Why I'm Here - The Dark Knight round tables

I arrive at my round table room fifteen minutes early to find that every seat at the table has already been taken, and that a second row of chairs have been dragged into the hotel suite, for a second tier of interviewers now hugging the walls. I haul another chair into the room and find a position off to the side, then settle into to listen to my fellow junketeers - faces I recognize from previous months of this sort of thing - gossip and complain. At one point, one of Warner's press girls comes in and summons the woman sitting directly to the right of where our subject will be sitting to come with her and move to another room.

As soon as she leaves the rest of the room explodes in relief - it seems that she's foreign press, not domestic, and notably unloved by the other junket veterans, who tell each other how much they were dreading her apparently aggressive questioning style and preoccupation with the more gossipy, personal questions that the European press lives on. One of the veterans - a white-haired older gentleman I see at most of these things - admits that he was the one who alerted the Warner press girls to her presence in the room and got her moved, for which he receives a round of congratulation. The junket press is an organism, timidly but functionally self-policing, which deals with threats and irregularities like an immune system, isolating infection in the interests of self-preservation.

Or at least that's how I see it. I wonder how long I'll be able to cultivate - at least for myself - a provisional outsider status on the junket circuit. I'm probably already fooling myself.

The afternoon goes smoothly, after the almost ritual 15-minute delay in starting. We get Dark Knight's producers first, then director Christopher Nolan, then the stars. Gary Oldman is funny, adopting a perhaps-calculated blokey persona peculiar to some English actors to a subtly distancing effect, and uses his familiarity with some of the veterans to buy himself some happily-proferred goodwill, just a little gesture of recognition flattering them into docile interrogators - not that an L.A. press junket is HUAC, exactly. Christian Bale is intense, his eyes hooded and almost expressionless, and he's clearly thought his way through his interpretation of his characters with a thoroughness that would do a critic proud. He's a real oddity in Hollywood today - someone known entirely for his work, with a personal life about which not a single detail comes readily to mind.

I've gotten used to discovering, with few exceptions, that too many female actresses are much prettier onscreen than in real life. The pounds - 10-20 depending on which truism is being invoked - that the camera really does add (it looks more like 30 to me, going by my handful of TV appearances) suggest flattering curves on actresses who look dangerously underweight in real life. I recall being surprised at how attractive Diane Lane was in person during a junket for Untraceable last year - she's done her level best to look haggard in several recent roles - and I have the same reaction to Maggie Gyllenhaal, who has the sole female role of any real size in Dark Knight.

Onscreen, Gyllenhaal is often cast as the oddball - the eccentric girl, the smart and randy weird chick in a larger group of women (see Mona Lisa Smile.) At the junket, her appeal is as much personality as looks - she comes off as amused, engaged and confident, and the assembled press fall into the approved rapt attitude. She ends her stint in our room - her handlers practically tugging at her shirt - telling us that the Hollywood indie film is dead, and that there is no way she could make the films that made her name just a few years in today's harsh entertainment economy. An interesting statement to make at an event for a movie whose budget - never mind potential earnings - could probably fund a whole city's elementary school budget for a year.

Almost everyone makes a point of talking about the late Heath Ledger, whose absence is noted continually all afternoon, in nothing but the most glowing of language; many even conspicuously use the present tense when referring to him. All of them make a point of insisting that he didn't seem in any say depressed or emotionally fragile while making the film - there are rumours that Ledger's portrayal of the Joker absorbed him to an unhealthy degree. His death, they all insinuate, was misadventure - an accident, not a suicide. This is clearly a message we're supposed to take away from this afternoon.

Why I'm Here: Dark Knight

Back in the '50s, and then again in the '70s, when the movie industry was suffering at the hands of television or simply in a creative doldrums, there was an explosion of new formats and gimmicks - VistaVision and CinemaScope, Technirama and Cinerama, 3-D and Sensurround. For some reason - which might be obvious - we're seeing that again, with the sudden viability of IMAX theatres and the return of 3-D. I couldn't help but think of this as I sat down in the The Bridge IMAX Theatre at the Howard Hughes Center to watch a screening of The Dark Knight.

At first, it looked like Chrisopher Nolan's sequel to Batman Begins was simply going to be a bigged-up print splashed across the centre of the IMAX screen, but then suddenly the frame expanded to fill the whole expanse in front of us, with an establishing shot that felt positively vertiginous. The film would do that again and again, returning to regular widescreen then blowing up again, with a noticeable change in image quality; anyone with a fear of heights should be given fair warning about one particular shot, with Christian Bale in Batman drag standing on the top of the Sears Tower while the camera swings around him, then settles next to him on the ledge. I actually felt a bit queasy myself.

In a summer full of box office monsters, Dark Knight is potentially one of the biggest of them all, and I see no reason to see why it won't. I also see no reason why it was given a PG-13 rating, considering that it's probably one of the darkest films anyone will see all summer - a 2 hour and 32 minute downer delivered at maximum volume and velocity.

It's also goin to get the late Heath Ledger an Oscar nomination, in all likelihood; a lot of pretty astounding things happen onscreen, but his performance is probably the most memorable thing overall. Nolan has managed to do what Ang Lee failed to do with The Hulk - depart from the essential silliness of the comic book film, but mostly by banishing anything resembling levity or satire; it's no surprise that the painted-on smile on Ledger's Joker is the closest thing to humour in all of its 152 minutes.

Why I'm Here: The Round tables

The concentrated 2-hour interview session for which we've all been gathered here kicked off almost twenty minutes late with the four little girls who were chosen from an open casting call to play Kitt Kittredge's best friends in the movie - four little girls of varying age, size and shyness with their moms waiting out in the hotel hallway while they were cycled from room to room to be grilled by a succession of journalists.

Grilling is, well, probably too harsh a term. Coaxed, perhaps, or gently quizzed. I can't speak for the other press rooms, but our was a pretty unthreatening bunch, with at least three members of the Christian media in attendance, which should say something about the market to which the American Girl movies play. Sitting across from them felt like a further test of my paternal potential - something AG seems fated to facilitate in my life. Ranging in age from 8 to 12, I couldn't help but regard the quartet of girls as a preview of some gallery of potential scenarios I'll be facing in a sampled range of alternate futures I might face. The smallest one - 8-year-old Erin - reminded me of a school friend of my oldest daughter. I hoped that they'd have a good time this summer - the summer of the Kitt Kittredge movie, as they'd probably look back on it for the rest of their lives - and discover, at the end of it all, that they didn't want to be in the movie business.

The strangest thing about becoming a father to daughters is the way it changes how you look at girls, even young women; suddenly you feel concerned, even protective. A year and a half ago I remember a round table in New York with Sienna Miller, who was still a focus of the tabloid press and paparazzi. Once upon a time, I might have seen a pretty girl, but on that day I found myself worrying about her, wondering what her parents were thinking, feeling sorry for them. It took real restraint not to begin my questions with a fatherly "Now, young lady..."

Wallace Shawn was next, looking and sounding very much like Wallace Shawn. Maybe it was just the group I was with, but I noticed that everyone was modifying their tone so that, even if there was an adult at the table, they asked their questions as if they were talking to a kid. I mostly wanted to ask Shawn about his father, who was the editor of The New Yorker, and whether he felt that Woody Allen typecast him for the rest of the film with his role in Manhattan. Another writer sort of edged around the subject with a question about whether he was happy with his career, to which Shawn replied that, if he knew that he was going to become an actor, maybe he would have done something about his speech impediment, which sounded refreshingly honest, especially if you've done a few of these things. He probably would have said more, but his handler was already motioning for him to move on to the next group.

Since the afternoon started late, each interview zipped by with what felt like a quickening pace. Abigail Breslin, the film's 12-year-old star, kept turning each question into a plea to her mother, sitting by the door of the room holding a well-behaved little Pomeranian, to get her another puppy. As they left, her mom came back to make sure we knew that she already had two dogs, and two cats, etc., etc., I was grateful when Julia Ormond, who plays Kitt's mother, took the initiative to contradict the day's perceived wisdom, which was that this film was somehow the first kid's picture ever to take on a realistic subject and hint at the presence of bad things in the world. Fairy tales, she reminded us, have that in abundance. It's always interesting to see how groups of strangers, assembled for some common task, can arrive at some common "truth" without discussion. There's something in there about the dark side of democracy, if I felt I had the energy to pursue it in the harsh morning light of Los Angeles.

Why I'm Here: Kitt Kittredge: An American Girl

Roundtables start in about an hour, and I've just finished up the lunch I picked up at the buffet in the hospitality suite. I've run into the film's director twice now in the elevators, and Wallace Shawn, who has a small part in the film, is in a room two doors down the hallway. I'm trying to get questions together, on the assumption that I'll be at a table where I'll have a chance to talk.

Kitt Kittredge: An American Girl is the fourth AG film, but only the first theatrical release, a co-production between the late New Line Pictures, Picturehouse and HBO. The first AG film aired four years ago, a Christmas picture based around Samantha Parkington, the Gilded Age doll, followed by TV movies featuring Felicity Merriman, the Revolutionary War doll, and Molly McIntyre, the WW2 doll.

Since I've become a parent, I've realized that there are movies I've seen now many more times than films that I'd call personal favorites. I have probably seen Molly: An American Girl On The Homefront more times now than The Maltese Falcon, If.... or Lawrence Of Arabia. I'm pretty sure I can say the same thing for Peter Pan, Finding Nemo and certain episodes of Dora The Explorer and Yo Gabba Gabba.

The Molly movie starred Molly Ringwald as Molly's mom - an irony that amused me personally, since Pretty In Pink was my wife's favorite film as a teenager. It's not a bad little film, and hardly saccharine - moms and girlfriends in the supporting cast keep getting "We regret to inform you..." letters and bursting into tears, and the sense of insecurity that saturated the home front during the war is very nicely evoked by director Joyce Chopra.

Kitt Kittredge would be a finishing high school by the time the Molly movie takes place - the character and the film are set in the middle of the Great Depression, as Kitt's family starts slipping out of the middle class after her father loses his car dealership to the bank. There's a crime that needs to be solved, so the movie - and the books that inspired it - are modeled after the Nancy Drew mysteries. There are also lessons to be learned about tolerance and jumping to conclusions, and in spots the film plays like propaganda for FDR's New Deal.

The franchise has gone big with this film, attracting a cast that includes Abigail Breslin from Little Miss Sunshine in the title role, Julia Ormond and Chris O'Donnell as her parents, and a supporting cast that includes Stanley Tucci, Joan Cusack, Jane Krakowski, Glenne Headly, Wallace Shawn and newly minted teen heartthrob Max Thieriot. Shot in Toronto, it also features locals like Kenneth Welsh and Colin Mochrie.

Most of them, including a trio of little girls who play Kitt's friends, will apparently be at today's roundtables. It's a decent enough little film - sweet and very earnest, and I can guarantee that my daughter and her friends will love it, and that by the time it's out on DVD, I'll probably have seen it more times than Citizen Kane, Casablanca or Patton.

From the departure lounge, Pearson Terminal 3

06.12.08 - 8:41am

As I left the house this morning, the last words I heard were my daughters, dictating their shopping lists for me - a teddy bear, a doll, a dress, a new bedroom so they wouldn't have to share with their sister. Sleepless after being up most of the night finishing up the writing I'd have had all day to complete if I weren't going to be in a seat in coach for most of the business day, the best I could muster was a heavy-eyed smile and a mumbled "Love you, uh, yeah, my boo-boos."

Normally my oldest daughter isn't much impressed with what I do, but getting to see the American Girl movie weeks before anyone else, then flying to Los Angeles to meet the cast - that's proof that Daddy does something she can tell her friends about in junior kindergarten. One day, perhaps, she might think interviewing Salman Rushdie or doing a mad dash around the city interviewing MPs on election night is worth a mention at recess, but until then, talking to the girl who plays Kitt Kittredge will do, even if I'm going to miss her birthday to do it.

I'm sitting in the departure lounge of Terminal Three at Pearson, waiting for the WestJet flight that's supposed to take me to L.A. to interview the cast of Kitt Kittredge: An American Girl. More about the American Girl phenomenon - let's talk junkets.

The movie junket is a fact of life for entertainment reporters these days - anything from an afternoon eating buffet sandwiches while waiting to do your interviews in a local hotel to three days in a hotel in London, playing with the water jets in the jacuzzi in your room and watching hours of local TV while eating room service - while waiting for your roundtable interviews with the film's director, producer and stars. For movie writers, it's the equivalent of one of those six-countries-in-seven-days travel packages, except that you don't leave your hotel.

The average movie junket these days is in either New York or Los Angeles, and you can rely on meeting the same group of people on every trip - seasoned veterans of the movie beat for whom junkets are like commuting; younger writers who've been thrown a junket bone as a perk; eager movie and pop culture geeks of any age self-assigned by their own newsletter or website, trying - and failing - to seem jaded by the whole process. The junket ecosystem is so established that an epiphet - "junket whores" - has been coined to describe the people who've built their lives around junkets, using them to fill their wardrobes, fund their vacations and shop for Christmas and birthday presents for similarly movie-obsessed friends.

Studios pay to fly in press from all over the country and even the world and put them up in good hotels, give them a per diem, organize outings and events and leave goodie bags full of toys and t-shirts in their rooms when they arrive in the hope - usually fulfilled - that they'll get a few decent features out of it during the run-up to the film's opening weekend. And thus I am here.

And here's my boarding call - off I go.