine to find out what it was like filming with a cast that barely spoke his language, how big a part the real Who Wants to Be a Millionaire actually played, and, among other things, which genre he's itching to take on next ... in America.

(As always, we do have to warn you that this interview might contain movie spoilers.)

Cinematical: Because your last film was this big, expensive sci-fi flick, did you intend to follow it up with something smaller ... which sounds quite silly seeing as Slumdog Millionaire is set in one of the busiest cities in the world?

Danny Boyle: Yeah, it's very funny those words 'big' and 'small', because obviously Sunshine is a big movie in some sense, but then in other ways it's a very tiny movie. You're working in a small studio with just eight actors, and you're there for months and months and it's just so tiny. With India, you've got about a billion people, and they all seem to be in the shot most of the time. It's weird, the biggest thing I thought was the contrast -- the change it was to go from outer space to the heat of this city; what they call the Maximum City. It was just such a refreshing change for me, and I'm so happy I got the opportunity to do it.

(from left to right) Sean Gullette in Pi, Ellen Burstyn in Requiem for a Dream, Hugh Jackman in The Fountain, and Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler

I had been writing a rambling introduction to this piece, but to make a long anecdote short, I decided to re-watch the works of writer-director Darren Aronofsky prior to seeing his new film, The Wrestler. Out of more happenstance than planning, I began his first film exactly a day to the minute before this one would end, and now I offer up my thoughts on his career to date. (Who knows what more could come following this: 24 Hours of Fincher? 36 Hours of Boyle? My Dinner with Andre Benjamin's Idlewild?)

Not days after Eric D. Snider brought us welcome proof of Tom Hanks' mullet-free appearance has the teaser trailer for next May's Da Vinci Code sequel (or is it prequel?) been posted online, and all that can really be said for Angels & Demons at this point is that Hanks is once again racing against the ironically shadowy Illuminati to solve another Vatican-set (but not Vatican-shot) mystery.

He's paired up with another brunette agent (Ayelet Zurer in lieu of Audrey Tautou), Ewan McGregor pops up as a man of the cloth, and Stellan Skarsgard finds himself on the business end of a branding iron. I had heard that the novel is an improvement from its predecessor, so let's hope this follows suit next May.

Considerably closer and already loaded with acclaim is Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, the trailer for which just popped up over at Yahoo! Movies. I'm close enough to seeing the film myself that I'm going to forgo watching it, but this'll hopefully convince you to catch it if our review and others hadn't already. Millionaire opens in limited release on November 12th.

And to round things out is this five-minute trailer for the looming remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still, which bears resemblance for the most part to this previous extended trailer, save for a last minute crammed with more completed money shots involving our big, bad friend Gort. TDTESS opens in IMAX and regular theaters on December 12th.

I thought it wasn't possible to view the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings board with more disgust and contempt than I already did, but they've managed to surprise me. Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle's joyful, enriching drama about a poor young man going all the way on India's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, has been slapped with an R rating for "some violence, disturbing images and language."

Speaking of language, the MPAA is full of s***. Big, meaty piles of s***. Slumdog Millionaire (to be released Nov. 12) has a couple of F-bombs (just like most PG-13 films), some moderate other profanity, a couple of intense moments, and some non-graphic violence. In fact, as Slashfilm's Peter Sciretta (citing Alex Billington) has pointed out, there are several instances in the film where Boyle has obviously cut away to avoid showing anything too strong. Clearly he had a PG-13 rating in mind, and as someone who watches a few hundred new movies every year, let me tell you: This is a PG-13 movie. Its content is right in line with the vast majority of PG-13 movies.

Yet for some reason, the MPAA has given it an R. Let me steal a bit from Amy Poehler and Seth Meyers: Really?! Really, MPAA? You think the pencil-impaling, face-melting antics of The Dark Knight fall within the bounds of PG-13 acceptability, but a few gunshots and tense situations put Slumdog Millionaire over the line into R territory? Really? And the decapitations and mass slaughters of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian -- a film aimed directly at children -- only gets a PG (a PG!!) while Slumdog Millionaire gets an R? Really?! MPAA, if you were a judge, you'd be letting rapists go free while sentencing jaywalkers to the electric chair. I've seen more sober reasoning and sound judgment at a frat party. Michael Vick had more common sense than you.

If you don't know the name Billy Ray, you should, and I'm not talking about Billy Ray Cyrus. (There's no reason to know him.) The filmmaker Billy Ray, despite having a name like a Dukes of Hazzard character, has written and directed two excellent fact-based movies about powerful figures who were brought down by their own hubris. Shattered Glass told of a promising young journalist who was ultimately disgraced for making up news stories, while Breach chronicled the fall of a morally upright FBI agent who sold secrets to the Russians.

For his next act, Ray will tell another true story about an ethically compromised man: Allen Raymond, a Republican political consultant who went to prison for some shady maneuvers he pulled in trying to swing a tight Senate race in New Hampshire in 2002. Raymond's memoir, How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative, was published earlier this year, and Ray will write and direct the movie version for Fox Searchlight sometime in 2009, according to Variety.

What did Raymond do? It's actually kind of brilliant, in an evil way. With funding from New Hampshire's Republican State Committee, Raymond hired a telemarketing firm to constantly jam the state's Democratic headquarters' phones with hangup calls, preventing the Democrats from making any outbound calls on Election Day. Meanwhile, the Republicans were making the customary get-out-the-vote phone calls all day long, and their candidate won the election by a very narrow margin.

Dirty tricks surely happen on both sides of the political fence, and if How to Rig an Election turns out to be nothing more than an anti-GOP diatribe, at least it will have been based on Raymond's own account rather than someone else's. But I suspect Ray will do a better job than that. Breach and Shattered Glass both did a classy job of presenting their moral dilemmas, and How to Rig an Election has the potential to be another thought-provoking case study.

"Darren did not put a strip pole in his office." -- Marisa Tomei.

Does the New York Film Festival still matter? The 46th edition opened last Friday, and while the fest may not have the celebrity cachet and discovery intent of Sundance and Cannes, or the welcoming populist mentality of Toronto, it stubbornly insists on being recognized as the gatekeeper for all that is worthwhile in world cinema.

Nonetheless, press conferences with a big-name American director and a resurrected American star (and his fetching, Academy Award-winning co-star) have stolen the spotlight during the first week of the festival. Looking somewhat like a guerilla himself, Steven Soderbergh arrived to promote his four-hour epic Che, starring Benicio del Toro as the revolutionary leader. According to the director, "There are a million Ches -– he means something different to everyone."

That attitude has irked some critics; Karina Longworth at Spout felt that Soderbergh's "unwillingness to make a statement may be a major part of the problem." On the other hand, Glenn Kenny of Some Came Running opined: "Silly me, I imagined that such an approach constituted a statement sufficient unto itself, but apparently not." The film will get a rare "roadshow" treatment when it opens in December: trotted around in its four-hour entirety to selected cities for one week only by IFC Films in December, complete with elevated ticket prices and a fancy giveaway program of some sort. Dreamgirls for the intelligentsia?

After the jump: The Wrestler and two fresh new films about those darn kids.

On a bright Toronto Morning, The Wrestler's director Darren Aronofsky still can't quite wrap his head around his past week: "It's been wild. Look, we started shooting in January; we finished the film five days ago. I was in Venice four days ago, with no buzz; three days ago, we won the Golden Lion out of nowhere, and two days ago, we showed it at Toronto and sold it to Fox Searchlight, so everything changed in five days. ..." Cinematical spoke with Aronofsky about the world of '80s wrestling, the unique possibilities and challenges inherent in working with Mickey Rourke, custom-crafting an old-school Nintendo game on an indie budget, punching up political commentary in post-production and more. ...

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After winning top honors at the Venice Film Festival, Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler rapidly became the must-see of the Toronto International Film Festival, with huge lines at the press and industry screening this afternoon seemingly unaffected by the news that Fox Searchlight had purchased the film. After seeing The Wrestler for myself, I feel the need to extend a note of caution about the film, which sailed into Toronto buoyed by advance raves for Mickey Rourke's performance as Randy "The Ram" Robinson, a low-level professional wrestler -- and we soon see how really, both those words could be in quotation marks -- whose '80s glory days are long over, scraping by at low-level, low-paying matches until a heart attack forces him to leave the ring and look at his life in the shadow of death. Many have already written about the parallels between Mickey Rourke and the swaggering, scarred wrestler he plays -- early success, fame and notoriety, a series of mis-steps and mistakes taking it all away bit by bit as the years advanced -- and the charge Rourke's own rise and fall offers a filmmaker like Aaronofsky looking to explore ruin and redemption.

But don't believe the hype -- or, more importantly, look past it; if a complicated, messy personal life were all it took to deliver a great performance, Paris Hilton and O.J. Simpson would have more Oscars than Katharine Hepburn. Rourke's work as Randy is physical, invested, powerful and sprawling -- but it's also quiet, sad and hauntingly wounded, too. And The Wrestler offers viewers far more than just Rourke's performance -- which, it must be said, is excellent -- if they're willing to not flinch from what it has to say: The Wrestler is a fascinating, rich, unblinking look at the dark, hunched mean streak that lies curled and poisonous inside of so much American popular entertainment and of so much American life. It's early to say this, but The Wrestler is one of the most grimly exciting, magnetically repellent movies we've had in a long time; it's flat-out one of the best American movies of 2008.

After a massive, all-night bidding war, Variety's Anne Thompson reports that Fox Searchlight has snagged The Wrestler for roughly $4 million, marking the first big purchase of the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival. Following its Golden Lion win in Venice and a Toronto premiere that left folks buzzing up a storm, Searchlight, along with Overture, Lionsgate, Weinstein Co. and Sony, began bidding on the flick, which some say solidifies a sure-fire Oscar nod for Mickey Rourke. In the end, it would appear that Searchlight won out ... and after a very successful marketing campaign last year for Juno (which landed all sorts of recognition), it should be interesting to see what Searchlight does with this.

So far all the talk has surrounded Mickey Rourke, with folks calling him the comeback kid, what have you -- but not for nothing, I think we have a nice little comeback story for director Darren Aronofsky as well. Great vibes with this one; I look forward to seeing it. Remember when Nic Cage was signed on to this? Heh. Bangkok Dangerous. Double heh. Check out this preview video from Venice, and look for much more on The Wrestler from Cinematical in the next couple of days.

It's so heartwarming to see rival studios playing nice with each other, even if it's only for purely financial reasons. It's especially good when the result of their cooperation is that a film by Danny Boyle (pictured) will get the theatrical release it deserves.

Slumdog Millionaire, about a Mumbai street kid who strikes it rich on an Indian game show before having his knowledge called into question, will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival next week. And now it'll hit multiplexes, too, on Nov. 28, thanks to a deal hammered out this week between Fox Searchlight and Warner Bros.

The film was originally part of Warner Independent Pictures' slate. But that division got shut down earlier this year, and Warner Bros. was left to deal with its leftover movies. It's like Warner Independent was a slightly irresponsible young adult, and Slumdog Millionaire was one of its children. Then Warner Independent died penniless in the gutter, and the child's grandmother, Warner Bros., being the only living relative, got custody. And Nana Warner Bros. loves the kid, thinks it's a great movie that people will enjoy, but ol' WB is on a fixed income and can't really support it. WB has kids of its own still living at home, for crying out loud.

So WB sidled up to Fox Searchlight, the dashing playboy son of billionaire Twentieth Century Fox, and struck up a relationship that involves Fox Searchlight paying for the film's marketing and distribution. Nobody has any illusions about this arrangement -- there's certainly no romance involved -- and they all live happily ever after. I just hope Fox Searchlight's dad doesn't find out, considering mean old Twentieth Century Fox is busy suing Warner Bros. over Watchmen. It's a pretty thorny situation, but hey, you gotta do what's best for the kids. It takes a village, right?

Four years after Connie and Carla failed to set the world on fire, Nia Vardalos has left the writing to someone else while returning to the safe turf of Greece for her new film, My Life in Ruins. Vardalos plays an Athens tour guide tired of all the grating tourists, obnoxious locals, and scheming colleagues in her life, and if the trailer -- link removed at request of studio -- (for those who don't mind Greek subtitles) is any indication, things might just change for the better soon enough.

There has yet to be any specific Stateside release date announced -- Fox Searchlight tentatively has it scheduled for 2009 -- but the crowdpleaser pedigree of Vardalos and director Donald Petrie certainly doesn't hurt the film's chances of outgrossing the $8 million that Connie raked in theatrically (whether or not the downright loud pairing of Harland Williams and Rachel Dratch will is a different story).

Also in the name of safe-bet follow-ups is I Hate Valentine's Day, a rom-com written and directed by Vardalos that reunites her with My Big Fat Greek Wedding love interest John Corbett. That project also bears an equally vague '09 release date, but I have trouble thinking that it couldn't be out of post-production and in theaters by next February.

I was pretty skeptical that Clark Gregg would be able to bring Chuck Palahniuk's novel Choke to the big screen. Fox Searchlight has launched the red band trailer for the dark comedy (along with four new clips), and I'll be the first to admit I was wrong. The first trailer was released back in May, and for anyone who was worried the book's more 'colorful' moments wouldn't be included, I'm here to tell you the filthiness is present and accounted for -- and I couldn't be happier.

Along with the new trailer, there are also some additional clips with the added bonus of exotic dancers filling in the narration from the book -- bizarre, sure, but surprisingly entertaining. Now for the bad news: the site has one of those age-verification login pages that are pretty crappy at the best of the times, but luckily you can always count on You Tube.

Choke is the story of sex addict Victor Mancini (played by Sam Rockwell), a con-man with the unusual tactic of choking in restaurants to earn money to care for his dying mother (Anjelica Huston). It almost sounds sweet, doesn't it? Well, it's not, and if you know anything about the work of Chuck Palahniuk, then you already know how messed up the story gets -- and I truly mean that as a compliment.

Choke arrives in theaters on September 26, 2008.

Yesterday we learned that a bunch of Disney movies will be available for free online, each for a limited time, this summer. Now, because everyone wants in on the streaming video game, Fox Searchlight has also put up three of its own films for free. Sideways, 28 Days Later and Quills can now be watched in full on the studio's website or on Hulu, which is hosting the videos. Hulu, known best as one of the premier streaming sites to watch TV episodes, is also hosting some movies from Searchlight parent Twentieth Century Fox, as well as from Lionsgate, Universal, MGM, Salient Media and FEARnet.

To me, the interesting thing about Searchlight's three available titles is that they're each R-rated, yet neither Fox nor Hulu requires proof of age to view the videos. The same goes for a few other titles offered on Hulu, but Searchlight's crop seems particularly adult in content. When I first saw the press release, I immediately thought of it as the antithesis to Disney's offerings. Of course, I don't mind who sees these movies. I'm having more difficulty getting over the idea of watching R-rated material with "limited commercial interruption." The ads make me feel like I'm watching a movie on network television, which of course would only broadcast films reedited or a general audience. But then suddenly I realize I'm not watching network-friendly versions when suddenly I'm seeing full-frontal male nudity in Quills. It's a little disorienting.

What do you think? Should Hulu have the same kind of censored cuts that the networks have to show? Or should these videos at least come with age-restrictive blockers?