By way of cleaning house, here's the last report for TIFF 2006. Live it up.

The best of the fest:

Penelope

The rest of the best:

Lake of Fire, Pan's Labyrinth, The Fountain, London to Brighton, Princess, Shortbus, Deliver Us From Evil, Rescue Dawn

The best of the rest:

Ten Canoes (unsubtitled version), Taxidermia, The Killer Within, Black Sheep, Sheitan, Severance, Venus, Renaissance, Offside, about half of Cashback

The rest:

Sleeping Dogs Lie, Red Road, Island, Summer '04, Summercamp!, The Host, The Jade Warrior, Time, U, Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Tour, The Silence, Outsourced, Mon Meilleur Ami, L'Intouchable, HANA, Bugmaster (why? because he's the motherfucking bugmaster, that's why!)

The... stuff that's generally poor and doesn't rhyme with "fest":

The Last Winter, The Magic Flute, The Prisoner or How I Planned To Kill Tony Blair, The Way I Spent the End of the World, La Coupure, Kabul Express, Chacun sa nuit

The motherfucking walkouts!!:

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, End of the Line, Away From Her, L'Optimisti (walked out due to hypnosis), Sistagod, The Banquet (walked out due to other commitments)

Didn't walk in:

Trapped Ashes, Invisible Waves

Posted by tederick at 4:16 PM in tiff 2006
Permalink | Comments (0)

The mobile not-such-a-laptop made this year a hell of a lot easier in terms of getting reviews written, since I didn't have to do it at 3:00 in the morning after getting home from Midnight Madness. Here are the last of the stragglers and the closing podcast for moviesTO, which I just realized (and this is true for the previous one as well) was probably recorded on the built-in mic instead of my headset. Oops. (It's a lot worse on the last one than this one.) Well, you learn something new every day.

Reviews:

Renaissance

Red Road

Island

Chacun sa nuit

Kabul Express

Summer '04

Taxidermia

London to Brighton

Sheitan

Podcasts:

moviesTO #47: Fest Rest

Mamo #58: Fest is the Best

Posted by tederick at 8:50 PM in podcastery & reviews & tiff 2006
Permalink | Comments (0)

"...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..."

I think it was Tuesday or Wednesday night, I was nackered, and Matty Price and I were looking for a place to eat before the Midnight movie... and arrived at Yonge Street to find almost no options. It was raining outside. Frankz was closed, Popeye's was closed, so we ended up at the Pickle Barrel and, admittedly against my better judgment, I ordered the benny for the sake of the column. And just look at that thing. That is the saddest eggs benedict I have ever fucking seen.

To be absolutely fair: we snuck into the restaurant 15 minutes before the kitchen closed, so this might not be their best effort.

But this benny is a disgrace! Undercooked eggs and ham and english muffin - wait a minute, that's undercooked everything - and lumpy hollandaise. Oh, and the presentation looks like a three year old did it. The latkes that come with the benny weren't bad, but the whole thing cost $8.95, which is way, way too much for product this poor. And that fruit? Don't even get me started on the fruit.

One egg out of four, and that egg is given grudgingly.

The Pickle Barrel is located just north of Yonge and Dundas in Toronto. On weeknights, the kitchen closes at 11. The Benedict Chronicles is an ongoing, non-regular series.

Posted by tederick at 1:14 PM in the benedict chroncicles & tiff 2006
Permalink | Comments (0)

I caught the perfect wave tonight. London to Brighton was terrific for my final (real) film of the festival, and after that it was nothing but goat-titty-sucking cream with the closing Midnight, Sheitan, to seal the deal. I took a quiet walk through the Ryerson back way, I said thank you to the staff at Frankz, I talked to a girl about her excellent brown pants, I had the big exhale sigh of relief and the calm and peace that comes with letting go. In the end, it all worked just fine. Keep running.

Posted by tederick at 2:17 AM in poetical & tiff 2006
Permalink | Comments (0)

I somehow managed to set my alarm for 8:30 p.m. and yet I only overslept by ten minutes. Getting to the Paramount for Kabul Express was a bit of a slog, but it got done. Then Matty Price put the whammy on me at The Banquet, pointing out that it was a slow and moody 2-hour-plus period piece, but that if I took off early I could hit the rush line for Summer '04, the only remaining "must" film that I was still not going to see. So y'know what? That's what I did. I said goodbye to the Elgin and walked up to the Varsity, solely on the fact that I just haven't done enough rushing in this festival. And for some sick bizarre reason, I enjoy the shit out of that process. It's like blowing up the Death Star or something. It just feels good to win.

My battery is about to kick out due to a Mac issue this morning (yet another Mac issue!); I'm still sort of reeling from the guy next to me in the movie who patiently explained that he never turns off his cell phone in movies, no matter what; and overall, the gruelling emotional experience of the last ten days has aired out every kink and knot in my clumped up heart and made them dance in front of my eyes like so many TIFF trailers. But that's okay. I'm in Taxidermia in an hour and London to Brighton after that, and then Sheitan to close the whole show, and I'm calling it all time well spent. Fire up the cigar, Linda, we're goin' to the movies.

Posted by tederick at 5:12 PM in tiff 2006
Permalink | Comments (0)

The above title is a single-line description of a film from a previous festival, which Matty Price insists was terrible... but I keep thinking, how is that not the best movie ever?! I want to make that movie. I want to do a 2-hour film of two guys walking around Budapest, ostensibly chasing a chicken that they are going to kill, and only occasionally catching sight of it. That is my kind of film.

Princess pretty much saved my day. I had seen a couple of lukewarm reviews on it so I was getting worried, but it's fucking terrific, and my top ten for 2006 is now a whopping 70% film festival. The rest of the day was largely sunk by my incest double-feature. I did not know I had booked an incest double-feature. But both La Coupure and Chacun sa nuit contained brother-sister incest as a key plot element. What made it weirder was the fact that in both films, the people around the brother-sister couple were aware of what was going on, and were treating it as something only minorly unusual... a little out of the ordinary, perhaps, but still within perameters. If you only watched those two films at this year's TIFF, you'd come away thinking that siblings losing their virginity to each other was as normal a part of adolescence as checking out wangs in the locker room. Brother-sister incest, everywhere around us, all the time.

I sort of cracked up at around 7:30 when I found myself unable to make simple reasoning decisions regarding a course of action for the evening. It once again involved sitting on the steps of the Manulife Centre and holding my head in my hands, but only for a minute or two this time and not so much with the shaking. So that's good.

I am ready for this to be over. If I never see another hand dryer for the rest of my life, it will be too fucking soon.

Review:

Princess

Posted by tederick at 2:03 AM in reviews & tiff 2006
Permalink | Comments (0)

I just did a quick tally, and my previously-moribund “top ten” draft for films of 2006 now holds six entries for films I’ve seen in the past week, including first, second, and fourth place. When the hell has that ever happened? A hundred years of never, that's when. I think that means it’s been a good festival. I think that also means it’s been a shite year at the movies everywhere else. I have high hopes for a few flicks remaining for the rest of the year - although Black Dahlia’s negative reviews today are really disappointing - but I’m just glad to have gone from a year where I was afraid I would be begging off with a “top five” instead of a “top ten,” to a year where really, I’m probably going to need a “top fifteen” or a hell of a lot of honourable mentions in order to capture the year that was 2006. Thanks for pulling it out, TIFF. You’ve reminded me of who I really am.

And hey, vaginas. Lots.

Reviews:

The Fountain

Severance

La Coupure

Posted by tederick at 5:25 PM in reviews & tiff 2006
Permalink | Comments (0)

I was gonna sit here and try to write reviews of all the stuff yesterday - although I think at this point The Fountain is going to fall into the same subjective netherworld that left Lake of Fire unreviewed - but instead I think I just want to go to the theatre early, drink coffee, read Pride of Baghdad, and get some alone time. Yesterday was good though; Renaissance was terrific (as was the aforementioned Fountain), as was (to everyone's surprise) Severance, the scream-festiest laugh-your-ass-offiest Midnight I've been to in a long, long time. I also got to walk out of Sistagod, which receives this year's Cameron Bailey Award for Cameron Bailey-Programmed Movies That Are Not Good Movies. That makes what, four walkouts and an outright skip this year? Or is it five? I'm getting nasty in my old age.

(OK: I understand what CB is doing, and that movies like Sistagod aren't supposed to be "good" in the traditional sense but are merely "interesting" from a developing cinema standpoint. Every year I take a chance on one of these things on the hope that one of these days, one of them will really penetrate through for me in a new and profound way. As of this year, though, I'm done with such clemency.)

Oh: if I have absolutely no idea what else to say, you might hear me describe films as "cerebral," "luminous," or "metaphorical." They are the bullshit watchwords of the day. As is spinning around in your seat the moment the credits roll and saying "SO WHADJA THINK?!"

Podcast:

moviesTO #46: Sex and Love

Posted by tederick at 10:35 AM in podcastery & tiff 2006
Permalink | Comments (0)

So the good news is that I'm alive. I'm alive, I'm well-rested, I'm ready to tackle the final three days and I'm in a rather good mood about it all. Fuck, I'm even gonna clean my room. So that's cool.

There's no denying that the middle of the week was absolute balljive for the most part. I guess the fest dumps their lower-end stuff there, as evidenced by the not-sold-out screenings and generally poor filmmaking. In fact, I don't think I "loved" any of the movies I saw yesterday; at best I could say "yeah, that was all right." I'm expecting big things from The Fountain today, and still trying to wrangle a Summer '04 ticket for Saturday.

Sean Penn: you're an asshole. But we knew that when you did the Jude Law props at the Oscars two years ago. As to whether my opinion applies to all smokers... well, that's a discussion for another time.

Reviews:

The Killer Within

Shortbus

Outsourced

Mon Meilleur Ami

The Last Winter

L'Intouchable

Bugmaster

Podcasts:

Mamo #57: Fest That Sells Sex

Posted by tederick at 10:58 AM in podcastery & reviews & tiff 2006
Permalink | Comments (0)

Okay, so as it turns out, this is the day. This is the day when the gas goes clean out of the car. I was pretty much hallucinating by the time I got to the Silver Snail this morning, I was so tired. I thought it was just early-ish morning fatigue. Shortly after writing that last post I passed a kid on the street begging for change with a sign that read “will take verbal abuse for change.” I walked by and then walked back, gave him a buck thirty-five, and then screamed “YOUR SIGN IS RIDICULOUS, YOUR CLOTHES ARE DIRTY, AND YOU MAKE ME FUCKING SICK!!!” in a voice loud enough to actually stop traffic. As expected, it made me feel better. But as the day wore on my alpha-wave brain state did not dispel, even after multiple coffees and a serious Guns n’ Roses recharge on the street outside the Elgin. I’m just basically on a single blip right now.

So it’s good I’ve got no Midnight tonight and no morning show tomorrow, because I think I don’t get through Thursday, Friday and Saturday if I don’t get the hell out of here pretty soon. I feel bad for the flicks I saw today and the ones I’ll see tonight, because they got the really short end of the stick in terms of my consciousness span, but that’s the way it is. At least I got one day further than 2004, when I had a nervous breakdown on the steps of the Manulife Centre at around 5:30 on the Tuesday night.

Posted by tederick at 5:51 PM in tiff 2006
Permalink | Comments (0)

The Beast defeated me. Not in a bad way. But I had to give up on Trapped Ashes at midnight last night because waiting to go into the theatre, I was almost asleep on my feet. I took it home instead and now don’t even recall getting into bed or how long or well I slept. I’m back at the Paramount now, which must mean something. I must have gotten here somehow. But the first flick I was supposed to see, Optimisti, started with not one but two scenes of a Hungarian dude hypnotizing a room full of farmers into sleep. I didn’t last ten minutes, and that was on a full cup of coffee. You just can’t do that shit at ten in the morning on the seventh day of the festival.

This film festival has become all about structure for me. I am hyper-aware of narrative structure. Aware of it in dramas, aware of it in docs, aware of it in comedies, aware of it each and every time something isn’t working. I am on structure like flies on shit right now. The problem with all this film festivalling, though, is how it turns the mirror back on me, like I’m seeing my own future: some feature film I’ll kill myself making for three years, that someone just like me will walk out of in twenty minutes because of poor structure or something equally obvious (to everyone else) that wasn’t obvious (to the filmmaker).

The issue is that I don’t think I’m a good enough writer yet to cover my deficits as a director, and I don’t think I’m a good enough director to cover my flaws as a writer. That’s an unholy combination, the result of which is that I think I need to spend some time working on other peoples’ scripts. I think subculture is okay - that thing has been revised and mulled over so many times that it's got the structure of a brick shithouse - but my directorial skills won't bone up on something I wrote myself nearly so well as they would on something that I connected to that was done by someone else. I have a couple of those that I’m knocking around, but I have to take the big leap and actually go do it instead of think about doing it a few months ago. And that means money, and that means time, and that means getting my shit together. Which has been overdue anyway.

And finally: praise Buddha, cuz Joss Whedon really is taking over Runaways. How good? That good.

Posted by tederick at 10:21 AM in comix & joss & tederick films & tiff 2006
Permalink | Comments (1)

Walked out of the Sarah Polley movie. Why? Because I’ve seen that shit. I’ve seen that shit literally dozens of times. The thing where the couple faces Alzheimers and whoever has the Alzheimers slowly degenerates over the next 90 minutes of the movie and there are absolutely no turns to the story and thereby no “story” in the traditional sense of the term at all and instead just scene after scene of the woman getting worse and worse and worse until she dies? Yes. I have seen that movie. I have seen students make that movie; I have seen adults make that movie; I have seen one crazy Slovakian nut make that movie backwards; I have seen Sarah Polley make that movie. Will everyone in the world please stop making that movie. Enough already.

Someone out there is actually going to crack the way to make a good movie about the personal costs of Alzheimers, but it’s not happening in Toronto this year. Jesus, if The Notebook is a more affecting look at this disease than Away From Her, then TIFF once again needs to get its programming head examined. (Yes, The Notebook. There was crying and promises of eternal love after The Notebook.)

Well it’s 10:30 and I’ve just busted into Blackstones even though they don’t open until eleven and don’t serve Benedict on weekdays. Killer Within’s at noon, my iPod toasted itself this morning, gonna go buy the Star Wars trilogy (for the seventh time in my life) and reschedule my plans for the 19th cuz clearly, I’m watching Return of the Jedi.

Review:

Sleeping Dogs Lie

Posted by tederick at 10:32 AM in reviews & tiff 2006
Permalink | Comments (0)

Tomorrow is the Beast. Five films and a three-hour John Waters conversation, between nine in the a.m. to twelve in the midnight. It's gonna be a killer. It's gonna be great.

Today was great too; I really needed today. A chance to completely recharge my batteries on the whole festival-going process and undo some of the exhaustion-based depression that has set in over the past few days. Sure, most of the films were shite. In fact, they were all pretty much shite after Venus. I walked out of End of the Line after about five minutes, my fastest walk-out ever: dialogue so poor it could have been written by ten-year-olds ("What? Jenny jumped in front of the subway? But I warned Dr. Collins not to let her out of the hospital. Now I'm going to feel responsible for what happened to her!"), acting so stilted it was like watching first year theatre students who would not make the second year... and a set-redressing of Bay Station that was pretty much laughable to anyone who's ever been there. I just couldn't take it. So I went and sat on the big rock in Yorkville, recorded my podcast, and took advantage of some free Wi Fi. Now that, that I could live with.

Didn't walk out of The Way I Spent the End of the World or U, but only because I'd already got my walk-out ya-ya's done for the day. And Bobcat Goldthwait's much-awaited Sleeping Dogs Lie was disappointing, just because it was so shittily made. His pre-show shtick about the only American in the audience, who he nicknamed Yeasty, was way funnier.

I await the Beast.

Reviews:

The Jade Warrior

Offside

Cashback

Black Sheep

The Way I Spent the End of the World

U

Podcasts:

moviesTO #45: Best Weekend Ever

Posted by tederick at 12:12 AM in podcastery & reviews & tiff 2006
Permalink | Comments (1)

What a breath of air a good film is. Venus pulled me right out of my post-cell phone post-on hold for 2 hours post-lost my favourite shirt doldrums. I realize this has been happening to me a lot lately, so I’m somewhat worried that I’m essentially in junkie mode - only happy when a movie makes me happy - because this bears potential dangers, should I be confronted by a crappy movie when I need a good one. But I must say, I’ve been tremendously lucky over the past few days. And now I’m writing like an Englishman in his nineties. Good show.

With my cell phone gone I am now without timepiece. I am navigating the between-screenings allotments with the temporal equivalent of dead reckoning. If I leave the Paramount at ten to two, I must arrive by subway at Museum station by 2:05. If it takes five minutes to walk to Quiznos and five minutes to order, I have about twenty-five minutes to eat and read my comic book before I should head to the Varsity to relieve myself, and then walk to the Cumberland to arrive five minutes prior to my 3:00 show. Thank goodness my internal clock not only doesn’t suck but has frightened people on occasion.

Today is my first day going largely solo, hence the timekeeping issues. But I’m really happy about it. I needed a bit of time to get back into the why’s of doing this marathon filmgoing thing, a bit of time to listen to my iPod on Bay Street and stride the windy corridors of the city in my full film nerd gear. I needed some time to find my power centre again, and found it I have.

Reviews:

Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Tour

Venus

Posted by tederick at 2:56 PM in tiff 2006
Permalink | Comments (0)

You know what's neat? I can no longer tell what a film's shot on. Back in '99 or thereabouts, when the first video-to-film transfers started showing up at the multiplexes, that shit stuck out for me like a sore thumb. Now yesterday I spent twenty minutes watching Offside - which totally improved my day by the way - before some part of my brain twinked and went, "You know? I think this was shot on video." I guess the visual language has finally become pluralized enough that my head is able to get back the medium and back into the story. Not sure when that happened, but glad it did.

Now I'm on hold with the cell phone company - who I, ahem, work for - trying to cancel my fucking phone. Hello? Shouldn't this be a priority item? I have to leave in about five minutes so I guess any erroneous charges will just have to be charged back to the company for making the single most irritating aspect of my festival thus far, that much harder to manage. Fucking cell phones. I FUCKING HATE CELL PHONES!!!

Anyhoo. Yesterday was a pretty weird, all-over-the-place, up-and-down day overall. There were some weird synergies in Cashback - which I recognize is not a very good movie, or at least, is a wildly uneven movie - about my life and things that have happened to me and the weird psycho-sexual neuroses of the male artist and his relationship to women, which made the screening uplifting in a way that had nothing to do with the objective merits of the film as a film. Plus I was sitting in front of Sean Biggerstaff, so that was hilarious.

Then we went to do a Mamo outside the Ryerson, and the writer of Mandy Lane turned out to be listening in, and came over afterwards and asked us what we thought of his movie. So we, uh... told him. It was freaking neat, man. I don't think I ever would have had the balls to do that as a writer.

There was also some trauma involving killer sheep, and something about an effort to turn my romantic tragedy into a romantic comedy, but I don't really remember what any of that was about. People watching from the benches would be wise to recall, however, that my story is not going to have a surprise ending. It has a surprise middle.

Reviews:

The Silence

Rescue Dawn

Summercamp!

Pan's Labyrinth

Podcasts:

Mamo #56: Fest Without Guests

Posted by tederick at 10:55 AM in podcastery & reviews & tiff 2006
Permalink | Comments (0)

I’m feeling the burn now. Day Four, and admittedly the disappearance of my cell phone has put me in a shite mood - having it gone for the one week a year when I actually need the thing that I hate for the entire rest of the time - but the uphill struggle is also starting to make it harder and harder to stay focused. I think it’ll be easier when I’m coming down the other side of the mountain instead of continuing to clamber uphill. I’m sixteen films into a 49-film set at this point, so mostly I’m just feeling the mass ahead of me instead of the distance behind or (more importantly) the thing right in front of me. So that sucks.

I should have built more time in between the shows because there is absolutely no margin for error. An attempt to reclaim the cell phone at the Ryerson, coupled with a five minute wait for what passed for my lunch, put me standing outside the Elgin scarfing down chicken while fending off a self-esteem-challenged TMN flyer girl three minutes before Pan’s Labyrinth. Upside: Guillermo Del Toro’s car arrived when I was just standing there, and Ron Perlman jumped out of the crowd to hug him, and I’m like “Fucking hell, it was Batman yesterday and now it’s Hellboy.” And Pan’s Labyrinth really is its own kind of awesome. A deeply challenging, mature film. I was really impressed.

So now I’m trying to grab five consecutive minutes of “me” time at a Tim Horton’s while simultaneously attempting to log onto the One Zone which has not exactly lived up to its potential since that glorious moment on the Burrito Boyz patio two days ago. Fuck... was that only two days ago? Feels like a bloomin’ week.

Yeah. I’m in a bad fucking mood right now.

Posted by tederick at 6:20 PM in tiff 2006
Permalink | Comments (1)

Today was very nearly a perfect day at the festival. And then I might have actually accidentally killed someone in the midst of walking out of a cruelly offensive horror movie. So call it a toss.

The first four movies I saw today are the best movies I've seen at the festival thus far. Two of them are among the best movies I've seen this year. One of them is actually the best movie I've seen this year. Penelope was that thing, that thing I've had at the festival only a few times in my life, where I was literally jumping up and down in the streets afterwards just to work out the sheer cinematic happy that that movie had crammed into my soul. I loved every single damn thing about the film from the tips of my short head-hairs to the roots of the gnarlier hairs on my toes.

And then I had to go to another movie. And that's another good indication of the pedigree of film I had today: every time a movie ended, I didn't want to go to the next one because I just wanted to sit in the fug created by the one I'd just seen, and live in it for a while. I had to go from the best cinematic fairy tale I've ever seen, a movie that made me hap-hap-happy like me, to a documentary about a Catholic priest who raped children. As we parted ways at Yonge & Gerrard, I heard Matty Price call out to me: "Matt! If it's not working, walk the fuck out." Fortunately, unnecessary advice: Deliver Us From Evil was terrific, though very hard to take. Still, two for two on a day, I was feeling pretty good. I sat at the Timothy's in the Manulife and tried to write reviews, which was made difficult by the fact that a) I was wearing my Superman shirt and b) it was garnering a lot of attention.

Then it was Lake of Fire, the anti-abortion doc, and I was nervous; no way could this live up. Well, it did. It lived up in a way that few movies in my entire life ever had. After the film (which was in fact far longer than the programme guide lead us to believe) the director thanked us for staying through such an overwhelming physical experience, and that's what it was - this was a physical movie. Forget how it made you think or feel or whatever else, this thing made me want to run out into the lobby and throw up or burst into tears. I don't think I can review it, actually. I think it'll be the first top-ten winner here on Tederick.com that has no formal review, because there's nothing more I can say besides the fact that it is almost impossible to watch, and should be required viewing for everyone on the planet. I sure as hell didn't love it... but I am so glad it's there.

So now completely convinced that the streak has to end somewhere, we go see Rescue Dawn... and I come out four for four, with one to go. Plus, Batman was there. And Werner Herzog, but he suffered a tragedy today and wasn't very talkative (rightly so). But damn, it was an awesome day at the movies right up until the Midnight got started, a flick called All the Boys Love Mandy Lane. From the first frames, my hackles were up. I don't think it was ever conscious on the part of the director, who must have been born about five years after I started masturbating. From his quips before the film started, he made it very clear that he is just one of "those guys who don't get it." But this is about as patently offensive and misogynist a film as you're ever likely to see, even within the admittedly-misogynist slasher film genre. Mandy Lane, in weird and violent ways, really did seem to be about why it's okay to rape girls. Shortly after a teen got blowjobbed to death by a guy using a shotgun as a phallus, for daring to suggest that she deserved some oral sex after administering some to a boy, I decided it was time to split.

And then my cell phone jumped off my belt clip and tumbled off the balcony of the Ryerson and into the general seating below.

Oops.

The breathtakingly beautiful house manager helped me reassure myself that no one was lying on the ground in a pool of their own blood with a Motorola next to their head, but was otherwise unable to ascertain the status of my phone without interrupting the movie, so I left it behind. Now I've got a short turnaround: tomorrow morning, I'm going to Summercamp!

No way tomorrow beats today. But it's got Pan's Labyrinth and a movie about killer sheep from New Zealand, so it can't be half bad.

Reviews:

The Host

Penelope

Deliver Us From Evil

Podcasts:

Mamo #55: Fest Without Rest

Posted by tederick at 2:12 AM in podcastery & reviews & tiff 2006
Permalink | Comments (3)

At a certain point during the festival - when your screening count gets north of 5, which is probably more movies than most people see in a year - time turns into an entirely other thing. Or more accurately, your ability to judge time goes completely out the window. I had an almost hallucinatory interaction with the passage of time during the screening of The Silence - my third film of the day and sixth (and a third) overall - at the Varsity yesterday afternoon. Though the program notes claimed that the film was an hour and 45 minutes long, by what (I later assessed) must have been about the hour-and-ten mark, I was convinced that I'd been watching the film since about a week after my birth.

By the hour-and-a-half, I was fully convinced that the program notes had got it wrong and that I was now missing my next screening. In fact, I was fairly anry at TIFF for so completely underestimating the corpulent running time of The Silence. And I use the word "hallucinatory" here quite literally, because this was a delusional state with all the trimmings. And then the house lights came up, and an hour and 45 minutes had gone by. It was like the end of Flight of the Navigator where Joey's like, "it all happened in one night?"

It's not that the flick is bad or even that it's slow. It's just that after heaping feature on top of featre, my ability to interact with its pacing in a meaningful way pretty much vanishes. How do I know this? Because the same phenomenon happened in everything else I saw last night.

The other big weirdo for the day was finding out that Rolf de Heer's Ten Canoes is supposed to have subtitles. This was fairly disappointing given that the subtitle-free status was one of the things I heaped the most praise upon for the film. Now I sort of want to track de Heer down (he's in town) and convince him to skip the titling. Take a chance, mate! Artistic value lies aplenty in TIFF's so-called "error."

Yesterday was a five-film day. The delirious happiness of blogging from Burrito Boyz gave way to a somewhat disappointing screening of my number one film for the festival, Kim Ki-Duk's Time, after which I was further disappointed to learn that tickets for 2:37 - which had been my first pick for the mid-afternoon slot - had become available again and then sold out again, sticking me right back into The Prisoner instead. Thom Powers (documentary programmer) really pissed me off by coming out and announcing that he'd had a vanity work made explicitly to fill the time-gap before The Prisoner was to start... a twenty-minute "documentary" made of outtakes from a longer documentary. What an asshole move. I was not predisposed to like anything this man was going to show me after that.

Then I carted up to the Varsity for The Silence, and then me and Matty Price went to Oja to grab a pre-Mamo bite, where we were waited upon by the most beautiful girl I've ever seen without being in the company of Chris MacLean. Then we cabbed it down to the P-mount, did the Mamo in the Chapters coffee shop (and were stared at almost the entire way through by a twentysomething dude about my age who could not figure out what we were doing), and then had minutes to spare to get into The Jade Warrior, the fucked-up Finnish kung fu movie. Yes.

Matty Price checked out a time or two during the screening and I found the quasi-dreamy rhythm of the film sort of hypnotic but I really liked it. We got out of the film to find a torrential downpour outside, and were literally forced into it by a stunningly mean-spirited security guard with a vaguely Eastern European accent... who then, after thrusting us into the deluge, then attempted to use one of the Paramount doors to move/crush a pair of teenage girls. That was when Matty Price FREAKED OUT!!! Dude, I'm telling you, it was awesome. He got in a full-on screaming match with the turbo-nazi bitch. It was glorious. I only wish I'd had the energy to participate.

Cabbed it through the rain to the Ryerson with a guy who ended up stiffing me for his share of the cab fare, and was really pleased to see a full house for The Host in spite of the full-house screening for Borat happening just a few blocks away. Got home at twenty after two and did very little other than collapse directly into bed, thoroughly exhausted.

Reviews:

Ten Canoes (revised)

Time

The Prisoner or How I Planned To Kill Tony Blair

Posted by tederick at 10:31 AM in reviews & tiff 2006
Permalink | Comments (1)

I am haunted by Borat's use of the term "back pussy" to describe his own asshole. I am going to have to re-name my hard drive.

Posted by tederick at 2:30 AM in tiff 2006 & vagina fridays
Permalink | Comments (1)

Significant functional improvements that have vastly increased my quality of life in this Toronto International Film Festival:

• Cab rides home after Midnight Madness. I loves me some vomit comet but this simple $100 cabbing budget is the slender line of thread between sanity and utter loss of reason on my end.
• Bringing Macbook to festival to write reviews while in line for the next movie. Couldn't be sweeter.
• Free Wi-Fi in the downtown core, allowing me to do this post live from the bench outside fucking Burrito Boyz! HOW GOOD IS THIS SHIT?!
• The 6-second TIFF trailer for this year. Saving me, literally, a hundred minutes of agony over the course of the festival.
• Willingness to grant sexual favours for tickets. I'm not getting action any other way, so why not?
• Only 2 midnight-to-9 a.m. turnarounds in the whole festival. Even if I'm waking up at 8:30 after a midnight, it beats the shit outta waking up at 7.
• On-the-fly single-take podcasting in Garage Band. Works a hell of a lot faster than the other way. Today's moviesTO #44, for example, took only the twenty minutes it took to say it all out loud. (And then 40 minutes to encode the file, of course.) I'm sort of amazed that I pulled it off vocally but really... favourite show ever? May actually be.

Man. It's sunny, I'm full of Burrito, I've got Lost Girls in my bag and I'm going to see Time in a few minutes. Right now I'm having a conversation about Macs and free Wi-Fi while writing this post and checking my e-mail on my gloriously Hermionefied new Macbook. FREE WI-FI. Sweet mamalucien, everything's coming up Milhouse.

Posted by tederick at 12:07 PM in podcastery & tiff 2006
Permalink | Comments (0)

Oh my god the new James Bond trailer. Oh my god.

The Beguiling claims to have Lost Girls in stock so I'm going to head out there early and grab it. They also claim that the Chapters order for the book won't be filled until December, so... same end of sentence. That'll make a good bit of porny porn to read in the ticket holders line methinks. Matty Price has my ticket for Time, making it a pretty solid six-film day. Here's yer Canoe-review:

Ten Canoes

Here we go again...

Posted by tederick at 9:16 AM in comix & movies & reviews & tiff 2006
Permalink

Once you're in, you're in. It's moving faster than you expected, and you're already on your way. My two-ticket day became a four-ticket day by 6:00, and then my four-ticket day de-volved into a three-movie day. What?

I got to the Elgin at 1:30 or so and Matty Price and I took in The Magic Flute as our first film of the year. Good news: the TIFF trailer is only about six seconds long this year. Bad news: The Magic Flute is a lot longer than that. It takes about fifteen minutes for the charm to wear off and for you to remember "Oh yeah, I don't like opera." But it's too late. You're in the river.

From there I hop-skipped it up to the festival box office to return a few tickets and thereby cram a few more blank spots onto my festival pass. I wasn't two steps out the door when I got a call from MP saying that Erik had snagged us our Borat tickets for the night - a dodgy proposition given that it had somehow become the single hottest ticket in town. (More later.) I went into HANA, and then used my new Borat-rush-line-free chunk of time to rush Ten Canoes instead. Got to talking with a fairly adorable girl in the rush line, but naturally only in the last two minutes before the line went in, and then - equally naturally - I got stopped at the door for pass trouble. The guy at the booth insisted that there were no more tickets available on my pass, which was patently untrue; I insisted otherwise, and we went back and forth on the "I'm right!" / "No, I'm right!" crap for a minute or two before he finally went quiet, spent five minutes digging through the computer, and gave me my ticket. No harm.

Ten Canoes was more my speed, though it's the only review you won't be reading tonight. I strode over to the Ryerson from the Varsity, met up with Dexter from work in the line, along with the ever-radiant Candace Day. Then it was joining up with my friends, offering to fellate Erik right there on the street, and laughing about the fact that one of the few gels not banned on American flights right now is 4 oz of personal lubricant.

But Borat. What the fuck.

This would have been the strangest Midnight Madness of my life, regardless of what happened later. A three hundred person rush line. A throng of people chanting "BORAT!" at the red carpet. And Sacha Baron Cohen showing up in character, and riding a fucking horse. The screening did not start at midnight. Hell, I don't think it started at 12:30. The screening only got started after the inside of the Ryerson basically ate itself alive in a Borat frenzy for about 40 minutes or so.

And then, 20 minutes into the show, the projector broke.

And then Michael Moore stormed the projection booth, prompting us to start rumours that he was doing a documentary on the Kazhakstani government's ongoing efforts to shut Borat down for good.

And then the Amazing Mesmeronic started doing his fucking presto magicko shit on the ground floor.

And then Larry Charles started doing shtick on stage.

And then... and then... and then...

No Borat for you.

Poor Colin. My heart just goes out to him. This was the biggest night in the history of Midnight Madness and right now he must just feel like the whole world showed up to eat his asshole (but not in a nice way). In some entirely inconsequential way I can relate. But fuck, I love that guy to tears. What a great show he's put on this year.

By the time we were out of there, I felt so fucking punch-drunkenly dazed that I pretty much couldn't make intelligent conversation with Jenny from blogTO, who we happened upon on the street. I jumped in a cab and hightailed it back here, scarfed down a PB&H in three bites because, oh, I forgot to eat since breakfast, and now I'm here.

Just got e-mail from Matthew: Time tix available for the morning. Here we go...

Reviews:

The Magic Flute

HANA

Posted by tederick at 2:16 AM in reviews & tiff 2006
Permalink | Comments (1)

I got my picks back... I knew I was in trouble when I heard that box 27 got processed early yesterday morning, and I was still waiting for mine at 3:30 today. They finally came in just now as I was continuing to watch Café Lumiere - irony! - and now I'm just trying to put the pieces together here. Not a complete and utter bloodletting but still with some key, key holes in the programme. No Time, for example, and no Borat, making my first two rush lines of the fest, in the first two days. Didn't get Ten Canoes - which sucks - or 2:37, or Stranger than Fiction or The Fountain. No Vanaja for me, which bothers me more than I thought it would - that one I may try to rush. Unfortunately D.O.A.P. looks like a lost cause because that thing is getting wayyyy too much press to be rushable. And I'm trying to finagle Summer '04 tickets for the second Saturday. I can't not see the flick that has the phrase "nuclear sexual flowering" in the program notes.

Bright side: Pan's Labyrinth, Princess, Deliver Us From Evil, the John Waters evening, Rescue Dawn, Sleeping Dogs Lie, U, The Killer Within, Shortbus, The Last Winter, L'Intouchable, London to Brighton, and Taxidermia all good to go, along with many others. Happy festivaling.

Posted by tederick at 4:02 PM in tiff 2006
Permalink | Comments (3)

It's all happening now. I've got my picks to drop off at this way-too-early hour, I've got my brand-spankity red Metropass for the month of my birth, I've got big red X's on my calendar at work counting down until I'm free-mercifully-free, I've got cold air and hot showers and a generally good feeling about this. This is my favourite time of year.

Tederick.com hits the big time over at blogTO today: I'm interviewed for the blogerati files, an ongoing column by Lily Dustbin about Toronto-based blogs. I tried to be effortlessly hilarious.... though it might have come off more like cunningly dyspeptic. Please leave comments and make me seem cool.

When my body complains about the lack of sleep this week, I just remind it that all this is merely a preview of the lack of sleep in the two weeks coming.

Posted by tederick at 7:06 AM in poetical & tederickdotcomdotcom & tiff 2006
Permalink | Comments (0)

Okay, I'm just going to say it: Garage Band is freaking nightmarish. For podcasting, anyway, that program is Satan's work on the planet Earth for the year of its release. Who in the name of sweet funct came up with this??? And for the love of all that's holy and right, WHY?!

I'm going to have to completely change the way I approach the podcast in order to overcome the astonishing gaps in common sense over at Mac Mothership. In the meantime, I rattled off the fruits of the past 48 hours of labour by picking and panning from the festival guide for TIFF 2006. And that, as they say, is that.

Click here to deal with it.

Posted by tederick at 12:03 AM in podcastery & tiff 2006
Permalink | Comments (0)

As I described it to one of my colleagues over lunch when she saw me trying to block out by 50 first picks in the TIFF schedule, "It's like playing high-speed chess ten moves ahead against five different opponents." So I don't know how that's going to work out. But in the meantime, here are my "musts," mere hours before I'll barf them all over blogTO:

• Time - Kim Ki-Duk returns!
• Borat Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan - Fucking Borat, clearly
• Pan's Labyrinth - Everyone's calling it the best thing ever
• Princess - Fucked up animé about the porn underworld, nuff said
• Rescue Dawn - the Year of the Herzog continues
• Taxidermia - Man ejaculates fire
• Ten Canoes - I love canoes
• U - I love peculiarly sexual childrens' movies
• Sheitan - fucking sold
• London to Brighton - woman and girl on the run from the mob
• Deliver Us From Evil - documentary about a pedophilic priest... made with the priest's involvement
• Chacun sa nuit - oh baby
• Shortbus - how can you not, after all the shit it's kicked up?

OK that ended up being the "musts" plus the top half of the A's. But now you know.

Posted by tederick at 2:44 PM in tiff 2006
Permalink | Comments (0)

I shit you not, internet, without counting I just highlighted my 116 shortlist picks down to 6 must-sees and 44 first-choice picks. A perfect total of 50 films. Without counting. In an ideal world that exists only in my mind where these 50 pieces fall miraculously into the schedule like confetti on grass and everything interlocks perfectly Lego-styles, my schedule is fucking sorted.

Oh right: the world.

Posted by tederick at 11:59 PM in tiff 2006
Permalink | Comments (0)

That's it: a hundred and sixteen shortlist picks. I'm so fucking proud of myself. Every spare minute today I was in that book. And today was by no means a light day at work, and slogging through 350 descriptions was thirsty work at times, but every once in a while I'd hit a description of something that would make me gasp out loud or cackle with glee or just plain feel like the air's worth breathing again. And being that this is the first year I actually went and bought the book... I am so glad I bought the book. The smell of it. Cracking the spine again and again and again. Putting an asterisk on every single page that even remotely made any kind of logical sense to me. I was worried that I'd come in too little or way, way too many, but in the world of horseshoes and hand grenades I'd say 116 towards an even hundred first- and second-choice tickets is about as good as it gets.

Especially given that the general "plan" (and if I could make those air quotes any larger by means of some sort of "HTML programming," believe me, I would) is to not follow any Midnights with a morning screening. Which, given that it now looks like I'll try for every single Midnight this year, makes it a p.m.-only festival for the most part. Well, we all know how long that "plan" will last.

But honestly. The Midnights this year. By the time I was on the last page of the Midnights, I was actually pumping m fist in the air outside Burrito Boyz going "COLIN! COLIN! COLIN!" Best. Lineup. Ever.

I finished the aforementioned 116 on the seat outside Burrito Boyz and then ran across Wellington to meet the blogTO contingent, because I guess I wasn't hyper enough already. There's something about these meetings that speaks of the finest kind of quasi-religious fervour. By the time the meeting's over I've got notes on about thirty posts I'd like to write and I've committed to five or six ongoing items. Best, though is when the subject of the sex/love column (which I remember whinging about all the way back in December) got brought up again and not one but two new blogTOers are interested in getting some chatter going on how we could get that started. I've got my first post half-written already.

So: it pays to socialize.

Oh, and the other good news: the podcast got sponsored. Hardcore. So for the first time in the year that I've been doing this, blogTO is sort of in the black. We literally spent ten minutes tonight trying to figure out what to go do with ourselves, because it was a whole new sensation.

The really weird thing was when I realized that at some point in this process, I became one of the old guard on that blog. It was just me, Tim, Tanja and Katherine that have actually been at this thing for a year or more; everyone else has been added since, and many quite recently. Now moviesTO's birthday is on Sunday and newer bloggers are looking at me like I pre-date Jesus Christ. I can't quite shake the ongoing feeling that I'm still the new kid at the table looking in, but whatever. The gang's all here, and it feels like September's gonna be one big kickass month.

Posted by tederick at 10:30 PM in tiff 2006
Permalink | Comments (0)

I swear I almost had a conniption of glee on the RT this morning when I saw the still for the Kim Ki-Duk film.

So many happies and I'm only in the freaking Vanguard section so far!

Posted by tederick at 8:14 AM in tiff 2006
Permalink | Comments (0)

Well it took me a long time but I've finally arrived at the stage where TIFF gives me a yellow/green highlighter to mark my choices with, instead of me scrambling around at 7:30 on Friday morning trying to find one at a dollar store that won't open for another three hours. So that's good news. I got my programme book today, my kit bag full of stupid shit (among the highlights this year: anti-wrinkle firming cream, a Starbucks gift certificate, and a can of Pepsi), and, of course, the pretty white envelope wherein I get to make 50 first-string picks and 50 backups. God-damn. I went over to Fran's and sat down, and started going through the book, making asterisks on any page that looked even remotely interesting. There's the usual paranoia about doing this thing so quickly - the fear that I'm going to make safer picks out of sheer hurriedness, when I should really be swinging for the fences on less obvious fare - but I think by Friday my choices will be brassy.

Work, meanwhile, bears all the signs of the week before a vacation, and can therefore be summed up in a single word: in-freaking-sane. I am literally living down to the fraction of a minute for the next five business days, including my evenings. Every hour and half hour, every five minute window leading into another larger window, is committed to something. My Outlook calendar at the office looks like a game of Backgammon being played by two blind retards on Venus. In the plus column, now when someone asks me to do something, I can legitimately reply "No, you'll have to wait until September 20th." I'm booking for the twentieth of frickin' September right now. Marvellous.

Just get me to the vacation. The rest will take care of itself.

Posted by tederick at 8:29 PM in j-o-b & tiff 2006
Permalink | Comments (0)