Just a day after Sony Chairman Howard Stringer bragged at CES about bagging Landmark as the first customer for its high res 4K projectors, Landmark ditched Sony, opting to go with Barco's 2K projectors instead.  Landmark announced the switch Friday at CES - apparently no one had told Stringer about the move before his speech. Landmark had previously installed a couple of Sony projectors and was "battle testing them", according to an email from Landmark's Mark Cuban to Cinematech back in December. I guess the battle testing didn't work out so well - Sony's 4K projectors have been plauged with delivery issues and technical problems and now they have no customers to brag about.

There are indie filmmakers who try to work in the realm of small character dramas and succeed only in making myopic films that feel inert and meaningless; there are those who attempt to stand out from the pack by writing scripts replete with quirky story lines and witty dialogue, only to end up with a mundane mess; and then there are a few who manage to achieve, through a combination of richly drawn, yet simple stories and excellent cinematography, a level of filmmaking that inspires without overwhelming, impresses without overreaching. Ramin Bahrani falls firmly in the latter camp, and with his latest film, Goodbye Solo, the director builds on the excellence of his previous work with a finely drawn tale of a cabdriver and the fare who changes his life.

Bahrani starts with an intriguing premise: Solo, a cab driver (Souléymane Sy Savané) picks up a routine fare, only to find his life turned upside down when the man he picks up asks him to take him to the remote mountaintop location of Blowing Rock in two weeks, where he plans to jump to his death. Solo's troubled by both the plans of his fare, William (Red West) to end his life, and the implications to himself of being a party to the man's suicide; he decides to befriend the older man in an attempt to persuade him to change his plans. This is the simple set-up for the film, and it's all Bahrani needs to make a thoughtful, compelling film that explores the relationship between these two vastly different men and the way they're changed by the friendship they form.

Today I leave Toronto to head home to Seattle, leaving James Rocchi behind to see the fest through to its exhausting end. It's been a decent fest overall, not great but good. I saw a several films I enjoyed here, including Burn After Reading, Goodbye Solo, and 35 Rhums, as well as a couple of fun midnight picks with JCVD and Detroit Metal City.

I missed being able to see a lot of films I really wanted to see, due to schedule conflicts and the lack of a cloning machine at our hotel that would allow me to be multiple places at once (or at least, the ability to see far enough into the future to foresee which of two films screening opposite each other will be wretched).

It seems that lots and lots of people who attend this fest (I'm talking normal people, not those of us crazy or masochistic enough to work in any aspect of the film business) want very, very much to attend the big parties, and seem to think if they can't get in, they're missing something fun or perhaps even life-altering. There's always a gaggle of scantily clad girls and hipsters hovering around the entrance of these events, hoping to finagle a way to crash the party.

The Secret Life of Bees, adapted and directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood from the best-selling book by Sue Monk Kidd, weaves racism and the civil rights movement around the story of Lily (Dakota Fanning), a young white girl taken in by three African-American sisters when she runs away from her controlling, emotionless father. It's a role that's in some ways reminiscent of the character Fanning played in Hounddog, a film that was critically panned and rather controversial for having a scene in which Fanning's character was raped.

This time around, there's no such awkward controversy; The Secret Life of Bees is a sweet, mostly charming coming-of-age tale that, while it doesn't particularly break any new ground with regards to the filmmaking, does an able enough job of adapting a bestselling book of the "women's bookclub" variety for the screen. Here's the basic story: Lily is haunted by the death of her mother; now, on the eve of her fourteenth birthday, she's had enough of her father, T-Ray (Paul Bettany), and starts to fight back against him.

When their maid, Rosaleen (Jennifer Hudson), is accosted by a pack of angry white men on the way to registering to vote -- and ends up arrested herself for her trouble -- Lily decides that it's time for both her and Rosaleen to escape. She has a vague idea about where to go -- Tiburon, South Carolina -- based only on the name of a town written on one of the few possessions she has of her mother's, and a label from a honey jar.

A sweeping period drama about Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire, The Duchess is a bland, largely flavorless story that takes one of the more interesting women in British history and reduces her largely to her relationships with the men in her life. From a purely technical standpoint, there's nothing bad to say about the filmmaking: The extravagant period costumes are resplendent with detail, the cinematography is gorgeous, the music is soaring, and the acting's solid but not great, but overall the film left me with the feeling of biting into a cream puff and finding that someone forgot the custard filling, leaving nothing but a hollow pastry and empty air.

Part of what hurts the film is the script, which is based on the autobiography of the same name by Amanda T. Foreman. There are three screenwriters credited to the film (which may be part of the problem): Jeffrey Hatcher, Anders Thomas Jensen, and Saul Dibb, the film's director. Their script takes the life story of a vibrant woman who was politically active and influential a century before the women's suffrage movement, and dilutes it to little more than a romantic drama of love triangles and oppression. Which is fine, I suppose, if that's all you want or expect of a period piece, but I was left with the feeling that there was so much more that was important and interesting about Georgiana's life that got lost in the focus on making a tragically romantic tale.

Award-winning screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga uses a convoluted narrative structure to tell a tale of love, betrayal and regret in The Burning Plain, his directorial debut. Arriaga opens the film with a shot of an old trailer in the middle of the desert burning to the ground, and he then proceeds to bounce around among several seemingly disparate characters, Babel-style, before finally bringing it all together in the film's final act.

The film stars Charlize Theron as Sylvia, a composed-but-icy manager of a fancy Portland, Oregon-area restaurant who spends her spare time having empty, emotionless sex with a wide array of men. Arriaga takes us back and forth from gray, rainy Portland, where Sylvia lives, to the New Mexico desert; early on we learn that the burning trailer, when it exploded into flames, was occupied by Gina (Kim Basinger), a white married housewife with four kids, and Nick (Joaquim De Almeida), a Mexican-American man, also married with kids.

Gina's daughter Mariana (Jennifer Lawrence) and Nick's son Santiago (J.D. Pardo) are drawn together as they struggle to deal with their parents' infidelity and death, much to the consternation of their respective families. Also tossed into the mix are a crop-duster pilot, his best friend, and his young daughter, whose lives are thrown into disarray when the pilot's plane crashes.

Above: First poster for Leaves of Grass (click to enlarge), which begins shooting on September 22.

Tim Blake Nelson and Edward Norton were on-hand in Toronto on Sunday to discuss their upcoming film, Leaves of Grass. Nelson wrote the script and will act in and direct the film, while Norton will play the dual lead roles of identical twin brothers.

Here's what we were told of the storyline: Bill Kincaid is a buttoned-up Ivy League philosophy professor; his pot-growing twin brother lures him back to his hometown in rural Oklahoma for an ill-conceived deal to bilk a local drug-lord (Richard Dreyfuss), described by Nelson as being like "a Jewish T. Boone Pickens in the Tulsa Jewish community". Bill gets entangled in his brother's schemes and implicated in a murder, and his ordered philosophical life starts to fall apart. Also starring in the film are Susan Sarandon as Bill's estranged mother and Keri Russell as a love interest for one of the brothers. Nelson will play the friend of one of the brothers.