If they ever make portable cell phone jammers with even a 30m active range (as opposed to ten), I am buying one. Good god damn, to be able to block BlackBerries in movie theatres. I'd be like the Batman of irritation.

Speaking of the Batman of irritation, the goddamned fucking Dark Knight blu-ray is gonna flip-flop between IMAX framing and letterbox framing after all. HOW FUCKING ANNOYING IS THAT. On the whole I am stupendously unimpressed with all this IMAX crap and consider it Nolan's single major mis-step on the entire project. It was distracting enough in theatres; the idea of watching my aspect ratio pop around the screen like a crack-addled episode of 24 is almost too much to bear.

(Can you believe I made that segue work? I'm like the Batman of... something. Point is, I'm Batman.)

P.S., Bill Hunt, your site design was archaic in 1999. The rest of the planet knows how to allow a direct-link into a dated post. Why can't you?

I've only read the first chapter of Orson Randall and the Death Queen of California, but so far, I pronounce it "excellent." Not bad for an issue I almost didn't buy.

Posted by tederick at 2:56 PM in batman! & comix & shinybludisks
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Who would win in a fight, Captain Hector Barbossa of the Pirates of the Caribbean, or Captain Christopher Pike of the Starship Enterprise?

(Think of it like an updated version of Angel and Spike's astronauts vs. cavemen argument, but don't make the mistake Chris made of thinking that astronauts would win just cuz they're fancy and evolved. Fuck, now I want to watch 2001.)

Posted by tederick at 10:57 AM in pirates & tv
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"...as plate after plate of fluffy poached eggs, cartilaginous peameal, and lakes of sunshiney goo continued to pile up over time, I realized that if I don't start catalogueing these excursions in some formal manner, a great field of human knowledge would be lost. Hence, the Benedict Chronicles..."

They call it the Heart Attack Benny, and it costs $13 (taxes in), and it lives up to its name. It's worth publishing a snap of the menu from Disgraceland here, because it says the story better than I can:

Son'bitch. So first off, we're doubling up on pork: you've got the peameal and some ham. Second, skip bread products altogether and replace the English muffin with slices of fried tomato, which adds a peculiar acidic bite to the initial impression but also makes you feel less like a painted whore when the meal's done.

Oh there's cheese on it - oh boy is there cheese on it. And chipotle hollandaise, which is as trendy these days as vitamin water and going gluten-free combined. And them hash browns don't suck either.

On the whole I'd say the Heart Attack Benny is well-named. It is not perfect - for one thing, it is so skull-fuckingly excessive in its pursuit of gluttonous decadence that it comes off a bit like a car crash in the mouth. The twin porks fight each other like Mickey Rourke in Sin City vs. Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, i.e. not terrifically different in characterization but boy howdy, are they gonna wail on each other until one of them is down. Additionally, the freshness of the tomato might save the soul a bit, but it certainly distracts the mouth in the overall cavalry charge towards creamy, salty death that is the rest of the meal. And to pile insult onto edible injury, all the grease makes the HAB frustrating from a flavour management perspective - just you try to get all of the food elements together onto a single fork. It's like eating a triple decker sandwich made of mayonnaise and gravy.

Still, I am impressed by the bravura and am willing to award points on style, and just for having survived the fucking thing. Three and a half eggs out of four!

Disgraceland is located at 965 Bloor Street West in Toronto. The Benedict Chronicles is an ongoing, non-regular series.

Posted by tederick at 9:24 AM in the benedict chroncicles
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Only one comic ever made me actually cry, and that was when Ampersand snuffed it in the last issue of Y: The Last Man. The rest of the time I remain comfortably bemused, but if anything else was ever gonna give me the misties, it was Deena Walker going off into the Caribbean sunset in Powers this month for no other reason than that she went batshit insane and killed a bunch of people but it all came out all right in the end. Powers remains sort of the gold standard of all the comics that I read - not that I actually like it the best or even think it is the best, just that it's the one that hip-checks any posers in my pull list clean out the door. Everything should be this singular, or be not worth my time. From day one, this thing has had a clear, intelligent, daring, artful, and personal voice. Powers will be the last man off the boat, when I'm done.

On the other hand, you've got the sheer bugfuck awfulness of Runaways vol. 3, and a train crash of the like I have not seen in lo these many years. Ramos is utterly abhorrent as an artist for this material, and Terry Moore does not appear to have one sweet fuck of a clue who he's writing - a bit of nice stuff for Karolina and Xavin in issue 2, but he can't write Molly or Klara to save his life, and his Niko mostly just acts like a pissed-off gym instructor. I love Runaways so fucking much, gave this abortion of a series 2 tries instead of abandoning ship at the end of vol. 3 issue 1 as every single neuron in my body was telling me to do. But there's no way home from here.

Which brings us round to Lady Bullseye, who debuted in - I think - probably the best Daredevil issue yet written by Brubaker. Strip-mining past characters is dodgy at the best of times but so far, the lady with the targets all over her damn self is interesting enough to be entertaining... but it's the storytelling itself that is the real winner here, every frigid sexy moment of it. Classy stuff, this.

Posted by tederick at 11:21 PM in comix
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"...as plate after plate of fluffy poached eggs, cartilaginous peameal, and lakes of sunshiney goo continued to pile up over time, I realized that if I don't start catalogueing these excursions in some formal manner, a great field of human knowledge would be lost. Hence, the Benedict Chronicles..."

What says the gaybourhood, re: benny? Let it never be said that I am a man averse to experimentation, even in the wake of that gorramned horrible filet mignon disaster at Fran's last year, the one that resulted in me awarding stains of virgin's blood instead of eggs out of four to represent my displeasure. No, I'm a fella who, when confronted with a new and bizarre incarnation of the salty old Benedict war-horse, is gonna pony up to the trough and have an equine go at a solid gallop straight to the stables, or whateverthefuck. So I went to the Village Rainbow Café and had the Eggs Iceland.

"Eggs Iceland." Not an unappealing name, if you're into volcanic rock and crystal clear water, and/or Dave Tebby. I am. I'm also fond of those instances where someone inventively changes one of the key components of a benny and rebrands the name. (Eggs Blackstone, they one where they swap out the bacon for smoked salmon, is the gold standard. Boy, I could go for one of those right now.) In this case, Eggs Iceland means that they've Blackstoned the benny - salmon instead of ham - and then promised some caviar on top.

Caviar's another thing I really don't mind. Actually, in the right circumstances, I'll eat my weight in it. But here, as with the filet mignon disaster, I really shoulda known better. Don't ever order caviar in a diner, ok? The "caviar" in question turned out to be that unappealing smear of crimson in the photo above, which unfortunately was painfully reminiscent of the aforementioned virgin's blood, and therefore put me off my meal rather a lot. Once again, the fault was entirely mine: ain't no two-dollar dive in this town gonna give me actually worthwhile fisheggs to put on my breakfast. Fuck no. This is what I get for having faith in stuff.

Anyways, the only other thing worth noting here is that the Village Rainbow Café uses the exact same canned hollandaise on their bennies that the Golden Griddle uses. Which means that either a) this non-hollandaise goo is available in bulk somewhere and I must have some, or b) the Griddle makes a sideline selling their shimmering hollanpaiste out the back door. Either way, I was pleasantly delighted.

I shall tar the Eggs Iceland at the Village Rainbow Café with a frigid one and a half eggs out of four, but at least we're not counting in blood.

The Village Rainbow Café is located at 477 Church Street in Toronto. The Benedict Chronicles is an ongoing, non-regular series.

Posted by tederick at 3:17 PM in blood & the benedict chroncicles
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Was a time, I used to customize some action figures. I never really got into paint ops much, or at least, not paint ops that involved the likeness - I am a shitty detail painter and portrait artist (but goddamned tremendous at paint-aging, I will tell ya). Anyways, Hot Toys - who have pretty much owned the year, toy-wise, with their Masterpiece Series Pirates of the Caribbean figures and now these forthcoming Dark Knight toys - went ahead and let the head of their paint department, JC Hong, demonstrate what he can really do with his tools, when not limited by the inherent down-rezzing of detail that comes with mass production. He took that Bank Robber Joker I was so drooly about a couple of weeks ago, which is already no slouch in the sculpt/paint/likeness department,

and did this.

Bit of a finger-waving "nyah nyah", because of course collectors will never see a product hit the shelves with even close to that level of fidelity (I mean, blink your eyes and you could actually mistake that photo for Heath Ledger). But on a pure fanboy geek level of a guy who dressed down his Millennium Falcon with garbagey sludge water when he was 12 just to make it look like it had really spent some time in space, I'm a' gonna call JC Hong a genius, and that one-of-a-kind paint op a piece of art, and sorta just think about it for a while, cuz it makes me happy.

Posted by tederick at 2:38 PM in batman! & toys!
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The goddamned miserable couch scenario finally got concluded last night and after several hours of toxic toil, I have a couch. A pretty spiffy couch that turns into a bed, so that I can have house guests. As far as I can tell (having received no information on this whatsoever from any educational institution, wise elder, or What To Expect book), the process of becoming a grown up is marked by the following pegs:

• The ability to host dinner parties
• The ability to have people from out of town sleep over
• Formally engaging some kind of financial "retirement plan."

I didn't sleep well and hate every single thing about the world this morning, except for maybe the couch, which I have not actually turned into a bed yet and might be awesome.

Posted by tederick at 9:54 AM in 1701
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Man, I stop watching Letterman and something this awesome happens!

By the way, I don't know if you've noticed, but Jack Layton sure can pronounce the hell out of the word "parliament."

Posted by tederick at 9:04 AM in goddamn politics & tv
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I finally caught up with the first episode of True Blood last night. It was really all over the place. Certainly the worst directing job Alan Ball ever did, though that's not a long list; especially in the first 20 minutes or so, which made me wonder if he'd come out with a massively overlong rough cut (not 5 or 10 minutes over, mind you, more like 30) and needed to pare down everything that wasn't a ludicrously on-the-nose line of expositional dialogue. Anyways, there were still things in the episode that I liked. I'm downloading the second now, but have little patience with the affair overall.

Meanwhile, disregarding the hodgepodge of news and rumours about Johnny Depp's upcoming Disney slate over here, we still arrive at the thing where he showed up at the event dressed in his complete Jack Sparrow costume with hair and makeup (and, one might imagine, a bit of swagger). [reaction] !!! [/reaction]

Oh, apparently they're making Pirates of the Caribbean 4.

(made it all the way to the end of the post without swooning)

Posted by tederick at 8:30 AM in movies & pirates & tv
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But it sure feels nice to have some.

Last night was lovely. El familia and I and Sarafina went to Scaramouche, and I had quail and pasta and a very strange and interesting wine. And boy, they're not kidding about that coconut cream pie. Everything golden and nice and I went home very happy. Adam and Caitlin gave me The Force Unleashed for the Wii, which didn't exactly set the world on fire, review-wise, but I'm ready to yank a Star Destroyer out of the sky with my mind right now anyways thanks to my contentious and highly frustrating relationship with Ikea over a certain $1300 they owe me and/or a couch that apparently is never, ever going to show up. Can I give you some advice? Don't ever buy anything from those Danish fucktards ever. "Ikea: Swedish for we're assholes."

Otherwise, things are coming together. Zam is now the nicest cat ever; she was apparently so traumatized by the move that she even started sitting on my lap while I watch TV on my complete and utter lack of a couch. I am going to get her a scratching post. I have internet at home at last, some more furniture hand-me-downs coming, and the makeshift couch-bed on the floor of the living room ain't bad for watching movies, looking out at the skyline, and/or musing abuot life / plotting the downfall of the wicked. And I ordered this. It's gonna be somethin'.

"Honey Kisaargi, an android created by her scientist father, is attempting to balance her dull office job and her secret life as the constantly costume-changing, pink-clad superhero warrior of love, Cutie Honey. When the dreaded Panther Claw gang returns to create evil and steal our hero's Love System necklace, it can only be Cutie Honey to the rescue!"

Posted by tederick at 10:23 AM in 1701 & foodin' & movies & wii & zam!
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Well it took longer than I expected, but some insane crimanal bastard finally figured out that Christian Bale and Kermit the Frog are the same person. So I guess the jig is up on that one.

I'm bored as fuck so let's play, what are people searching for at Tederick.com?

On Google, the keywords are almost an even split between things related to vaginas, and things related to penises. So at least we have some equality among the sexes there. I'm also getting some of the usual hits for Toht, an inexplicable upswing in hits looking for information about Destro, and a new player on the table, being searches related to lesbian Voyager fan-fic between B'Elanna Torres and that Borg woman. Only worth mentioning in that I don't think I ever wrote any Voyager slash fiction. Truth told, I don't think I ever wrote any slash fiction at all, but I've got the memory of a half-eaten grapefruit.

On the site itself, the items most frequently called up in the blog-searchin' box are TV shows that I don't watch (30 Rock appears frequently), items related to Harry Potter (everyone seems to be trying to find something about Horcruxes on this site, but fucked if I know what), and a few disturbing references to ex-girlfriends or people I used to know. Amusingly, someone just searched for "What else has been going on?" cuz maybe they thought I'd just answer them back.

Anyways.

Posted by tederick at 1:31 PM in miscellaneous crap & sex (theoretical) & tederickdotcomdotcom
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Helloooooo internet! I am 32 years old now, which is the age between 31 and 33. This technically still qualifies as "early 30s" but really feels like "in my thirties" which translates to "soon I'll be dead." You might just as well be reading this blog from beyond the grave. Wouldn't that be something.

For my birthday, Sarafina took me to the ROM to see the dinosaurs. This turned out to be excellent. You know how we all griped about the crystal for a really long time? Unnecessary! The crystal makes a hell of a dino-display case, even if it had to be connected to the ROM proper with rickety gantries that even Indiana Jones would be nervous about crossing. Anyways, here's me with a short-faced bear:

There were also giant turtles, stegosauruses, and mean-looking Tyrannosaurs with their wimpy arms. Plus, in other parts of the museum, mummies, dresses, and Shanghai. Not to mention the Stair of Wonder, which is really just a staircase, but give the ROM points for upping the rhetorical ante with their naming conventions. There's really a lot going on down there.

Later on in the evening, 1701 hosted its very first BYOC party - bring your own chair, cuz I ain't got none. Sarafina made ninja cakes: cupcakes which are ninjas.

I got some Duchov-love from Bex, plus my first household plant from Demetre. It's a Reggae Breeze, which is a type of Hydrangea... an awesome type of Hydrangea. Plus several other excellent people came by and sat on my floor. So it was pretty decent as these things go.

Then it was the Reservoir Lounge for somewhat down-tempo swing dancing, but it was still fun. Here's me and Mark and Sarafina, c/o Demetre's camera:

I like those people a lot. Unfortunately there are no pictures of us dancing but I guess that's just as well since I never really mastered "dipping" Sarafina.

2 a.m. eggs at the Griddle, 9 a.m. wake up call for driving to Brantford, lovely downtown Brantford all day Saturday for the Brantford International Jazz Festival, and then stuck on the QEW for what seemed like the rest of my frickin' life because nobody thought it was worth mentioning that all arteries into and out of the city were going to be closed on Saturday night. Sunday cleaning house and watching Spider-Man 2, perhaps a little high, which was an excellent way to end an excellent weekend, and that brings us to here, whereupon I am actually feeling good again for the first time in six weeks, and not just tired. So all right: I likes me some September, and walking around town with my love, and thinking forward to the next thing.

Posted by tederick at 6:22 PM in 1701 & jedi antics & miscellaneous crap & photoblog
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What does she use it for?

• Back scratching?
• Pointing at people?
• Poking holes in cloth?
• Stirring?
• Conducting?
• Magic?
• Breaking in two when frustrated?
• Galactic conquest?
• Reading?
• Yoda?
• The art of misdirection?
• Tap?
• or simply the allure of a mysterious woman holding a stick?

"Mon Mothma's Mothma Stick" is too ostentatious for a band name, so let's use it as a track name instead.

Also: why does General Madine also need a mothma stick? And why does he get to use it in the actual movie?

Posted by tederick at 10:07 AM in galaxy far & toys!
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I sure thought that short, fat Lando was outta sight, but a frickin' 12" Blacula is OUTTA SIGHT!!!

I could fight 'em!

Now to be fair, if I were to have my druthers, Blacula would actually be low on the list of blaxploitation icons that I'd want to see turned into toys. A 12" vintage Shaft (preferably anatomically correct), a Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed 2-pack, a Pam Grier made with a Triad female figure body and maybe some knives... that'd be all right. Certainly someone out there has the wherewithal to create a fully articulated Sweetback with his foot placed firmly up the Man's ass?

Posted by tederick at 9:02 PM in toys!
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I have yet to use the scramble crossing honestly. It's driving me crazy. By scrambling "honestly" I mean: arriving at Yonge and Dundas needing to cross diagonally, and being presented by an opportunity to do so immediately, rather than within 2 or 3 light changes. Everyone else gets to scramble; I am straight-crossing like a jerk while the rest of the world goes fanny-dan-dango diagonally.

Now, there are people I know who are not scrambling honestly, who are so hell-bent to scramble that they are waiting one or two light rotations for an opportunity to scramble before initiating their cross. This is fine, but defeats the purpose; the scramble crossing was designed to get us where we need to go faster, not to make us wait. It is certainly not there just to showcase the wonders of the geometric center of the Yonge/Dundas intersection. The air is no purer there. The center of the grid is simply (on the occasion that one must either go from the Eaton Center to Toronto Life Square, or from that thing that used to be the Gap to Dundas Square) the shortest distance between two points. But not for me. I remain imprisoned by right angles.

Fedge.

Posted by tederick at 3:02 PM in blogTO
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"It's crack cream. You put it on your crack." - Matthew Price

ITEM!: I never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever shoulda tried to go without internet in the home. The wi-fi signals in my building are locked up tighter than... uh... tight... things. But why complain, Matt? Well, in spite of my bravura technology-couldn't-possibly-be-that-important stance (and yours too), it's surprising just how much daily information you need to get off teh intrawebs. I'm not talkin' no Facebook email mumbo here, I'm talking simple stuff like where to go if you're bleeding from the head, or want a copy of Final Fantasy III. Fortunately, I have set myself up to have internet installed sometime early next week, whereupon I can finally start downloading some TV, which is the other thing I never shoulda given up.

ITEM!: I never shoulda cut all my hair off, either. As much as the long hair was driving me insane, the short hair is making me really, really sad. Who knew? I guess my internal image of myself changed sometime this year.

ITEM!: 175 emails upon my return. Pitiful.

ITEM!: Yesterday with my ladyfriend was pretty much the best day ever, from neck to nuts. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I'm doin' ok with that.

ITEM!: Things my house needs: soap tray, bath mat, chairs, a sofa (on order), plants, pots and pans, steamer trunk, framed Japanese Prestige poster, the internet, scratching post, a personality

ITEM!: Burn After Reading is rather tremendous, if puzzling; the flick fucking ends like a slap in the face and I would say it had done so too soon, were I not completely unable to figure out a single storyline, character arc, or plot element that had not actually been satisfactorily resolved at the moment the credits rolled. It feels a little like a magic trick, or more accurately, a game of three-card monte, but I respect the deftness with which I was tricked.

"I'm not set up to mold hard rubber." - Harry Pfarrer

Posted by tederick at 3:32 PM in 1701 & j-o-b & miscellaneous crap & movies & tv
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With Chocolate last night, the show closed on my least enjoyable TIFF ever, and I am ready to move on to other things. My blogTO coverage is here, and our final podcast of the festival is here. And my inevitable breakdown of what was actually worth my time goes like this:

That dog won't hunt: Derrière Moi, Deadgirl, The Burrowers, Martyrs, The Secret of Moonacre

That dog will hunt, but chooses not to: Rocknrolla, Witch Hunt, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, White Night Wedding, Still Walking, The Hurt Locker, Better Things, The Dungeon Masters, Gomorrah, Tokyo Sonata, The Sky Crawlers

That dog might occasionally bring back a rabbit or something, but if so, that rabbit is rangy and has fur missing and might already have been dead when the dog found it: Waltz With Bashir, JCVD, Delta, Achilles and the Tortoise, Religulous, Vinyan, Blood Trail, Not Quite Hollywood, Ashes of Time Redux, Hooked, The Wrestler, Of Time and the City, Maman est chez le coiffeur, Three Wise Men, Me and Orson Welles, American Swing, Sexykiller, ONLY, Chocolate

That dog can certainly hunt: Soul Power, Detroit Metal City, Sauna, Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, Acolytes, The Brothers Bloom, Medicine for Melancholy, Synecdoche, New York, Acne, At the Edge of the World, The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World

That dog is a goddamned outstanding hunter: C'est pas moi, je le jure!, Flame & Citron, It Might Get Loud, Tears for Sale, Ché

Posted by tederick at 10:13 AM in blogTO & podcastery & tiff 2008
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Lo for the last day. Rounding the corner on my 48th film, the programmers' assistants (because the programmers no longer come out) are phoning in the opening monologue, the filmmakers have all left, and the auditoriums stink of fat damp ass. My OFS looks like it's been hit by a car. A prismatic trip to China this morning with The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World was redemptive; I began playing "anywhere but here" in my head until I'd made my way all the way down to Auckland and was staring out at the sea. Now I have changed The Real Shaolin for ONLY on the advice of my erstwhile yurt-mate, will give Sky Crawlers no more than 20 minutes to bore the shit out of me before I decide if I'd rather have a burrito, and am looking forward to The Secret of Moonacre and Three Blind Mice tonight but have absolutely no plans or intentions to do anything after the midnight by way of drinkin' or druggin'. Sarafina's working again tomorrow anyway and I'm going back to work on Tuesday; between the move, the festival, and the everything else, this hasn't felt like time off, just time spent. I royally suck at getting out of my head, more and more by the year. I would do any of three things to change my life this week, if I weren't required to do the fourth just to be able to afford it.

Posted by tederick at 12:03 PM in tiff 2008
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I am such a sucker for hitting shit with other shit. In At the Edge of the World, they hit a ship with another ship! This utterly redeemed an otherwise painfully one-sided documentary about crazy-ass "pirates" who interfere with whaling activities. In my day, pirates didn't try to help anything. They took what they wanted, and gave nothing back! Well anyway, in the movie, the pirate ship pulls up on this Japanese whaling ship and without even so much as a "here's something you can't do," the captain yanks the wheel hard over and KA-BOOM! they knock straight into the bad guys AND damage their own bow on the impact AND proceed to ram right into an iceberg immediately after, like one of those skater punk kids who tries to ride a railing down a flight of stairs, trips on his own baggy pants, and smashes his face off the railing AND the stairs AND their skateboard. Fantastic.

Right now they're showing The Celluloid Closet in Dundas Square, which goes to show you just how much the world has come along in 15 years. Man. That movie makes me want to watch Ben-Hur again.

I want to say one more thing about Acne, which we saw yesterday: that is far and away the finest depiction of a tween having routine, almost bored sex with a prostitute that I've ever seen. Actually (obviously) it's the only depiction of a tween having sex with a prostitute that I've ever seen. Like XXY last year, a Uruguayan film has really gone to the transgressive side of the Force in terms of showing me subject matter that nobody could ever get made here in Canada. It kinda makes me wonder what the hell is going on, down in Uruguay. Based on the stories of the only person I've ever known who actually lived there, the whole country is nothing but bleeding head wounds and old men shooting at chickens. And yet it's also apparently detailed, emotionally relevant and considerate gender-identity and coming-of-age cinema. I gotta visit that country.

Hey, we did our second Mamo yesterday, and it was all right.

Posted by tederick at 8:13 PM in pirates & podcastery & tiff 2008
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I'll tell ya something, that is a goddamned motion picture film, it is. Ché (The Whole Bloody Affair) turned out relatively brisk, if two back-to-back 2.25-hour movies could ever be called brisk. I'd say it's my favourite one at the festival so far, possibly even my favourite Soderbergh although he and I don't get on well. I'm a sucker for that Lawrence of Arabia dynamic - get 'em on the way up in Ché 1, when they're kicking ass all over Cuba and espousing idealist philosophies like a grad student working a Denny's; get 'em on the way down in Ché 2, when Bolivia is handing them their ass, and really, really, really feel the death. Hell, when it was done I'd have been just as happy to sit through Ché 3, the intervening years, and sincerely hope BDT and Soderbergh will sling that at us someday.

Oh: and I want that camera. I want it, I want it, I want it so badly it almost hurts. A video camera with a filmic depth of field. Viva la revolucion!

I wish I had seen that film a week ago, because I think it would have vastly improved my overall festival mood.

Meanwhile,

• Matty Price's snores in the Kiyoshi Kurosawa film woke me up, so we left
• Me and Orson Welles was the opposite of Ché in terms of whether I can get past digital capture
• Gamorrah - almost worth it to see the preening gangster wannabes start crying when the real gangsters put the hurt on it. (Almost.)
• If you cut together all the shots in Acne of the shots of the kid just walking from place to place, you'd have a whole new movie that was a) about half the length of the one we saw, and b) hilarious!
• I would cry rank sexism on The Dungeon Masters for showing us the elf chick putting black makeup on her boobs while refusing to show the actual nudist DM in the nude, if the latter guy weren't so frickin' unappealing
• If one more person thinks the point of Synecdoche, New York is trying to explain it, I will punch them in the heart.

Now I've abandoned Vacation in favour of a rush line for At the Edge of the World. My nights are lovely, and there are moments of stunning, painful beauty crammed into the edges between all the filmgoing, but I still haven't found what I'm looking for, and am anxious to be done.

"You can say what you want about it, but that's no mess." - Matty Price re: Synecdoche

Posted by tederick at 4:26 PM in tiff 2008
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I wish I'd had more time or brain space last night to write an even longer tract on why Martyrs wasn't just bad (because it was), but was also (in ways completely unrelated to its being bad) utterly horrible and entirely torture porn, a genre which has finally landed with a thud on the Midnight Madness shores. I don't think I've ever been to a Midnight that I actually found upsetting - not in the "it made me think, it stayed with me" sort of upsetting, but in the "I wish I hadn't seen that" way. I hesitate to use the word "violated" because it gets thrown around a lot these days, but after lying in bed awake and sad until about 3 a.m., it's on my mind.

The good news out of last night is, both Tears for Sale and Medicine for Melancholy were tremendous. Utterly tremendous. I don't really understand the negative press on the former (do these people legitimately not understand the type of filmmaking they're watching? Jeunet & Caro were doing it 15 years ago...), and only feel rather badly for the makers of the latter. A sensitive, independent romantic dramedy like that simply does not want to be made in the American industry. If it was made in a foreign language, it would sell through the roof.

Jane Schoettle is my hero.

Posted by tederick at 8:51 AM in tiff 2008
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Boy, there's nothing quite like that moment when you realize they've forgotten to subtitle a rather lengthy tract of dialogue. Like being stranded in a dinghy, ain't it?

Three Wise Men - vastly undersold - took advantage of the removable armrests in the AMC and turned 3 seats into a couch. The height of luxury.

Posted by tederick at 3:47 PM in tiff 2008
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Well, just had my first true walkout of the fest, out of Better Things after about a half an hour. It's not even that it was necessarily bad, just cold and minimalist, and after a bunch of interlocking sequences of teenagers doing hard drugs cut against old people being really old and sad, I thought to myself "this movie isn't going anywhere I need to be." On top of that they started late, I was hungry, and I had to use the bathroom. Simple choices.

The Brothers Bloom is tricky. I really liked - more like, flat out loved - about the first half of it, in spite of its look-at-me unabashedness. The second half, though, my enjoyment completely evaporated. I think Rian Johnson's gonna be a hell of a director, but I don't think he's all there as a writer yet - for all the wonders this script sets up, the ending doesn't feel like it really closes them satisfactorily down. Something happens to the air in the room at about the 2/3rds mark, and whatever childish glee had overcome me for the past hour simply walked out the door and left me cold. The best thing about the flick is Rachel Weisz (again, man, when did the Mummy girl hit the top five actresses of her generation?), with Rian Johnson's cousin's off-beat, tinkering score coming in a close second.

I'm also fairly sure there was something wrong with the last two reels - I don't think they were completely finished from a technical perspective. They looked digital-y and ungraded, and the sound for several exterior scenes seemed to rely entirely on unsweetened location audio. So I presume to deliver the film on time for the fest they had to rush the last two reels off an online dub rather than a true answer print. I'd be interested in seeing the film again, if only to avoid being distracted in its last 30 minutes by trivial technical concerns.

On the other side of the Weisz-Aronofsky power couple was The Wrestler, where the performance of Mickey Rourke was so good that it actually overtook the script - i.e. the script was underscoring and highlighting things that could have been left completely to Rourke's performance and have been conveyed just as clearly. As a result it felt a bit overkilled, particularly in the second half. The best scenes in the film are Aranofsky shooting Rourke wrestling, and Rourke behind a deli counter for some reason. Everything else felt like waffle.

Also saw Terrence Davies' engaging if hypnotic Liverpudlian tone poem, Of Time and the City, and Maman est chez le coiffeur, which was like C'est pas moi, je le jure! without the sense of fun. Left after about an hour of The Burrowers - there's a great Western horror movie out there waiting to be made, but this ain't it.

I also had a wonderful curry at Salad King. Thank you very much.

Posted by tederick at 1:03 PM in tiff 2008
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I like my exploitation the way I like my coffee: grandé and loaded with cream. As such, Acolytes was pretty much perfect - where did this come from? The film was cunningly lensed - what I call the Hell Up In Harlem Factor. See, anyone can write an exploitation flick (in this case, an Aussie thrash-n'-scare about some wannabe badasses who stumble upon a much bigger badass) but 9 times out of 10, these films are shot like pornos or Kevin Smith movies i.e. unimaginatively. Then along comes Hell Up in Harlem, which puts Martin Scorsese in his place in the same year as Mean Streets. Goddamn thing's just tremendously aggressive with its camera, and so was Acolytes, finding frames and moments and beats that so stupendously elevated the material that I sat there with a big dumb grin on my face pretty much throughout. At the end of the day it's still a flick about 3 kids who find a dead backpacker. But it handed Deadgirl its dead ass, I'll tell you.

So last night was an improvement over most of yesterday. Hooked, which was actually a second pick for me, was far and away the most interesting use of camera I've seen at the festival thus far - entirely subjective, from the points of view of 2 principal characters, 1 supporting, and about 3 cameos. If the story this was hung around was rather flimsy - an ultra-low-budget concept which uses a riverside as its major location and two separate spots on said riverside for the majority of its scenes - the first-person gag was still pretty absorbing. I don't need the gimmicks where characters look at themselves in the mirror, but something profoundly unsettling develops in darting back and forth between two sides of the same conversation, both actors addressing the (other) camera (/you) like an MPD schizo. I almost wish the flick hadn't been subtitled - lots to get out of the use of editing here, too, if you weren't always having to go to the subtitles across or during specific shots.

Mamo #121 is posted for your convenience. Hopefully we'll get another couple done before the end but we didn't do a great job of coordinating our schedules this year. [blush]

It's now officially the first morning that's too cold to sit outside in a t-shirt. I am in Dundas Square, across from the scramble crossing I never get to properly use, and staring up at a giant poster for Nights in Rodanthe starring a very lumpy and romantically intent Richard Gere. (Rodanthe is played by Diane Lane.) Reminding me that It's Never Too Late For A Second Chance, I think I'll go have another coffee.

Posted by tederick at 9:15 AM in podcastery & tiff 2008
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ATTENTION STARBUCKS: Garden State was four years ago. Get over it.

Today sucks, Internet! Complete time-burn: I shouldn't have gone to anything! It's not even that all of the films were bad, but certainly none of them were good. Still Walking and White Night Wedding were both perfectly acceptable, but very thin; Ashes of Time Redux was good, but too arty and elliptical for what I wanted today. And The Hurt Locker just sucks. That movie shoulda been Wages of Fear, and instead it was Backdraft. And not even a good version of Backdraft, which wasn't even a very good movie to begin with; this was a piss-poor Backdraft and the first genuine challenge to Matty Price's longstanding maxim that an audience will like any principal character so long as he's good at his job. Jesus: what a waste. I'd clocked that thing after the first ten minutes, and it went on for a hundred and twenty-one more.

So all in all I'm in a ratty mood going into a second-pick 9:30 show (Hooked) and with the midnight that everyone skips (except me) tonight, the Monday night slot with Acolytes. This is the first year that I have legitimately come to think that I will not be doing this again. At the least, this fifty-flick thing is not something I should be doing every year. I could get a lot more out of a shorter, more focused schedule.

I can positively affirm that my left butt cheek is genetically lower or larger than my right. This is the only explanation for the development of the numb patch.

Posted by tederick at 9:07 PM in tiff 2008
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Bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored, bored.

Posted by tederick at 5:54 PM in tiff 2008
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It's not that Zack and Miri Make a Porno is a bad film, it's just that it's a bad Kevin Smith film, the third in the line now that exhibits no turns, no rethinking of the idea. It's a dead-straight romantic comedy between two white American leads (to even call them "disenfranchised" like his previous main characters would be giving them too much credit). In this case the rom-com just happens to take place during the production of an amateur porno which is what I'm sure Smith thinks lends the film its indie badass street cred, but a MacGuffin is a MacGuffin, no matter how many anal toys are involved.

Smith was there in person, though, as was Mewes, as was Mosier, as was Harvey motherfuckin' Weinstein which was relatively cool. I don't usually do the geek-out for celebs, but this one was reasonably meaningful for me. I mean, they showed us Clerks in my first week of film school. The guy's sorta been with me through the whole curve. I wish he'd go back to making Kevin Smith movies - I'd trade all the cinematographic niceties in the world for one more look at a cliche story where the cliches have been all turned around on themselves.

And it wasn't that Not Quite Hollywood was bad, far from it; I'd like to own that flick on DVD and cull from its list of Australian exploitation flicks to add to my library. But at 1 a.m. it's all played at too unmodulated a tone - the "AHHHHHHHHH!!!!" tone - that I was just fighting it too hard. I went home at 1:30, and got what sleep I could.

Posted by tederick at 9:16 AM in askew & tiff 2008
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Apparently today is docu-day... pretty good when it's Blood Trail, pretty damn good when it's Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, and almost all the way to outstanding when it's It Might Get Loud, a documentary about the electric guitar in which the Edge jams with Jimmy Page and Jack White on the opening riff of "I Will Follow," and which flipped me over into nerdgasms of glee. Actually, it had me mentally measuring my new living room for speakers. In the midst of all that Matty Price and I shouted out a Mamo but we'll see if it's postable, the ambient noise at the restaurant was through the roof.

Now I've just come into Witch Hunt, and must ask why I was handed a complimentary pair of stalker binoculars by a Sun Life Financial representative as I came into the theatre, just for seeing a movie about hunting and improperly convicting pedophiles. What's the message? Keep an eye out for more of 'em? Or watch the watchers? What?

Many conversations with other festival goers ensue.

Posted by tederick at 6:21 PM in tiff 2008
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"I'm not stupid! I know that when the last day comes, I'll be dragged to the depths! But that does not mean I can't save one life!"

Wow, I just met someone who actually started talking about the blogTO podcast without knowing that it was mine. Up top!

Anyhooza, I exchanged my cursed Knitting ticket for Harvard Beats Yale, which was a bit of a coup. Still no movement on The Ghost. And I have officially maxed out my sleep credits because when I got up this morning after about 3 hours of unconsciousness, my brain was all slidey. I am in the wide spaces right now, all logy and gross, with a long way to go till bed. Deadgirl last night was officially not worth the sleep deprivation and emotional abuse, being that rather than cleverly spinning the premise into something actually about something, it was really just a movie about some boys who chain up a girl and rape her for days, and all the attendant gagging for the camera about how hilarious it is that they're being so unrepentently awful. That's the exploitation crapshoot - sometimes a movie completely subverts all the misogynist aggressive trappings of its genre, and sometimes it just walks up to those trappings, strips down to a zebra-print speedo, and dives right in.

The good news is, Flame & Citron was outstanding. That is so the movie Munich wanted to be, and produced like a brick shithouse, too. Every shot, every angle, every daub of light on the gorgeous WWII canvas was pitched perfectly. It was also, unfortunately, the movie where Matty Price and I had this couple behind us:

"Why did they kill that guy?"
"I thought he was WITH them!"
"Oh my god - is that a suicide pill??"

which begged the question of: if they were having that much trouble with a straight-ahead period thriller, how were they reading the subtitles?

Then, on the way out and as we were joking to each other about that pair, Matty P. and I were behind these dudes:

"Wait, which one was Flame?"

which is our new favourite line.

Anyways. Religulous was good, I suppose, but fairly uselessly blunt in the final analysis. I guess that's just the way that thing goes. It is interesting to contextualize religion's popularity in the States right now against, say, the days of the founding fathers, and it's also always hilarious to talk to a guy who plays Jesus in a Floridian Christian theme park, but pitching atheism - or even just common-sense anti-dogmatism - seems like such an utterly lost battle these days, and I found the film a bit bumming. I felt mute. Still, Charles and Maher didn't fall into the one obvious trap of a flick like this ([cough] Michael Moore [cough]) which is, to use the inappropriate metaphor, preaching to the saved. It's all well and good to rant about right-wing inadequacies in a left-wing film, but who's going to see it that needs to see it? These guys know who their audience is, know that their audience already knows that religious fundamentalism is fucking insane. The rallying cry here is for their audience to, well, rally - to use their vast, silent minority in America to exert the kind of influence that the religious groups already do. We like to make fun of the religious action groups, but when have we actually tried to stop them?

Meanwhile, I'm apparently the only guy in the year who liked Sauna - not loved, mind you, but I think there was enough going on there on a broad existential level to redeem the gaps in the story. Besides, the main guy is just cool - one of those nice character turns where you think you're watching the antagonist until about three quarters of the way through where you realize you're looking at the hero. I like those.

Vinyan, too, had a lot to recommend it - the director will certainly have something significant to contribute, someday - but frick lord, the script was terrible. One of those irresistable "down the hole" scripts that filmmakers seem to inevitably indulge in early in their careers, where the impetus to tell the crazyfuckedup story (a married white couple go deep into the Burmese jungle looking for their lost son) overwhelms any interest in creating consistent motivations or even characters whose basic choices are sensible: the only driving impulse is "keep them going deeper into that jungle," regardless of the common sense of the thing. And yet, the filmcraft was sorta awesome, using subjective camera, extraordinary sound design, and really, really gorgeous photography to genuinely capture the freaky mood of the thing.

The film ends with the rather hilarious image of a flock of young jungle boys applying mud to Emanuelle Beart's nude body. The two boys who were clearly directorially ordered to keep to her back are moving in slow, bored circles; the 35 boys crowded around her front are having the time of their fucking lives lathering mud onto her boobs, including one kid who simply could not get enough of tugging on her left nipple. Paired with Deadgirl toward the end of the day, it seemed like a rhyming pair on the unrestrainable sexual vociferousness of the human male. Though really, that's giving the entire enterprise too much credit.

Posted by tederick at 9:11 AM in tiff 2008
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"Bare your bottom halves to the demon king!"

Well that tears it: I wanna be a death metal rocker. Or maybe I just want to wear a purple cape and white face makeup. But either way, I had a damn hoot of a good time watching Detroit Metal City, which is so unabashedly accurate in its depiction of the language and emotional stylings of manga that it is, frame for frame, probably the most faithful graphic novel adaptation this side of Sin City. If that inevitably leads the principals to act like meat-and-bone cartoon characters for most of the time, well, no mind. Would that the Scott Pilgrim movie nails the genre this precisely.

Hey guess what: Derrière Moi was the worst fucking movie I have seen in a good long while. Painfully "shot" on dollar-store handicams and likely edited in a Final Cut Pro night class, the movie was everything that is bad about post-Going Down the Road Canadian filmmaking. There's a horrifying sickness in young Canadian filmmakers that has them think that if they just turn the cameras on, zoom way the fuck in on their subjects biting their lips and flicking their hair behind their ears, and just let their non-actors act naturally around the threadbare structural clichés of their cocktail-napkin script, the "film" that emerges will out-Vague the fucking French New Wave. Storytelling is a craft, not a fucking accident. Fuck.

I saw my nemesis after the show! Ooooh nemesis. Me and him in the snake pit, some day.

Posted by tederick at 11:35 AM in tiff 2008
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This year's Tuesday Night Freak-out: has been canceled. Stay tuned for further developments as they become available.

C'est pas moi, je le jure just broke my heart a little bit. Or maybe just cut me open somewhat, more like. But in the good way, I think... cathartic and satisfying and a bit sad and a bit happy and very, very good. That is a really sensational movie, and the kid in it is nothing short of scarily amazing. So there ya go: I am capable of not just sitting through, but enthusiastically enjoying, Canadian feature filmmaking. If Quebec counts? Who knows, I'm going into another one (Derriere Moi) right now, so I'll let you know.

I also saw the Hungarian incest flick, which was "that film," being the obligatory once-annually festival film I must encounter from Eastern Europe, where nobody says much, shots are held long, lingering shots of small animals are imbued with impenetrable thematic significance, and really fucking awful rapes happen in the middle of the day every now and again. Not that it went particularly sour in this case: like After the Day Before in 2004, I didn't really mind the languid sequences of the Danube Delta drifting on by and the lengthy, inexplicable procession of funeral boats underscored by the inevitable drone-hum of an all-male throat choir. And as incest stories go, a traditionally-damn-near-impossible sub-genre, it wasn't bad, just a bit sledgehammery towards the Lottery-esque ending. But there's no denying that between Delta and Achilles and the four hours of sleep that preceded them, it was a low-key-to-the-point-of-subliminality start to the day.

C'est pas moi (my first trip to the Winter Garden, which made me positively purple with disappointment that I didn't get to see J.K. Rowling read there during the Hallows tour) ran 20 minutes long, so I missed the first 15 minutes of 35 Rums. That's easily 6 or 7 rums! So I didn't bother, and instead stayed for the Q&A, which I never do (because of the inevitable questions: in this case, "where was it shot?" and "did you change much from the book?").

An effortless rush of Rocknrolla damn near turned today into my only 7-flick day, but with Rums off the schedule, 'twas not to be. Oh, and Rocknrolla... hella awful. Or just stupid and pointless, really. Oh, if I could undo the damage that Lock, Stock has done to the world. I would be a happy man.

You ever have that thing where you're all alone in a whole row of theatre seats and a guy comes in and sits immediately beside you? And then, 15 minutes into the movie, you hear the horrifying ZZZZIPPP? Cuz I did, today. (It was his fanny pack. But that doesn't explain the needless proximity.)

Right-o.

Posted by tederick at 8:21 PM in the rum diaries & tiff 2008
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Well that 6-minute walk home from Midnight worked out super friendly sky high, and I got in the door moments before S who was out at the opening night party. Four lovely hours of sleep later and I was off to Kitano-world to see Achilles and the Tortoise, the latest entry from Asia's answer to Bill Murray. The flick was predictably languid, sly, and stupendously dark, a perfect match for a Friday morning wakeover. There is a frame in the middle of the thing where Kitano and his art school cronies have killed a man in an art experiment by crashing a truck loaded with paint into a wall - a lone artist stands before the makeshift flower shrine, cradling a broken, paint-covered bicycle - which is both so goddamned hilarious and stupendously upsetting that I'd really like an 8x10 glossy of it for my office.

I used to like fucking around with things, back in the day, back when you were allowed to make things because it was just fun to make them and you thought they might be interesting, rather than having to have Thought Everything Out and Planned and Budgeted Appropriately. "The collision of the tangible," remember that? Bah.

Also very pretty was Waltz With Bashir, which was otherwise frustrating because it was so close to being genuinely great while something continuously held it back. The central flashback, which propels the filmmaker to try to discover why he can't remember the massacre, is really quite breathtaking on just about every level. I wonder what that would be like - to lose time. My experience of memory is more like a slow attrition, not an out-and-out cut and paste job.

Closed the night with JCVD, which was damn near impossible to enjoy from the balcony of the Ryerson with white subtitles on a consistently blown out white-on-white-highlights Photoshop image, and with two very large heads in the way to boot. Still, there's no denying that shot where JCVD elevates into the rafters and then goes on about his life with startling emotional presence is really quite something. A bit broody for an opening Midnight, but I'll take it...

Posted by tederick at 11:33 AM in tiff 2008
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is a thing that I have!

First AMC experience went smoothly, except for the lemming-like pileup at the top of the last escalator when the ticket takers at the gate couldn't keep up with the deluge of cinema-goers coming off the escalator and an aneurysm of people built up and built up until people started getting shoved backwards down the escalator and then finally the aneurysm popped and nobody died.

Soul Power, my first flick of the fest, was amazing, but then it was probably an amazing concert back in '74, and I just wish I had seen more of it. Boy, when they called James Brown the hardest working man in show business, they weren't kidding, were they? I'm amazed that man didn't split his pants. And Miriam Makeba... and B.B. King stepping into the ring to fuck with Muhammad Ali... well goodness, that's a lot of fun.

Posted by tederick at 8:27 PM in tiff 2008
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Well this is what I've been reduced to, friends - squatting in a Starbucks, coasting on the OneZone's weird technical loophole which still, three years later, lets me access Tederick.com for free while every other site on the earth is blocked by the connection checker, desperately to fuck wishing I had not decided to brave the first few days of my new habitation internet-free. It's goddamn terrifying up there, Internet! A BlackBerry is a piece of shit substitute for a living, breathing Facebook! Merciful Zeus. And serious crap.

Actually, the only thing that really worries me about being web-deprived is that I agreed to blog about Midnight Madness over on my old blogTO stomp, and now it looks like I'm going to have to finagle some late-night wheeling and dealing just to get into the site's back end. (Story of my life. Ho!) If it works out, though, you can check out my posts starting tonight with JCVD, right over here, sometime after 3 a.m. Wait, make that 2 a.m. - I LIVE SIX WALKABLE MINUTES AWAY FROM THE RYERSON NOW. In case you hadn't heard.

I am sick to death, Internet, of moving, unpacking, cleaning, organizing, shelving, stocking, decorating, and pulling very long white hairs out of my beard. For a "vacation," this one (thus far) utterly sucks.

Fortunately, there's TIFF.

Over the next 10 days I will be seeing (yes seeing!) FIFTY-ONE feature films. I was cranking for 53, but barring putting something together at the table tomorrow and mid next week, it's looking like I will merely be matching last year's number, not exceeding it. Still, this ain't golf. Golf sucks.

I will be seeing:

Thursday:
Soul Power at 6:30
Waltz with Bashir at 9
JCVD at midnight**

Friday:
Achilles and the Tortoise at 9
Delta at 2
C'est pas moi, je le jure at 4:30
35 Rums (arrrrh!) at 6:30
Derriere moi at 9
Detroit Metal City at midnight
and I might rush Rocknrolla, not because I want to see it, but because fuck Rocknrolla, that's why.

Saturday:
Sauna at 12:30
Vinyan at 3:15
Flame & Citron at 6
Religuolous at 9
Deadgirl at midnight**

Sunday:
It Might Get Loud at 10
Blood Trail at 12:45
Knitting at 2:45
Witch Hunt at 6:30
Zack and Miri Make a Porno at 9:15, where Kevin Smith WILL be asked to guest-host Mamo.
Not Quite Hollywood at Midnight

Monday:
Still Walking at 9:15
White Night Wedding at 12:00
Ashes of Time Redux at 3
The Hurt Locker at 6
Hooked at 9:30
Acolytes at midnight

Tuesday:
The Wrestler at noon
Of Time and the City at 4
Brothers Bloom at 9
The Burrowers at midnight
and I may rush Patrick Age 1.5.

Wednesday:
Better Things at 12:15
Three Wise Men at 2
Medicine for Melancholy at 5:45
Tears for Sale at 9:15
Martyrs at midnight**

Thursday:
Gamorrah at 9 a. damn m.!!
Synecdoche, New York at 12:15
Dungeon Masters at 3:15
Acne at 5
Me and Orson Welles at 9

Friday:
Che (the whole bloody affair) at 9
Tokyo Sonata at 2:15
Vacation at 6
American Swing at 9
Sexykiller at midnight

Saturday:
The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World at 9
Sky Crawlers at 12;15
Real Shaolin at 3:15
The Secret of Moonacre at 6:30
Three Blind Mice at 9
and Chocolate at midnight.**

The ** line items are the ones which, theoretically, I will also review on blogTO before retiring to bed on those nights. God, next Thursday morning's gonna suck, especially if Martyrs is as mind-warping as they say.

All rightie, I'm up and out, got my first flick in just over an hour, and it's at the gorramned AMC. This is gonna be a disastahhhh...

"Let's get down to brass tacks here: how much for the ape?"

Posted by tederick at 5:05 PM in 1701 & blogTO & tiff 2008
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I am a dizzying 17-storey height above the city right now, it is a beautiful Tuesday, and I am on vacation. Were it not for the slight inconvenience of spending the only truly gorgeous weekend of our entire apocalyptic summer not on a cottage deck drinking beers (a lack felt so painfully that, in Canadian Tire the other day and confronted by a truck-sized billboard of Canadian Shield granite poking through a mist-shrouded lake, my eyes started brimming), I'd say everything's going off without a hitch.

In comparison with my former roommates, it turns out I am relatively monastic in my quantity of possessions. I figured I'd be in the middle of the pack (nobody was going to out-clutter Brandy) but after spending 2 hours on Sunday night just bringing boxes of stuff down to the living room from Chris' room, I felt positively Spartan. All in all my move was a piece of cake, a lazy Sunday afternoon in the driveway at 3QF with my big truckin' fuck. It was only after an existantialist nightmare trip to Ikea, when the sun went down and we started loading Chris and Brandy's big truckin' fuck, that things started to get frazzly. I have consumed more sugar in the past 48 hours than in probably the last month (including a bushel of Cinnabons which, had I the means, I would have pre-digested Fly-style and sucked up whole), enough sugar that, after midnight on Sunday and while the others thought we had gone off to slack, Steve and I even hoisted Brandy's beaten, broken couch out the front door of 3QF and smote its ruin on the mountainside.

Now in my surprisingly enjoyable new pad - which, for everyone who's missed the subtext, is christened 1701 - Zam is being her predictably adorable self, so needy and clingy (as she is after any traumatic event) that she's almost an entirely different cat. All is well. Sarafina came over last night (her office is a scant 4 minute walk from here) and we made a delightful feast of Swiss Chalet among the forest of box towers, and watched American Graffiti. The roar of the city kept me up for much of the night, and now I am surfing the ether of unpassworded wi-fi, watching DVDs and emptying the boxes I spent the last week filling. Life is insane. So much production, for so little change.

Posted by tederick at 9:29 AM in 1701 & 3QF & the apocalypse & zam!
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