Weather in Toronto: overcast, with a light drizzle; coolish. Yurt proximity: close without overlapping. Left ass cheek: numb. Last shit: 36 hours ago. Films down: 15. Films to go: 35.

Right after I wrote that last post last night, Matty Price and I sat down in the line for Nothing is Private and started recording a Mamo - only to have the show brought to a thundering close when the line started moving out from under us a few minutes later. The rather hilarious result is a little something we like to call show #94, Juno Interrupted. And I remain strong in my recommendation of Juno to everyone. So happy. Except that every time I focus on it, I experience a tidal wave of pain. So I'm not gonna do that.

Nothing is Private, a whole other story. Didn't bring my box set because that would just have been too damn complicated, but yeah, Alan Ball was there and so was Two-Face. (Batman is going to kick his ass.) The movie tried really hard, and as a result came out feeling a bit overcooked - it was still really really good in a whole lot of ways, but given that the subject matter asked so much of its audience (being the complete sexualization, both consensual and not, of a 13-year-old girl), it needed to be a little bit better to really get past the squirm factor, which was considerable. Still, I can't deny that some pretty important work was done here. In Juno last night (I swear I'll stop talking about this soon), Juno's parents, upon finding out about the pregnancy, say something like "what kind of girl are you?" and she just says "I don't really know what kind of girl I am." I think that's a fairly remarkable point for a young person to make and I think it needs to be made more. Something similar went unsaid by Jasira in Nothing is Private, when grown-ups kept calling upon her to specifically define her relationship to things (pornography, menstruation, virginity, sex) that she had only limited experiential knowledge of, and almost no referential context whatsoever. We really do a nasty job of forcing young people to figure their shit out on almost nonexistent information and minimal experience. Couple that with an adult's foolish tendency to think that kids don't want sex, and the fact that (in this movie) only Toni Collette can be called upon to exert any kind of moral reasonablity when dealing with a young person's burgeoning sexuality while everyone else just behaves as irresponsibly as an adult dealing with young people possibly can, and you've got Aaron Eckhardt making with the back-door statutory. It isn't fun. Flick was pretty as hell, phenomenally challenging, reasonably important, and didn't quite stick the landing - which makes the whole enterprise flawed. Hell.

Thought I'd take yet another opportunity to pimp my red-eye reviews of each night's Midnight Madness over at blogTO, because I think it's fairly impressive that I'm able to write anything halfway coherent at 3:00 in the morning. Diary of the Dead last night was the first time my ability to hang on to lucidity really started to slip, but I got through it all right. In fact, I got more sleep last night than I have in a while and came out bright and early to do a follow-up Mamo (yet to be posted) with Matty Price. Then we saw The Orphanage - sort of difficult for me to get into, on account of how as far as I'm concerned, if you buy an abandoned orphanage in the middle of nowhere that was once inhabited by a pack of kids who mysteriously disappeared (one of whom wears a leg brace), you pretty much deserve what you get. The audience reaction was spectacular, however, and when things started getting really scary and you could just hear everyone freaking out, I had a tremendous urge to just yell "AW, SCREW THIS!", throw my skirt over my head, and run screaming for the emergency exit. It would have fit the mood.

I have said "Welcome to Toronto, dumbass!" to two separate people in the last 24 hours, both of whom demonstrated that they had no idea the film festival even existed. One of these days, I'm gonna get shot.