Photos from Nuit Blanche
c/o Chris, my personal photographer.
Tederick.com: September 2007 Archives
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September 30, 2007
September 28, 2007
Lasiurus
Last night my iCal said this: "Dinner with Kate - bring guns." But no, it all worked out fine. I didn't have to murder her at all! In fact a lot of things that have been left undealt with for far too long (hey check that out, I made up a word and used it in a sentence at the same time!) got brought out and sorted out and put away. So that's... well that's just solid, is what that is. The wheel never stops turning.
I can't tell you how good it feels to be walking around in pants that aren't so oversized that they're hanging down to my ballsack right now. It's like a whole new me.... in pants.
My telly sources inform me that Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered a mighty 20 years ago today... two thirds of my life. That's just goddamned insane. If you want to go back and read some really, really bad writing on the subject, I reviewed the whole show back in '02 when the DVDs came out, starting here. But otherwise there's little to say beyond the obvious fact that this series, probably more than any other, turned me into who I am. Not a direct line, certainly, but for formation of the psyche you can't do much better than being the television obsession of a 14-year-old boy. Besides, remember Data with that beard that one time? That was crazy.
OK, the number of lower-than-z-grade acquaintances, i.e. people I maybe met once, who are seeking my friendship on Facebook are making me feel like a very rare baseball card that everyone wants to collect just to say that they have it. Only in my case, the gum is apathy.
I'm hoodied up, very focused, and calm.
Red Tent Sisters
The other day a friend of mine who shall remain nameless told me she'd bought a new vibrator and hadn't bought it at Red Tent Sisters - the women-positive sexual & reproductive health store very near our home on the Danforth. So this seemed like a good opportunity for shameless self-promotion mixed with selfless support of a community establishment: here's my piece on blogTO about the store, here's a link to the store's web site, and here's my strong recommendation that you spend all your Q4 funny money on stuff from this store. Places like this - particularly in a location like this - are in dire need of support to get their feet firmly planted. Let's all be with the helping.
Workshops and events coming up in October: fertility yoga (woot! gotta try that one), Natural approaches to menopause, and a film screening of Absolutely Safe, a film about breast implants (and presumably, things going horribly wrong!).
September 27, 2007
Go there do that
blogTO has your guide to Nuit Blanche, and it is excellent.
Serenity rose
This morning I wrote pretty much the entire third issue of Snapdragon... I just couldn't stop. Again, being as that I'm doing this with no plan whatsoever I thought that was pretty impressive. Plus, being a comics reader myself, I suspect this is the issue where - if this thing ever sees print - the readers will go, "oh, NOW he knows what do with it." This is the one where the possibilities of the concept overtook the requirements of the genre. I file it under "yay me."
Sorry for all the masturbation on the blog lately, but I am feeling uncommonly calm, clear, and focused right now, and with that being the general state to which I am always striving, I'm just sort of trying to make sure I don't miss it while it's here.
Key among my current joys is the degree to which I am enjoying Dividadero. Holy sweet crap, am I enjoying Divisadero. Ondaatje's writing remains near-narcotic in its effect on me... to say nothing of its equally respectable near-erotic effects. It's been a long time since I've read a (non-Harry Potter) book that literally fell under "can't put it down." I've got a stack of Iron Fist comics that ain't gettin' any smaller cuz I'd rather be in novel-land right now. Been a while for that one, too.
I am on a strict diet of Evanescence and Coldplay right now; not sure why. It's like a 2002 musical wonderland in my head, following the 1987 musical wonderland that was my Appetite for Destruction haze last month.
In the next week I've got Nuit Blanche, a departmental offsite, a team day, three working dinners, a soccer game, yoga, and a Mamo. I've also got minor VCR 9 prepping to do: our first shoot date is booked for the 8th of October, at the vacant lot near my office. Sending out the sides last night I finally began to understand what Adam meant when he said there was no way I was ever going to make this. It seems un-possible, I guess. But it all makes sense in my head...
At work today someone told me that I'm a catch, and I actually took it as a compliment instead of as an incendiary like I usually do. Times have sure as fuck changed.
September 26, 2007
EXTREME STEVE!!!! episode fifty-four
Exile
I tried to watch Heroes. I did. Fuck, I couldn't get ten minutes into it. That show is now officially awful, Internet. And I suspect given the scope of the plans for the season and the spin-off, now would be the moment when the world is going to cotton to that.
Meanwhile, I am largely unable to keep up with any TV commitments this year, though I'll try to watch the House opener later tonight if I have time. Haven't watched the Family Guy Star Wars thing yet, so stop asking.
Let's flip it over to comics:
I loved Umbrella Academy #1. Loved it, and would call it a high recommend, regardless of your doubts about the thing. I also got up-sold into Azarello's Doctor 13 graphic novel, and I have to say, it was pretty awesome as well. The most fun I had this week, though, was reading All-Star Batman & Robin #7. That comic is now officially the funniest thing in print right now. "I'm the goddamn Batman and I can call my goddamn car whatever the hell I want to call it." It's amazing how few people have caught on to the fact that this is a comedy.
Anyhooza, just trying to get out the week alive; looking like there's another double tap to the head in my future, and also a play about Judaism. Or something. And with the announcement that the TTC will be supporting Nuit Blanche with all-night subway service, I feel I have little choice but to actually do the whole dusk-till-dawn... but how the fuck do I survive my 1 p.m. soccer game on Sunday, be that the case? We'll see.
I owe you a Steve. Shortly.
September 25, 2007
I solemnly swear that I am up to no good.
I finished the second issue of Snapdragon this morning and went straight into the third. I am fucking loving this. I should note, for purposes of self-aggrandization if nothing else, that I really started this with no overall plan. I found the story, though, and I'm really liking it. Plus, like that first bike ride of the season, it just feels good to be stretching my legs again - which works well with the fact that I am back into my yoga practice twice weekly, after a six week hiatus. I also had what had to have been my final warm summer night bike ride tonight, because Toronto was 32 goddamned degrees today. It won't last. It won't even last 12 more hours. We're going into the hole.
This would be an outstanding opportunity to re-pimp this Saturday's Nuit Blanche screening of the One Minute Film & Video Festival, years 1-4. It's at the Rhino in Parkdale and I believe the ball drops (for the first time of many) at 7:03. I will be popping up occasionally, whack-a-mole style, to introduce, blather, and generally make merry. I have yet to write anything for it. So it might be a "2005 show" as opposed to a "2006 show."
Right now I'm hiding from that selfsame film festival at the Starbucks at Yonge and Bloor; my dinner plans for tonight promptly evaporated but my living room is under siege by festival submissions, and I didn't particularly feature sitting round doing nothing. So instead, I am sitting round doing nothing somewhere else. It's a fine distinction but I like to think I'm the master. And two days in, I must say, I feel positively unchained. Everything's in its proper box right now: life is making sense, for the first time in longer than I'd care to remember. So that's a good. It's an interesting thing, love without expectation.
Men with beards
So by now the news is out that I am growing my beard for my Hallowe'en costume. BUT WHICH COSTUME??? Here are some bearded contenders.
Riker:
Jack Sparrow:
Sigmund Freud:
Obi-Wan Kenobi:
Hector Barbossa:
Data that one time:
Dr. Richard Kimble, on the run from the law!:
This guy:
September 24, 2007
I never don't
I started a new scheme this morning - a new, crazy scheme! Owing to the fact that I am always too tired to write when I get home from work, I am now waking up an hour earlier, and writing before I go. Holy madness and balls-ass shit that's clever. And the really good news (in terms of behaviour reinforcement) is that the first time out, I smacked it out of the park - six pages on Snapdragon including the key beat for the second issue and one sweet motherfucking My So-Called Life hommage on page 17. I'm using Snapdragon (comic) as the warm-up lap before starting Pandaemonium (screenplay). The latter has been knocking against the inside of my head rather fiercely since I thought it up a month ago, and yeah, it's time to put the rubber on the road.
And incidentally - Bendis is right, Final Draft is awesome for writing comics. One of my major challenges writing Terra and now Snapdragon was the sheer quantity of time it took to format everything as I went along in Word, which is not the friendliest program ever; it was seriously cutting into my mental flow and dropping my page count to a snail's pace. Well not so much any more, my people; I'm flying through the setups now. Oh Bendis. You have earned your egg.
Once again for soccer yesterday, nobody showed up, but after we had defaulted to the other team we had a rather rousing just-for-fun game, and fun it was. The Red Queen was in play, Stacey was teasing me relentlessly for everything, and Crazylegs... well, that man's got some crazy legs. I love my team. I know I say that a lot, but damn, it is just so freaking rare in my life to see a group of people who are just out to have fun and be decent.
And then Jessi cooked us a mighty dinner - she's handy to have around, that one - and we watched some of my flicks, including Bone Daddy 2 which I haven't watched in forever. Oh, and watching a total non-Star Wars person enjoy Far, Far Away as much as she did? Warms my wookiee-lovin' heart.
It is definitely time to move the catalogue forward, though. Looking at my tapes last night, I was struck by how old it all felt. I've finally got a shoot date on VCR 9, but I'm looking forward to moving stuff that is really not of the order of the rest. I've got a hunger on in a big way right now.
September 23, 2007
The storm, part II
I use the blog to organize my life and make it coherent. I write only to myself. Sometimes this is very direct and overt, like during TIFF, when the blog basically kept me alive - I could all the bits of chaos coming at me every second, and file them down to sensible (well, to me) chunks of narrative that could be uploaded, processed, safely databased and left for everyone else to see. Out of my head, into the green world. My journal functions entirely differently; the journal is history, while the blog is narrative. The blog is the screenplay of my life, one lousy bit of dialogue at a time. (I suck at writing dialogue.) And the only downside to organizing your life via a Movable Type database that can be sorted, searched, and easily referenced, is the uncanny ability to turn it into a map of all the patterns and dates, all the hopelessly myriad connections that do not exist in life, only in art. The boundary line is a scary thing - when does this stop being, say, a pair of Mickey Mouse boxer shorts that five hot girls bought me when I turned 16, and when does it attain the quasi-mystical status of a garment that I should have thrown away long ago, that still (miraculously) fits, that still pops out of the bottom of my underwear drawer with alarming regularity every two or three years but only at the exact right moment, to prove that it still has an eerie, effective quantity of whatever fairy dust made it what it was when I went to semi-formals with Mark back in grade 11. When the legend becomes fact, blog the legend - and try not to get caught out for all the simple, stupid ways every thing you say and do can seem only pale shadows of what was there in the first place. This silly, horrible world and all the beautiful things in it. Like the storm finally easing, like the best four months of my life, like the beginning of the next thing overtaking the ashes of the last. I notice. I can't help it. Up is down, dusk is dawn, there's a green flash on the horizon.
"There's just something about the 23rd of September." - me
"But you can't stop the change. Any more than you can stop the suns from setting." - Shmi Skywalker
"I'm going to bed, before either of you come up with another clever idea to get us killed. Or worse, expelled." - Hermione Granger
Water lilies
I radically misjudged Naissance des pieuvres when I saw it at the fest. That thing has been growing on me in hindsight in a big way. I've talked to a few other people about it and read some reviews online and done quite a bit of backwards reflection, and all I can say is, it was Tuesday (traditional home of the Traditional Tuesday Night Freak-Out), the Megatron thing had just happened, I'd come out of a couple of lacklustre flicks in a row and I wasn't entirely on board with my queer cinema search-and-exalt mode. Looking back at everything that went down there, I think a) it's amazing this thing didn't fire off every single wheelhouse alarm in my person, by sheer virtue of subject matter, and b) the fact that someone had the balls to make that flick at all is substantially praise-worthy. Calm and sure of itself, it didn't have enough bells and whistles to grab attention in the middle of the 51-film slate, but on its own it would have sent me into paroxysms of cinematic fervour. So yeah, I think that sucker might end up on my ten best list for the year. I really wanna see it again, which is a good sign, but it's not being released Stateside till next year.
Oh, and the title actually translates as Birth of Octopuses. Which I only learned now because honestly, why would "octopuses" be in my limited French vocabulary? Now I know. (And knowing is half the battle.)
September 22, 2007
People chess
I'm not saying this to impress anyone with my social fortitude, but I am actually booked for every evening between now on the fifth of October. Every single one. In the shower last night I strongly considered declaring People Bankruptcy to go along with all my other bankruptcies; everyone would just get an e-mail saying "I'm sorry, but through my own incompetence I massively overbooked myself and have begun to fear for my ability to survive, so if we made plans for this month I may just not show up." But then, I have to eat, right?
Stuff I got for my birthday!: a Wii and stuff for the Wii, a Blu-Ray player (yet to be bought), a t-shirt that says "time flies when you're having rum," Play Doh, books about salt, tea and rum, a 12" Jack Sparrow to go with the 6" Jack Sparrow and the 18" Jack Sparrow, and various cards, shots, and punches in the arm.
Resident Evil 3 was terrible. Absolutely fucking terrible. Possibly the second worst movie ever made. I was plenty drunk by the time we got in there so really I guess I didn't mind as much as I might have, but the movie was so bad that even the "get drunk and go see a terrible movie" thing didn't work out in terms of the humourous. Still, it was fun to hang out with everybody. Now let us never speak of my 31st birthday again.
Extinction
September 21, 2007
Moxies vagina ball
There's one solid reason to visit the Moxies across the street from my office: the prostitutes. Lots and lots and lots of prostitutes. But when you get over the ultra-short skirts and low-cut breastware on the entire barely-legal serving staff, you also begin to notice that the light fixtures are shaped like dildos, the plates are shaped like eggs, and hanging from the ceiling in one corner of the dining room is this thing:
And you begin to detect a theme. The Moxies vagina ball could also be referred to as the punani Death Star, or the single least-subtle piece of vag design since the Sarlacc pit. Inside the vagina ball is a brightly glowing red light, the Light of Creation, from whence it gets its comely Caucasian glow. The vagina ball has not one, not two, but about eight clitorises (clitori?), and when it's set to spin, it becomes quite hypnotic. Honestly, I was a remark away from cutting this thing down and rolling it to my home.
Patriotic morning byplay
Brandy: The dollar is over a dollar.
Me: We rule!
Facebook is far too annoying and I already wish I'd never joined, but the upside is that the "Wall" thingie really does boil down all my friends into their most defining attributes: Mer's on there saying FB's not as cool as they say it is, Bex is trying to shoot me down (and FAILING!), Matty Price is being loving and supportive, and Jessi just wants her wallet back. The Wall is the crucible of the soul.
Remember that thing where I said I wasn't going to get sick? Apparently no one told my nose. I am leaky and gross. How am I supposed to kill zombies now? Sneeze on 'em?
September 20, 2007
Yeah. I caved.
Like a Ukrainian mining town. Come find me.
High and low / heaven and hell
Wait a minute - if Tatooine is supposed to be the ass-backwards middle of nowhere in a galaxy of ten thousand star systems, how the fuck does Tarkin know what that guy is talking about when he says that the Falcon blasted its way out of Mos Eisley? Isn't that like me recognizing the name of a coffee shop in outer Mongolia?
Well gang, in spite of my best - and if I may say so, heroic - efforts, there will be no 10th anniversary sequel to Fuck: the Documentary, which was to be titled Fuck 2: Fuck You!. Instead, Adam and I will be collaborating on a film about Oshawa. It will combine fiction and non-fiction elements and be called You, Me, the Cannonball, and the Shwa. We aim to go to camera in November, when the Shwa will be at its most Shwa. More details to be confirmed at the latertime.
Meanwhile, I'm getting an awful lot out of the Stephen Prince book, The Warrior's Camera. It's a little annoying that I can actually hear Prince's didactic monologue in my head as I'm reading his words, but that's my own fault for listening to so many Criterion commentaries. I remain intensely distrustful, however, of any analysis that makes it seem like a filmmaker put so much damn work into the pre-thought of his movie. Diagrams and schematics and ethical projects and so forth. Surely nobody actually breaks a film down to what essentially amounts to a masters thesis in philosophy, before he even begins writing it? Surely one just has an idea, sees some themes or concepts that can be articulated through that idea, and then just tries to make the flick as best as one can?
Number one crush
Now listen up you bastards!! Chris got me Transformers for the Wii! For ten glorious minutes I was a destruction-bent autobot with absolutely no idea what he was doing or why! I destroyed buses full of civilians! I shot holes in bank walls! I climbed the sides of buildings and rained fire down on a dim and unsuspecting public!! And yet, I never transformed... The Wii is a dreamspace in a box, with all the attendant ironies and vagueries.
Meanwhile: Brandy got me the SNES controller for the Wii! So now I can download and play Donkey Kong Country 2, my Favourite Game Ever! So there!!
I am absolutely not coming down with a cold. FYI.
I think I radically underestimated the recovery time for the film festival; I was so fucking tired yesterday I actually lost the ability to pull correct words out of my vocabulary by around 5:00. I was malapropping like a pro for a while there. I passed out in Caitlin's bed for an hour or so and that let me get through the night, but it was a near thing. Note to self: one night of solid sleep and then going hard like a demented undergrad for the next three nights, not so much "good."
Meanwhile, check this shit out:
But when you're Adam, you never get to be in the picture. We went to a place called Il Mulino, which is on Eglinton near Bathurst (though not very near Bathurst) and it was goddamned tip-top. Terrific beef carpaccio and I tried the octopus as well; an imported mozarella so lusty and flavourful it was like I could actually see the cow; and the best gnocchi I've ever had that wasn't made by my mother and brother. Plus, actually the best waiter ever: not only could he detail the interrelating qualities of the entire menu and twelve daily specials, and provide a fucking HUGE wine to go along with, but he could also enunciate the finer points of 3:10 to Yuma and crack a fairly solid joke. If I could import this guy like they import their mozarella, all would be well with the fucking world. I am so in need of a valet.
The owner came out and got to talking to Mom and Caitlin about Torino and Sienna, and I'm beginning to realize that for all my farther-east travel ambitions, I've made an error by not yet having been to Italy. That, and actually going to Egypt (where my mother was born), have been on my mind a lot lately, as little more than angsty sensation waiting to be made form. I wonder what I would do in a year with no film festival.
September 19, 2007
Time of the wolf
Wiimote meets lightsabre, in the long-awaited marriage of obvious applications of designed objects.
This review is so fucking funny, it actually almost makes me want to buy the Death Proof DVD. Almost. Actually I'd buy a Death Proof-only DVD quite gladly, if it were the cut I saw in theatres this past spring, but needless "deleted scenes thrown in" cuts just piss me off. Can we just for frickin' once let things be?
If you feel like saving the environment today, go here.
Otherwise, perhaps you'd like Jane Schoettle's job.
How pathetic is it that I've finally caved to the Facebook gods and can't get the fucking thing to send me a confirmation e-mail so that I can actually activate the gorramned account? Wow yeah, pretty fucking pathetic. Well anyways, I'll keep you posted; half a bajillion idiots can do this, so it follows that I can figure it out.
I'm becoming interested in wolves lately. Can anyone recommend any books about the use of wolves in folklore and the relation of wolf archetypes to psychology? (Hmmm... heavy request.)
OK... birthday ongoing, no time for jivin' suckah. Hit the road JACK!
"Take what you want. Give nothing back!" - Captain Jack Sparrow and Mr. Gibbs
Bonecrusher
Dear Internets,
I am now 31 years old. This is the year they will sing songs about (when I turn 32). ("They" consisting of a chorus made of Matty Price, Chris, and Chad, and also a robot named Wander.) In the meantime, fair weather favours the watchful, and so on and so forth. Tally ho.
Shelagh and I went to see Eastern Promises tonight; I now officially cry foul on the TIFF audience choice award. There is no fucking way that movie beat Juno for the top votes, because for whatever its varying qualities, it is simply not the kind of movie an audience would immediately respond to. Foul, I cry, foul! Juno clearly won, and TIFF is clearly playing unfair.
Mmmmm... Juno. [happy place] I intend to celebrate my birthday by plotting my nefarious takeover of a Pirates-dominated Blu Ray universe, doing as little work as possible, and trying - once again - to figure out which Transformer is the best one. Silly, silly life.
To my twins - Amelia, Kimba, and Hermione Granger - hope you're having as much fun with this as I am.
September 18, 2007
The virgin queen
"Welcome back to the real world." - a co-worker of mine
"Oh no, my dear. That's the real world. This is the Land of the Dead." - me
Yeah, I said that. And I already had to get shirty with someone for making a homophobic remark when I described XXY. Dante missed a level of hell when he was doing his pretty diagrams. In the good news pile though, I go away for ten days and nobody quits, gets fired, or has their head split open and a robot come out. One person got promoted, but she is highly deserving. The status remains otherwise quo. My computer decided to commit hara kiri to welcome me back, but otherwise nothing new to report.
The next little while is all about pattern breaking. I organized my life in post-its on my wall yesterday; I even wrote objectives and tactics. I am one focused motherfucker right now. The fest gave me a lot of clarity; now I've gotta go use it.
Speaking of toy bankruptcy, I got the Keith Richards action figure last week at the Snail - and it is bloody brilliant! Man I think it's actually the best Pirates toy I have. I wish they'd keep making these, but I guess they probably won't, unless we get Pirates 4.
Meanwhile, the battle over the sovereign claim of the TIFF "arrrrh" gag continues apace.
Man, I am in a serious Lost hankering here. Ya know? Locke won best supporting actor the other day, and here it's September and there's no Season Three on DVD and no new season to look forward to for godfucking ever. I am so used to absorbing this show in the September/October corridor now; I need my island fix. It ain't autumn without a little Dharma.
September 17, 2007
Slouching towards Bethlehem
Here's a Mamo we recorded on.... Friday? Yes I'd say it was Friday.
And here's one we recorded on Monday night. Can you tell the difference? HINT: aromatic beans.
Batman begins
So I suppose I was tired. Going to soccer was clearly a mistake; in fact, signing up for the entire fall season might have been a mistake. But I went to the game intending to have a nice easy time of it, and instead ended up playing the majority of the game and nearly dying. I came home, watched Batman, and promptly went into a coma. Slept for twelve hours straight without moving, and wouldn't have woken had I not had to go to the doctor for a blood test. Which, on an empty stomach, proved an exercise in hilarity! I got screened for Hep due to the tat, and then had to slog out into the middle of buttfuck to pick up our gigantic new soccer net. You know, the one we're supposed to take on the TTC to the games in the middle of nowhere. Oh TCSSC. Why, why, why.
Oh: I lost over 20 pounds. Actually I probably lost even more than that, and then gained some of it back in the last two weeks. I'm going to get back on the horse with added exercise and better diet, pronto. I plan to be under the deuce by the end of November. Why not? Heroin is so chic again, and with the semi-beard I look like a dire individual.
As I've now been asked several times, I'll clarify: DVD bankruptcy does not apply to birthday presents. DVD bankruptcy, book bankruptcy, toy bankruptcy, and girl bankruptcy shall all be temporarily suspended for the next five calendar days. After that, it's on. I suppose the real goal over the next three months is to see if I can eliminate every single thing in my life. Just, you know, to see what happens.
Now I'm charting out my master plan on my bedroom wall. You know, like in Back to the Future II.
"Yes. Great. I wish you hundreds of fat children." - Inara
September 16, 2007
Inside
And so it was. Mad Detective was strange and beautiful, though I wondered throughout what the title character - who sees the inner selves of people he comes in contact with, rather than their external selves - would see if he looked in a mirror; and seeing as how he died surrounded by them, I felt a little robbed. Ex Drummer was a work of concentrated evil so vile that I actually not only shut off my emotional response to the images on screen, but my intellectual one as well; the result was like watching a hypnotic flashing light for two hours, and not entirely unpleasant at that. And À l'intérieur was worthy of the highest compliment I can give it: it outshone last year's closing Midnight Madness for its sheer sick, twisted fuckedupedness. What is with the French? Honestly.
We lined the front of the house; I brought the rum. There was Colin and a beach ball and the girl who shares the festival's name, and Matty Price on allergy medication and a couple of Sheitan call backs and my pirate socks.
It's done now.
The best of the fest: XXY
So close: Juno
Otherwise great: Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Une Vielle Maitresse, Chaotic Ana, Sukiyaki Western Django
Solidly good: Persepolis, Shoot 'Em Up, Frontiere(s), Control, Chacun son cinema, Mongol, Nothing is Private, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Vexille, Stuck, Naissance de pieuvres, Cassandra's Dream, Encounters at the End of the World, Dr. Plonk, Angel, Smiley Face, Terra, Weirdsville, DAINIPPONJIN, La Citadelle Asiegee, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Mad Detective, A l'Interieur
Acceptable: Glory to the Filmmaker, Diary of the Dead, Chansons d'amour, The Orphanage, Princess of Nebraska, La Fille Coupee en Deux, Flash Point, Gone with the Woman, Hollywood Chinese, Son of Rambow
Unacceptable: Pink, The World Unseen, Chrysalis, The Exodus, Operation Filmmaker, Very Young Girls, The Tracey Fragments
Awful: Mother of Tears, Reclaim Your Brain, L'Age des Tenebres
Horrific: Ex Drummer
I make my count 51, and objections must be filed in box 37.
It's late, dark, and cold, and I won't sleep for hours. To every single person I shared this experience with over the past ten days, up to and including the staff of Burrito Boyz, you have my love, cheers, and thanks.
September 15, 2007
Before the devil knows you're dead
I just saw the best film of the entire festival. Wasn't expecting that. XXY was just supposed to be something I gulagged to my Saturday night come-down period, which has now ended up trotting into my brain and saying "Yeah. I live here now; you just rent." It's the London to Brighton spot in the schedule - I suppose I should have seen this coming.
XXY is the best film about gender identity I have ever seen. When your kids ask you what straight and gay mean, this is the film you show them to teach them that none of those words mean anything. I'm not going to say anything more than that because the tight construction and impeccable plotting are really what make this thing tick. But It is my sincere hope that it will receive a Stateside release and be seen by everyone, everywhere, on the planet. Fucking phenomenal.
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead was pretty decent, too, especially if you're into Marisa Tomei getting doggie-styled by Philip Seymour Hoffman in a Brazilian hotel room. (Hey, who isn't?) Plus it's just a pretty damn good movie. Hard for me to tell on account of that everyone around me in the balcony at the Ryerson was being a complete and utter dick about the proceedings, but whatever. I spared their lives.
I came out of XXY so fucking thrilled I just had to walk around the block a couple of times listening to music. The sun had just gone down, the last rush line was still standing outside the Varsity, and a few moments of perfect serenity settled over me. Man, this was one hell of a summer.
The besieged fortress
FORTY SIX DOWN FIVE TO GO MOTHERFUCKER!!! WOOOOOOOOOO yeah that was me yelling that in the middle of the intersection at Richmond and Peter just now. Fuck you.
That was also me who burst out laughing while the little boy was drowning in Son of Rambow. Fuck you too. It was a direct Fellowship of the Ring quote shot for shot, and it amused me.
I taught young Maxwell how to do the pirate "Arrrh" during the anti-piracy card in yesterday's Terra screening. Actually as far as I'm concerned I taught the entire festival how to do this. This is because I am the Lead Pirate. King of the Pirate Brethren, if you will. Captain. Sure, it's an old gag, but I did it first at the first Midnight, goddammit, so I'm claiming ownership for the rest of fucking time. Are any of these other bastards wearing pirate socks??? No. No they are not.
Let me tell you something: La Citadelle Asiegee makes March of the Penguins look like a walk in Central Park. It also takes that film's anthropomorphization and raises it to the level of pure mythology: this is The Lord of the Rings for Bugs. A column of carnivorous ants invades a termite colony in Africa. The results are predictably awesome. It had not occured to me before that a swarm of insects is essentially one creature in multiple bodies; this explains much. (Such as why they can only be destroyed through purging fire.) You ever seen a column of ants take down a fucking snake? Cuz I have. It's changed my opinion of the universe.
Dashed downtown for a comic book and One Last Burrito. Something sure flipped over this week, because apparently I am now finally the Norm of the Silver Snail: everybody knows my name.
No country for old men
Like shutting off a light switch - the real world comes rushing back, the temperature drops ten degrees, I pop out of bed at 8:30 like I'm about to go to yoga, problems are lurking in the wings like unsolvable land mines. I am blithe (and bonny). No sense fretting - before, during, or after the last day. The next little while is going to be governed by one sad little phrase: "Everything is going to change."
For one thing, I have a fairly solid beard starting.
I'm shedding the accumulated crap; emptying my bag. I no longer need maps and guides and emergency garments. After Terra last night I emerged from the theatre into a driving rainstorm; I sprinted four blocks along Bloor, straight into the Gap, straight to the second floor and into a hoodie. I have a complicated relationship with hoodies; almost spiritual, how they arrive exactly when I need them (I could not have found a hoodie in this colour and shape a week ago; I know this because I tried, in this exact store), how I don't even need to try one on any more to know it will fit like a piece of old skin. Soon everything I wear will have a hood, even my underwear - hood for the cock, hood for the balls. And my socks. Tiny little individual hoodies for ten individual toes.
Terra, along from having the best title of any narrative work ever, nearly got me. For about ten minutes at the beginning of the film, I was actually crying at how unbelievably powerful and beautiful a world was unfolding onscreen - how dare this director, this man from Montreal, reach right into my soul and find something I couldn't articulate in a million years of trying. The visual design, the music, the use of flight (straight out of Flight)... but when the engine of the story got going, the story was merely B+ acceptable rather than A++ mind-blowing. I was bummed about it, but also relieved; I was in no fit state to have my soul blown open by a new, scorching beauty.
Every festival needs its canvas survey and mine this year was the Hollywood Chinese doc; this was a competent look at the place of Asian-Americans in American cinema in the past hundred years. It hit what I would consider all of the main points except that it didn't linger long enough on the question of sexuality for women (Asian women are whores) or men (Asian men are sexless), two of what I would call defining characteristics of Hollywood's use of Chinese culture in film, even to this day. Otherwise it was solid. Son of Rambow, the family movie from the UK, was solid as well, although here, I would have liked to see it speak more directly to my own experience making movies as a kid - there was none of that. When you're a kid making a movie, it's never about the gag (slingshotting one of your actors into a tree) as how the fuck you're going to achieve the gag (the hours and days and weeks of planning that go into the slingshot); this was what made Raiders Adapted so much fun or at least fun in concept, but without focusing on the actual craft of how the boys make their movie, Rambow left no real window for me to get at the characters. So it was merely charming.
By this point Brandy and Matty Price and I were locked in a rotating windmill of Ryerson exits and re-entries. I got cock-blocked clean into the next decade while waiting in line, by someone who (admittedly) had no idea he was doing it; I no longer care. Heterosocial relations are a game for the living. I found yet another Far Bathroom before the midnight and didn't get lost this time. For one thing, other patrons are exploring the lower reaches as well; you find them in the most unusual places. We saw Weirdsville and then DAINIPPONJIN. With the former it was nice to see Telefilm's name attached to something that isn't utter garbage, even though the film still didn't have one sweet fuck of a clue what it wanted to be for about the first half hour; it was also nice to confirm that my Scott Speedman crush remains strong and comfortable. DAINIPPONJIN was great as well, but wayyyyyyyyyyy too subtle for a Midnight screening - the comedy was fantastic and fantastically low-key, but really quiet and small. Matty Price bailed after the second reel; I bailed after the fifth.
But as it turns out, sleep is something my body no longer needs nor desires. I am in a perfect perpetual state.
September 14, 2007
Gone with the woman
On Matty Price's advice I traded my ticket for Encarnacion for one for Gone with the Woman; Encarnacion will now win the audience choice award. Gone with the Woman, on the other hand, is excruciating; not in the way in which a film is bad, but simply in that, by seeking to create a love interest for the main character who is the living embodiment of every single thing that is unfathomable, frustrating, and cruel about women, the filmmakers succeeded far too well. I WANTED TO KILL THIS WOMAN. A chainsaw blow to the neck, cleanly separating head from shoulders in a single blow, would have been too kind. It was goddamned instructive on just how easily you can get pulled in by the seeming trappings of relationship stability without ever realizing that no, you don't actually have to put up with any of this shit just because she talks a good game and is hard to shake off. I was fairly delighted when the main character ended up with the beguiling French girl with whom he had almost nothing in common besides a basic emotional understanding; the fact that this would happen at all proves, of course, that this was a movie and not real life. In real life, he'd spend the rest of his puff trying to shake the goddamned Norweigian.
When I was a teenager, I thought I had fallen in love with someone when I had not. A couple of years later when I really did fall in love with someone for the first time - under circumstances far less cinematic and far more pathetic than those depicted here - I came up with a very simple, and hardly useful, maxim that has held true ever since: when you're in love, you just know it. You can't explain it, reshape it, move it around, and it may well be the result of a kind of consensus hallucination in your multiple personalities, but you know it deep down in the cranio-sac. Thus, do I posit to you dear reader, the fundamental meaninglessness and hopelessness of all human relations. Sure, it works out for people, all the time. And similarly have I frequently fielded the ball to an offensive line player in a perfectly timed and pitched up-the-line pass, without meaning to. It ain't something I count on.
Two short films in the next four hours before a night at the Ryerson; this will let me lap Mr. Mxyzptlk. Turning fast around the inside of the track, the stress on the chassis is gonna be a bitch.
The butterfly and the diving bell
So titled in order to observe certain structural requirements.
Apparently I forgot to mention that we did a Mamo the other day; here it is. You know what? Honestly I have no idea where or when we recorded this one. It's not the post-Juno follow up one, I can tell you that. I seem to be "missing time."
All is well. Two last six-film days will put the count at 51 if all goes well; I picked up an extra in there without noticing (Tracey? Control?). And if you haven't looked outside, please do. It's a beautiful day in the city of Toronto.
Smiley face
Last film at the Elgin (Angel); last film at the Scoshe (Smiley Face). I won't even have time to get down there tomorrow or the next day for a final burrito or a trip to the Snail. The grid is collapsing into a triangle; soon it will become a corridor, before it's simply a dot, and then nothing at all. The Rye-high will close this thing and then the candle will go out. Half an hour after Smiley Face ended I was sprinting down the endless corridors under the Ryerson, completely lost, giggling furiously, and wishing that, at the very least, I had the excuse of being stoned.
I'm into the forties tomorrow. With the end in sight I no longer feel tired. There's nothing I can do to myself in the next 48 hours that I can't recover from in the 48 following. I've gone past "punchy" and am simply at "nuisance." I lead the "arrrrhs" in the non-Midnight screenings when the piracy card comes up. When I got up to the balcony of the Elgin for the Angel screening and found almost the entirety of the thing blocked off for FedEx VIPs, I yelled out "WHAT THE FUCK ARE THESE?!" and then quipped that FedEx had mailed themselves a balcony.
Angel was lovely, entertaining, and utterly forgettable, save for another complex and fascinating female character to add to the pile of this year's winnings. Anna Faris can go on that pile too for Smiley Face - she was remarkable, and the film was hilarious. Far from "stoner comedy," this was in fact "stoner horror movie," remarkably accurate in its ability to present the perceptual disconnects of being freaked out and stoned, and then manipulating those sensations to get at the paranoia angle. I loved it.
Flash Point barely kept me awake till its promised "whiplash-inducing final half hour," but when we were staggering out of the theatre at 2 a.m. and I was joking that I had in fact gotten into a fight exactly like the final fight in the film, Matty Price returned with "were you in the bathroom?" completing the loop on a 5-day-old joke that no one will remember a week from now. We are in a green and open country.
Every time I have boarded the Queen streetcar this week, the first few seats have been half-buried in sand.
September 13, 2007
Days of darkness
You know, when I was a wee lad, I seem to remember that if you wanted to make some kind of a "point" in film, you might be seen to do it with wit, subtlety and perhaps a modicum of grace. Nowadays, on the other hand, the preferred method is to simply hit your audience repeatedly over the head with the same idea for about 45 minutes or until they walk out, whichever comes first.
I saw Reclaim Your Brain at noon, which was a humourless and painfully one-dimensional tale of a man's struggle against the television ratings system. Yes, that's the story. What a useless piece of nothing this thing is. Somebody actually made this, and other people bothered to see it, and at least two more people bothered to give a fuck about it one way or the other. I left about ten minutes before the end because they'd started late (partially due to a nicely understated little verbal slap-fight between the programming assistant and the director before the show) and I had missed the fact that I had 14 minutes to commute the Scoshe-Elgin corridor. I made it, but barely in time, and then L'Age de Tenebres started and I left after 45 minutes. The film repeated the exact same point, over and over again, in scene couplets, with no variation or progression of the idea at all, just different comic executions of it. Denys Arcand is worthless and should be removed from the cinema.
Nobody was at the fucking thing, though, which was nice. I pretty much got the balcony of the Elgin all to myself - which made me feel, temporarily, like I was in an ancient movie house watching a venerated classic unspool in front of me, back when there was still a bit of lustre left in this thing. The new version is all plastic - good plastic, solidly made, but lacking fibre.
I tell you what though - we saw Dr. Plonk this morning, and that was freaking great. Not just good; great. It was like a movie D-Coc and J-Szp would have made; in fact, as far as I'm concerned, they should go ahead and make it anyway. They could call it Dr. Plonktuous. D-Coc missed this one; he's been in every screening with me since Monday afternoon so it's a shame he couldn't make it out for such an obviously D-Cockish film.
We're not so much down to the dregs here, as down to the point where you can suss out a man's game pretty damn quickly. If a flick don't have it, it don't have it.
Reclaim your brain
Last night in the mens' room of the Elgin I was drying my hands next to a guy who was telling his friend that he hadn't been able to do anything since last week because he'd been seeing so many films. His friend asked how many and he said "eight." At which point I burst out laughing, and not just regular laughter, a full-on Joker laugh. And I stumbled away clutching my ribs and repeating "eight" over and over again. This was not performance. This was just where I am now.
So on Sameer's dime I saw The Tracey Fragments last night last thing; no midnight. I got to the Scoshe (sp?) early and there was a mob outside; I asked a guy in the glut "who are they bringing in there? BATMAN??" Turns out it was for Gael Garcia Bernal. He's a fucking tiny person. What did his rabid fans think was going to happen there? The best they could hope for was a solid actor-trampling, and then they lose their prize forever. Maybe that's the point.
Ellen Page is a tiny person as well. She sat behind me in Fragments. Jason Reitman was there too; I shook his hand and told him how much I liked his film, but I was kind of irritated to see people using him as a gateway drug to get to Page - a Chinese girl came up to him, identified him, and asked him to introduce her to Ellen at his earliest opportunity like he was her fucking doorman or something. Something ain't flicked on right in these peoples' brains. But then, during Une Fille Coupee en Deux last night (which was all right but ultimately forgettable), when Matty Price leaned over and suggested a Ludivine Sagnier / Ellen Page sandwich, I lost the movie for about five solid minutes. The look on my face was later described as a combination of horror and religious ecstasy. So who the fuck am I to talk.
As for the film itself, The Tracey Fragments was essentially a mere prototype of something that will someday be done far better by someone far smarter. Bruce McDonald, and no other, fucked this up. Page's performance was unmodulated and shallow, and the technical craft underneath the big slicey-dicey split screen stuff, which has been gaining all the attention, was pre-film school amateur hour at best. A big part of the problem was the sheer shittiness of the visual data - the film must have been shot on bargain-basement handicams; I doubt there even was a director of photography; there certainly wasn't any lighting. The problem being, you can't take visual information that poor and then chop it up and reformulate it into more complex visual artifacts - it doesn't hold up to the audience's gaze, and just becomes so much noise. When Tracey has her big run-from-the-pimp-in-her-briefs-and-a-shower-curtain moment, and her world de-evolves into a kaleidoscope of every thing she's experienced so far, the result looks rather like a digital tape breaking up - which could have been a sublime visual point, if it were not entirely accidental.
Nonetheless, I must admit that the idea, at its core, was a good one. For a few brief, (ahem) fragmentary moments, the split screen technique combined with better-than-average teen girl voiceover and the reliable Ellen Page watchability really does achieve something in conveying the mindset of the girl. It just has to be done better than this.
September 12, 2007
Encounters at the end of the world
You get broken down to every teeny tiny bit of yourself, live there for a while, and then in a few days, you'll build yourself back up fresh; defragmented. Today was the first day I forgot my tickets at home, the first day I got off at the wrong subway stop. I feel fine. I am an androgynous monkey-lizard swimming through a river of time. I am a gorilla riding a yak. The towers of this city shall be my Redwood trees; my skin is a map of the tattoos I haven't drawn yet. I am sexless; I am wind. I am a ranger. I am blood and oil.
Matty Price and I have started calling actors almost exclusively by the title of their most significant film - "Kick his ass, Die Hard!" "Hit that bitch with a frying pan, American Beauty!" "Direct the shit out of that film, Fitzcarraldo!" As with most things at this point, this is amusing only to us. Mongol is this year's Bugmaster (why? I'll tell you why). In this obscene wilderness you find a new kind of sense. Tiff (the person, not the festival) branded me the Silver Snail groupie today. I guess that means I've arrived. My eyes are clear.
In the limited moral universe of Woody Allen's Cassandra's Dream, the drama only stems from the question of what meaning is assigned a specific act before, and after, its execution. I side with Ewan McGregor: once you've killed, you'll still have to find a way to live the rest of your life; prison is irrelevant.
In the Antarctic waste of Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World, scientists prophesy the coming apocalypse; view us as day-players on a world whose interest in us is fleeting. In unintentionally direct retaliation to this, two scientists play electric guitars on the roof of their hut in the middle of the frozen waste. They bring the defining triviality of our species - art - to a place that cannot hear it, understand it, or record it for later use. They do it just to do it, and on we go.
I am sitting at Queen & McCaul, cross legged with my laptop, against a giant wall billboard for a competing laptop brand, wearing my blogTO t-shirt and blogging about TIFF on Tederick.com. I am this city.
Western django
"This is sukiyaki, not a dang lollipop!" - Quentin Tarantino in SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO
Hey, Megatron came back. Who saw that comin'? [raises hand] Megatron, Sideswipe, Grimlock, all in a day. We're running clean out of Transformers, gonna have to move over to G.I. Joes next. Please God make me a stone...
My man Sameer hooked me up with a ticket for The Tracey Fragments tomorrow night, so my relationship with this bėte noir is finally at a close. God knows the movie itself will be nowhere near worth this kind of trouble, but every year there's one film that I set my sights on as a must-have-no-matter, and this time, Tracey was it. A year from now, I'll barely remember why. (It had something to do with Ellen Page wrapped in a drape.)
Today I saw two documentaries back to back which, as it turned out, had most of the same creatives involved. (I met one such, Nina Davenport, at the Cumberland during the other film's Q&A.) Her doc was Operation Filmmaker, and it mostly just made me uncomfortable, as peeps into the reality of Hollywood personalities always does. Very Young Girls, on the other hand, just felt flat. Once you get past the simple opening statistic - that the average age of entry to prostitution in the United States is 13 - the film really doesn't go anywhere with it besides endless repetition.
After that I went to see another tale of very young girls in Naissances de pieuvres, which also felt fairly flat, although I must admit it had an utterly transcendent final five minutes when the lesbian 13-year-old got to kiss the love of her life, then lost her, and then baptised herself in the school pool. Yeah when you write it out that way it sounds ludicrous but the music was really good and there was just something about that shot of her kicking herself towards the surface of the water, what do you want from me.
And there is no denying that SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO is a great, great film. And being as it was the must-have of the Midnight lineup, the gang was all there. I am truly blessed by great company. Matty Price and Erik and Jason and Sasha and Gabriela and a whole bunch of other people who revolve around this weird world like a starry sky. Really, one can't complain.
There's a nip in the air. Coming round the last turn now.
September 11, 2007
Ana chaotica
I understand French. I understand Spanish. I stopped reading the subtitles five minutes into Chaotic Ana. The realization made me sick - made me want to put my head between my knees and think of my grandfather who is gone. I proceeded to have a massive artistic epiphany, and connect many lines in my head, even as I fought and weaved with a film that was as ugly as it was beautiful, as smart as it was stupid, as right in its every detail as it was in every single mistake it made. I don't know what the fuck any of this is any more. I went to the quad at Victoria College to have my traditional Tuesday afternoon freak-out, and promptly discovered that I didn't need to have one. That the thing deep down inside myself that is going to make or break the next 12 months of my life before ruling the next 120 years, was in fact ready and waiting. That I am, entirely, myself. And then the page turned again, and now I need to know exactly who is going to walk with me next. Are you ready to begin?
Last night Alan Ball somehow guessed I was a filmmaker and asked what kind of films I make... as usual I started with the "well, I guess you could say fantasy" line that I've been using forever but then I just switched it over and said, "actually, I guess I just make movies where weird shit happens." That's the new line.
The exodus
Yes, immediately after writing a post about how I haven't walked out of anything yet, I walked out of something. And I walked out of something called The Exodus. The irony never stops.
There wasn't anything wrong with it, I