And so it was. Mad Detective was strange and beautiful, though I wondered throughout what the title character - who sees the inner selves of people he comes in contact with, rather than their external selves - would see if he looked in a mirror; and seeing as how he died surrounded by them, I felt a little robbed. Ex Drummer was a work of concentrated evil so vile that I actually not only shut off my emotional response to the images on screen, but my intellectual one as well; the result was like watching a hypnotic flashing light for two hours, and not entirely unpleasant at that. And À l'intérieur was worthy of the highest compliment I can give it: it outshone last year's closing Midnight Madness for its sheer sick, twisted fuckedupedness. What is with the French? Honestly.

We lined the front of the house; I brought the rum. There was Colin and a beach ball and the girl who shares the festival's name, and Matty Price on allergy medication and a couple of Sheitan call backs and my pirate socks.

It's done now.

The best of the fest: XXY

So close: Juno

Otherwise great: Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Une Vielle Maitresse, Chaotic Ana, Sukiyaki Western Django

Solidly good: Persepolis, Shoot 'Em Up, Frontiere(s), Control, Chacun son cinema, Mongol, Nothing is Private, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Vexille, Stuck, Naissance de pieuvres, Cassandra's Dream, Encounters at the End of the World, Dr. Plonk, Angel, Smiley Face, Terra, Weirdsville, DAINIPPONJIN, La Citadelle Asiegee, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Mad Detective, A l'Interieur

Acceptable: Glory to the Filmmaker, Diary of the Dead, Chansons d'amour, The Orphanage, Princess of Nebraska, La Fille Coupee en Deux, Flash Point, Gone with the Woman, Hollywood Chinese, Son of Rambow

Unacceptable: Pink, The World Unseen, Chrysalis, The Exodus, Operation Filmmaker, Very Young Girls, The Tracey Fragments

Awful: Mother of Tears, Reclaim Your Brain, L'Age des Tenebres

Horrific: Ex Drummer

I make my count 51, and objections must be filed in box 37.

It's late, dark, and cold, and I won't sleep for hours. To every single person I shared this experience with over the past ten days, up to and including the staff of Burrito Boyz, you have my love, cheers, and thanks.

Posted by tederick at 3:55 AM in the rum diaries & tiff 2007
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I just saw the best film of the entire festival. Wasn't expecting that. XXY was just supposed to be something I gulagged to my Saturday night come-down period, which has now ended up trotting into my brain and saying "Yeah. I live here now; you just rent." It's the London to Brighton spot in the schedule - I suppose I should have seen this coming.

XXY is the best film about gender identity I have ever seen. When your kids ask you what straight and gay mean, this is the film you show them to teach them that none of those words mean anything. I'm not going to say anything more than that because the tight construction and impeccable plotting are really what make this thing tick. But It is my sincere hope that it will receive a Stateside release and be seen by everyone, everywhere, on the planet. Fucking phenomenal.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead was pretty decent, too, especially if you're into Marisa Tomei getting doggie-styled by Philip Seymour Hoffman in a Brazilian hotel room. (Hey, who isn't?) Plus it's just a pretty damn good movie. Hard for me to tell on account of that everyone around me in the balcony at the Ryerson was being a complete and utter dick about the proceedings, but whatever. I spared their lives.

I came out of XXY so fucking thrilled I just had to walk around the block a couple of times listening to music. The sun had just gone down, the last rush line was still standing outside the Varsity, and a few moments of perfect serenity settled over me. Man, this was one hell of a summer.

Posted by tederick at 7:31 PM in sex (theoretical) & tiff 2007
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FORTY SIX DOWN FIVE TO GO MOTHERFUCKER!!! WOOOOOOOOOO yeah that was me yelling that in the middle of the intersection at Richmond and Peter just now. Fuck you.

That was also me who burst out laughing while the little boy was drowning in Son of Rambow. Fuck you too. It was a direct Fellowship of the Ring quote shot for shot, and it amused me.

I taught young Maxwell how to do the pirate "Arrrh" during the anti-piracy card in yesterday's Terra screening. Actually as far as I'm concerned I taught the entire festival how to do this. This is because I am the Lead Pirate. King of the Pirate Brethren, if you will. Captain. Sure, it's an old gag, but I did it first at the first Midnight, goddammit, so I'm claiming ownership for the rest of fucking time. Are any of these other bastards wearing pirate socks??? No. No they are not.

Let me tell you something: La Citadelle Asiegee makes March of the Penguins look like a walk in Central Park. It also takes that film's anthropomorphization and raises it to the level of pure mythology: this is The Lord of the Rings for Bugs. A column of carnivorous ants invades a termite colony in Africa. The results are predictably awesome. It had not occured to me before that a swarm of insects is essentially one creature in multiple bodies; this explains much. (Such as why they can only be destroyed through purging fire.) You ever seen a column of ants take down a fucking snake? Cuz I have. It's changed my opinion of the universe.

Dashed downtown for a comic book and One Last Burrito. Something sure flipped over this week, because apparently I am now finally the Norm of the Silver Snail: everybody knows my name.

Posted by tederick at 2:20 PM in pirates & tiff 2007
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Like shutting off a light switch - the real world comes rushing back, the temperature drops ten degrees, I pop out of bed at 8:30 like I'm about to go to yoga, problems are lurking in the wings like unsolvable land mines. I am blithe (and bonny). No sense fretting - before, during, or after the last day. The next little while is going to be governed by one sad little phrase: "Everything is going to change."

For one thing, I have a fairly solid beard starting.

I'm shedding the accumulated crap; emptying my bag. I no longer need maps and guides and emergency garments. After Terra last night I emerged from the theatre into a driving rainstorm; I sprinted four blocks along Bloor, straight into the Gap, straight to the second floor and into a hoodie. I have a complicated relationship with hoodies; almost spiritual, how they arrive exactly when I need them (I could not have found a hoodie in this colour and shape a week ago; I know this because I tried, in this exact store), how I don't even need to try one on any more to know it will fit like a piece of old skin. Soon everything I wear will have a hood, even my underwear - hood for the cock, hood for the balls. And my socks. Tiny little individual hoodies for ten individual toes.

Terra, along from having the best title of any narrative work ever, nearly got me. For about ten minutes at the beginning of the film, I was actually crying at how unbelievably powerful and beautiful a world was unfolding onscreen - how dare this director, this man from Montreal, reach right into my soul and find something I couldn't articulate in a million years of trying. The visual design, the music, the use of flight (straight out of Flight)... but when the engine of the story got going, the story was merely B+ acceptable rather than A++ mind-blowing. I was bummed about it, but also relieved; I was in no fit state to have my soul blown open by a new, scorching beauty.

Every festival needs its canvas survey and mine this year was the Hollywood Chinese doc; this was a competent look at the place of Asian-Americans in American cinema in the past hundred years. It hit what I would consider all of the main points except that it didn't linger long enough on the question of sexuality for women (Asian women are whores) or men (Asian men are sexless), two of what I would call defining characteristics of Hollywood's use of Chinese culture in film, even to this day. Otherwise it was solid. Son of Rambow, the family movie from the UK, was solid as well, although here, I would have liked to see it speak more directly to my own experience making movies as a kid - there was none of that. When you're a kid making a movie, it's never about the gag (slingshotting one of your actors into a tree) as how the fuck you're going to achieve the gag (the hours and days and weeks of planning that go into the slingshot); this was what made Raiders Adapted so much fun or at least fun in concept, but without focusing on the actual craft of how the boys make their movie, Rambow left no real window for me to get at the characters. So it was merely charming.

By this point Brandy and Matty Price and I were locked in a rotating windmill of Ryerson exits and re-entries. I got cock-blocked clean into the next decade while waiting in line, by someone who (admittedly) had no idea he was doing it; I no longer care. Heterosocial relations are a game for the living. I found yet another Far Bathroom before the midnight and didn't get lost this time. For one thing, other patrons are exploring the lower reaches as well; you find them in the most unusual places. We saw Weirdsville and then DAINIPPONJIN. With the former it was nice to see Telefilm's name attached to something that isn't utter garbage, even though the film still didn't have one sweet fuck of a clue what it wanted to be for about the first half hour; it was also nice to confirm that my Scott Speedman crush remains strong and comfortable. DAINIPPONJIN was great as well, but wayyyyyyyyyyy too subtle for a Midnight screening - the comedy was fantastic and fantastically low-key, but really quiet and small. Matty Price bailed after the second reel; I bailed after the fifth.

But as it turns out, sleep is something my body no longer needs nor desires. I am in a perfect perpetual state.

Posted by tederick at 10:28 AM in hoodies & tiff 2007
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On Matty Price's advice I traded my ticket for Encarnacion for one for Gone with the Woman; Encarnacion will now win the audience choice award. Gone with the Woman, on the other hand, is excruciating; not in the way in which a film is bad, but simply in that, by seeking to create a love interest for the main character who is the living embodiment of every single thing that is unfathomable, frustrating, and cruel about women, the filmmakers succeeded far too well. I WANTED TO KILL THIS WOMAN. A chainsaw blow to the neck, cleanly separating head from shoulders in a single blow, would have been too kind. It was goddamned instructive on just how easily you can get pulled in by the seeming trappings of relationship stability without ever realizing that no, you don't actually have to put up with any of this shit just because she talks a good game and is hard to shake off. I was fairly delighted when the main character ended up with the beguiling French girl with whom he had almost nothing in common besides a basic emotional understanding; the fact that this would happen at all proves, of course, that this was a movie and not real life. In real life, he'd spend the rest of his puff trying to shake the goddamned Norweigian.

When I was a teenager, I thought I had fallen in love with someone when I had not. A couple of years later when I really did fall in love with someone for the first time - under circumstances far less cinematic and far more pathetic than those depicted here - I came up with a very simple, and hardly useful, maxim that has held true ever since: when you're in love, you just know it. You can't explain it, reshape it, move it around, and it may well be the result of a kind of consensus hallucination in your multiple personalities, but you know it deep down in the cranio-sac. Thus, do I posit to you dear reader, the fundamental meaninglessness and hopelessness of all human relations. Sure, it works out for people, all the time. And similarly have I frequently fielded the ball to an offensive line player in a perfectly timed and pitched up-the-line pass, without meaning to. It ain't something I count on.

Two short films in the next four hours before a night at the Ryerson; this will let me lap Mr. Mxyzptlk. Turning fast around the inside of the track, the stress on the chassis is gonna be a bitch.

Posted by tederick at 1:57 PM in tiff 2007
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So titled in order to observe certain structural requirements.

Apparently I forgot to mention that we did a Mamo the other day; here it is. You know what? Honestly I have no idea where or when we recorded this one. It's not the post-Juno follow up one, I can tell you that. I seem to be "missing time."

All is well. Two last six-film days will put the count at 51 if all goes well; I picked up an extra in there without noticing (Tracey? Control?). And if you haven't looked outside, please do. It's a beautiful day in the city of Toronto.

Posted by tederick at 12:14 PM in podcastery & tiff 2007
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Last film at the Elgin (Angel); last film at the Scoshe (Smiley Face). I won't even have time to get down there tomorrow or the next day for a final burrito or a trip to the Snail. The grid is collapsing into a triangle; soon it will become a corridor, before it's simply a dot, and then nothing at all. The Rye-high will close this thing and then the candle will go out. Half an hour after Smiley Face ended I was sprinting down the endless corridors under the Ryerson, completely lost, giggling furiously, and wishing that, at the very least, I had the excuse of being stoned.

I'm into the forties tomorrow. With the end in sight I no longer feel tired. There's nothing I can do to myself in the next 48 hours that I can't recover from in the 48 following. I've gone past "punchy" and am simply at "nuisance." I lead the "arrrrhs" in the non-Midnight screenings when the piracy card comes up. When I got up to the balcony of the Elgin for the Angel screening and found almost the entirety of the thing blocked off for FedEx VIPs, I yelled out "WHAT THE FUCK ARE THESE?!" and then quipped that FedEx had mailed themselves a balcony.

Angel was lovely, entertaining, and utterly forgettable, save for another complex and fascinating female character to add to the pile of this year's winnings. Anna Faris can go on that pile too for Smiley Face - she was remarkable, and the film was hilarious. Far from "stoner comedy," this was in fact "stoner horror movie," remarkably accurate in its ability to present the perceptual disconnects of being freaked out and stoned, and then manipulating those sensations to get at the paranoia angle. I loved it.

Flash Point barely kept me awake till its promised "whiplash-inducing final half hour," but when we were staggering out of the theatre at 2 a.m. and I was joking that I had in fact gotten into a fight exactly like the final fight in the film, Matty Price returned with "were you in the bathroom?" completing the loop on a 5-day-old joke that no one will remember a week from now. We are in a green and open country.

Every time I have boarded the Queen streetcar this week, the first few seats have been half-buried in sand.

Posted by tederick at 2:30 AM in tiff 2007
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You know, when I was a wee lad, I seem to remember that if you wanted to make some kind of a "point" in film, you might be seen to do it with wit, subtlety and perhaps a modicum of grace. Nowadays, on the other hand, the preferred method is to simply hit your audience repeatedly over the head with the same idea for about 45 minutes or until they walk out, whichever comes first.

I saw Reclaim Your Brain at noon, which was a humourless and painfully one-dimensional tale of a man's struggle against the television ratings system. Yes, that's the story. What a useless piece of nothing this thing is. Somebody actually made this, and other people bothered to see it, and at least two more people bothered to give a fuck about it one way or the other. I left about ten minutes before the end because they'd started late (partially due to a nicely understated little verbal slap-fight between the programming assistant and the director before the show) and I had missed the fact that I had 14 minutes to commute the Scoshe-Elgin corridor. I made it, but barely in time, and then L'Age de Tenebres started and I left after 45 minutes. The film repeated the exact same point, over and over again, in scene couplets, with no variation or progression of the idea at all, just different comic executions of it. Denys Arcand is worthless and should be removed from the cinema.

Nobody was at the fucking thing, though, which was nice. I pretty much got the balcony of the Elgin all to myself - which made me feel, temporarily, like I was in an ancient movie house watching a venerated classic unspool in front of me, back when there was still a bit of lustre left in this thing. The new version is all plastic - good plastic, solidly made, but lacking fibre.

I tell you what though - we saw Dr. Plonk this morning, and that was freaking great. Not just good; great. It was like a movie D-Coc and J-Szp would have made; in fact, as far as I'm concerned, they should go ahead and make it anyway. They could call it Dr. Plonktuous. D-Coc missed this one; he's been in every screening with me since Monday afternoon so it's a shame he couldn't make it out for such an obviously D-Cockish film.

We're not so much down to the dregs here, as down to the point where you can suss out a man's game pretty damn quickly. If a flick don't have it, it don't have it.

Posted by tederick at 3:55 PM in tiff 2007
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Last night in the mens' room of the Elgin I was drying my hands next to a guy who was telling his friend that he hadn't been able to do anything since last week because he'd been seeing so many films. His friend asked how many and he said "eight." At which point I burst out laughing, and not just regular laughter, a full-on Joker laugh. And I stumbled away clutching my ribs and repeating "eight" over and over again. This was not performance. This was just where I am now.

So on Sameer's dime I saw The Tracey Fragments last night last thing; no midnight. I got to the Scoshe (sp?) early and there was a mob outside; I asked a guy in the glut "who are they bringing in there? BATMAN??" Turns out it was for Gael Garcia Bernal. He's a fucking tiny person. What did his rabid fans think was going to happen there? The best they could hope for was a solid actor-trampling, and then they lose their prize forever. Maybe that's the point.

Ellen Page is a tiny person as well. She sat behind me in Fragments. Jason Reitman was there too; I shook his hand and told him how much I liked his film, but I was kind of irritated to see people using him as a gateway drug to get to Page - a Chinese girl came up to him, identified him, and asked him to introduce her to Ellen at his earliest opportunity like he was her fucking doorman or something. Something ain't flicked on right in these peoples' brains. But then, during Une Fille Coupee en Deux last night (which was all right but ultimately forgettable), when Matty Price leaned over and suggested a Ludivine Sagnier / Ellen Page sandwich, I lost the movie for about five solid minutes. The look on my face was later described as a combination of horror and religious ecstasy. So who the fuck am I to talk.

As for the film itself, The Tracey Fragments was essentially a mere prototype of something that will someday be done far better by someone far smarter. Bruce McDonald, and no other, fucked this up. Page's performance was unmodulated and shallow, and the technical craft underneath the big slicey-dicey split screen stuff, which has been gaining all the attention, was pre-film school amateur hour at best. A big part of the problem was the sheer shittiness of the visual data - the film must have been shot on bargain-basement handicams; I doubt there even was a director of photography; there certainly wasn't any lighting. The problem being, you can't take visual information that poor and then chop it up and reformulate it into more complex visual artifacts - it doesn't hold up to the audience's gaze, and just becomes so much noise. When Tracey has her big run-from-the-pimp-in-her-briefs-and-a-shower-curtain moment, and her world de-evolves into a kaleidoscope of every thing she's experienced so far, the result looks rather like a digital tape breaking up - which could have been a sublime visual point, if it were not entirely accidental.

Nonetheless, I must admit that the idea, at its core, was a good one. For a few brief, (ahem) fragmentary moments, the split screen technique combined with better-than-average teen girl voiceover and the reliable Ellen Page watchability really does achieve something in conveying the mindset of the girl. It just has to be done better than this.

Posted by tederick at 12:03 PM in tiff 2007
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You get broken down to every teeny tiny bit of yourself, live there for a while, and then in a few days, you'll build yourself back up fresh; defragmented. Today was the first day I forgot my tickets at home, the first day I got off at the wrong subway stop. I feel fine. I am an androgynous monkey-lizard swimming through a river of time. I am a gorilla riding a yak. The towers of this city shall be my Redwood trees; my skin is a map of the tattoos I haven't drawn yet. I am sexless; I am wind. I am a ranger. I am blood and oil.

Matty Price and I have started calling actors almost exclusively by the title of their most significant film - "Kick his ass, Die Hard!" "Hit that bitch with a frying pan, American Beauty!" "Direct the shit out of that film, Fitzcarraldo!" As with most things at this point, this is amusing only to us. Mongol is this year's Bugmaster (why? I'll tell you why). In this obscene wilderness you find a new kind of sense. Tiff (the person, not the festival) branded me the Silver Snail groupie today. I guess that means I've arrived. My eyes are clear.

In the limited moral universe of Woody Allen's Cassandra's Dream, the drama only stems from the question of what meaning is assigned a specific act before, and after, its execution. I side with Ewan McGregor: once you've killed, you'll still have to find a way to live the rest of your life; prison is irrelevant.

In the Antarctic waste of Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World, scientists prophesy the coming apocalypse; view us as day-players on a world whose interest in us is fleeting. In unintentionally direct retaliation to this, two scientists play electric guitars on the roof of their hut in the middle of the frozen waste. They bring the defining triviality of our species - art - to a place that cannot hear it, understand it, or record it for later use. They do it just to do it, and on we go.

I am sitting at Queen & McCaul, cross legged with my laptop, against a giant wall billboard for a competing laptop brand, wearing my blogTO t-shirt and blogging about TIFF on Tederick.com. I am this city.

Posted by tederick at 4:26 PM in blogTO & blood & poetical & the apocalypse & tiff 2007
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"This is sukiyaki, not a dang lollipop!" - Quentin Tarantino in SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO

Hey, Megatron came back. Who saw that comin'? [raises hand] Megatron, Sideswipe, Grimlock, all in a day. We're running clean out of Transformers, gonna have to move over to G.I. Joes next. Please God make me a stone...

My man Sameer hooked me up with a ticket for The Tracey Fragments tomorrow night, so my relationship with this bėte noir is finally at a close. God knows the movie itself will be nowhere near worth this kind of trouble, but every year there's one film that I set my sights on as a must-have-no-matter, and this time, Tracey was it. A year from now, I'll barely remember why. (It had something to do with Ellen Page wrapped in a drape.)

Today I saw two documentaries back to back which, as it turned out, had most of the same creatives involved. (I met one such, Nina Davenport, at the Cumberland during the other film's Q&A.) Her doc was Operation Filmmaker, and it mostly just made me uncomfortable, as peeps into the reality of Hollywood personalities always does. Very Young Girls, on the other hand, just felt flat. Once you get past the simple opening statistic - that the average age of entry to prostitution in the United States is 13 - the film really doesn't go anywhere with it besides endless repetition.

After that I went to see another tale of very young girls in Naissances de pieuvres, which also felt fairly flat, although I must admit it had an utterly transcendent final five minutes when the lesbian 13-year-old got to kiss the love of her life, then lost her, and then baptised herself in the school pool. Yeah when you write it out that way it sounds ludicrous but the music was really good and there was just something about that shot of her kicking herself towards the surface of the water, what do you want from me.

And there is no denying that SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO is a great, great film. And being as it was the must-have of the Midnight lineup, the gang was all there. I am truly blessed by great company. Matty Price and Erik and Jason and Sasha and Gabriela and a whole bunch of other people who revolve around this weird world like a starry sky. Really, one can't complain.

There's a nip in the air. Coming round the last turn now.

Posted by tederick at 3:10 AM in blogTO & tiff 2007
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I understand French. I understand Spanish. I stopped reading the subtitles five minutes into Chaotic Ana. The realization made me sick - made me want to put my head between my knees and think of my grandfather who is gone. I proceeded to have a massive artistic epiphany, and connect many lines in my head, even as I fought and weaved with a film that was as ugly as it was beautiful, as smart as it was stupid, as right in its every detail as it was in every single mistake it made. I don't know what the fuck any of this is any more. I went to the quad at Victoria College to have my traditional Tuesday afternoon freak-out, and promptly discovered that I didn't need to have one. That the thing deep down inside myself that is going to make or break the next 12 months of my life before ruling the next 120 years, was in fact ready and waiting. That I am, entirely, myself. And then the page turned again, and now I need to know exactly who is going to walk with me next. Are you ready to begin?

Last night Alan Ball somehow guessed I was a filmmaker and asked what kind of films I make... as usual I started with the "well, I guess you could say fantasy" line that I've been using forever but then I just switched it over and said, "actually, I guess I just make movies where weird shit happens." That's the new line.

Posted by tederick at 5:48 PM in poetical & tederick films & tiff 2007
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Yes, immediately after writing a post about how I haven't walked out of anything yet, I walked out of something. And I walked out of something called The Exodus. The irony never stops.

There wasn't anything wrong with it, I just seem to pick this movie every year - something Asian with a slightly quirky premise (in this case, that women are secretly trying to rid the earth of men) which turns out to be perfectly capable but utterly uninteresting. Somehow I always miss the obvious warning signs. Oh well.

But man, Stuck was fucking terrific. Downside: now completely wired and doubt I'll sleep anytime soon; my internal clock must have finally adjusted to the new sched. My first day back at work will be hilarious.

I'm really glad that I saw two great films today (Elizabeth and Maîtresse) and one really fucking entertaining one (Stuck). The five-a-day thing seems like the perfect flow right now; I'm very much looking forward to tomorrow's run.

Wore the Superman shirt today; when I didn't hear my burrito order come up this evening, I was finally alerted when everyone in B-boyz yelled "SUPERMAN!!" And then on my way home, I got "Hey Superman, you wanna have some fun?" from a prostitute. Then she showed me her ass (her actual ass, not the clothing covering her ass). It's not too bad being the Man of Tomorrow.

Posted by tederick at 2:23 AM in tiff 2007
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I sat next to Alan Ball. That's right I sat next to Alan Ball. Alan Ball Alan Ball Alan Ball. Yeah. That was me: next to Alan Ball.

The flick was Une Vieille Maîtresse, I sort of stalked him just a tiny bit when I saw him just outside the door, and sat down right next to him and Peter Macdissi. Macdissi didn't say shit. Alan Ball, on the other hand, was quite friendly and we chatted for a bit about Nothing is Private, and whether or not the subject matter is actually as shocking it's being treated, and so forth. It was quite pleasant. He asked me about my films and I talked to him about Six Feet Under and yeah, that's about the best celebrity encounter I think I've ever had at the film festival except for maybe Gus Van Sant who was also, after the Gerry screening five years ago, very gracious with me and fun to talk to. But yeah: I am a sweet fucking happy man right now.

Oh, and the movie? Hottest fucking thing ever. One of the best I've seen so far, too. Catherine Breillat, all stroked up and crazy, was here in person. And the movie just got me, hook line and sinker. I'm officially calling a "will the real Asia Argento please stand up." She was fucking terrible in Mother of Tears, and so fucking good here it blew my mind. All kinds of crazy, eating blood off the bullet wound her lover took because he insulted her, shrieking in the fucking desert because her little girl got killed by a scorpion... man howdy, if there is a prevailing theme for the festival so far for me (one that isn't the official "cultural overlap" theme), it's powerful female characters. I am fucking drunk on them right now, I've seen so many. This one was every single kind of poison, but just so unbelievably enthralling and... herself. Wild, like in the old stories. I think I knew a girl like that once. Hell, I think I almost married a girl like that once.

Posted by tederick at 8:55 PM in blood & tiff 2007
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Three movies with D-Coc this morning: Mother/Senator/Nun, the political thriller from Belgium; The Tree, about the renegade Eastern Orthodox holy man living alone in the Lithuanian wilderness just after World War II; and Habituelle, the one with the bears. All good, though D-Coc found the dialectic presented in The Tree to be troubling from a sociopolitical standpoint. (I just thought the girl was hot.)

Meanwhile, Matty Price and I just moved our yurts clean out of sight of one another due to an argument over the announced title for Indy IV, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I say it's a worse title than The Phantom Menace, and he says The Phantom Menace is still significantly more awful than this. It became heated; there was shouting. So really, I don't want to see that pinhead's yurt at all right now.

Points against Indy IV: 4
Points for Indy IV: 4

Cycling through more news, I haven't been able to get "Love will tear us apart" out of my head since Friday night. Only, it's just the chorus. So it's like when my sister sings something - and endless repetition of the most defining line from the song, over and over and over again. In my head. All the time. It's not fun.

So let's dispense some more wisdom: rule numero dos is, as coined by MP, "if it's not working, walk the fuck out." People think I'm crazy for walking out of these movies but you gotta understand, when you're on the twentieth or thirtieth throw at the table, it's not worth your emotional energy to dedicate time to something that doesn't "have it" - which is usually readily apparent within the first fifteen minutes. And yet, I have not walked out on anything yet this year, although I suppose in more fatigued times I would have walked out of The World Unseen and Chrysalis. They weren't bad, but they didn't "have it."

Re Chrysalis, I have two moratoria:

1. I would like to declare a moratorium on this plot. The one where it's about 50 or 60 years in the future, some organization (either an extremely powerful corporation or a government agency) has invented some thing with enormously dangerous repercussions. And those repercussions have filtered down to the streets, usually because they're using prostitutes or street children or something as lab rats. And there's one rogue cop who is going to put the pieces together and bring the big organization down. It's not that it's a bad plot, it's just that I've seen it enough. Last year with Renaissance, five years ago with Minority Report, hell there's bits of it in Blade Runner and a bunch of other places too. I am calling it fait accompli. We have done this thing: let us move on to another thing.

2. I blame Francis Coppola for this one: use of desaturated colour in the future. Moratorium that shit. I blame Francis because it's his fault that period movies are all burnished and golden, and some nutter then extended the logic of that and decided that a) our inherent "humanity" is represented by degrees of colour saturation, and therefore b) the future will be cold, desaturated, and washed out. (This also creates a linear timeline in which the present - "now" - is apparently some kind of median grade of our colourful humanness; we are neither as ochre-human as we were before, nor as blue-inhuman as we are bound to become.) Plus the whole damn thing just looks like a Brita commercial. Let's just throw the lingoistic jive clean out the winda, and go find new tools.

Just got out of Elizabeth: The Golden Age, pretty much the only really "Hollywood" ticket I actively pursued this time around, to indulge in the opulence of seeing that almost ludicrously opulent movie in the equally ludicrously opulent Elgin in the middle of a Monday afternoon when we really oughta all be at work and not watching movies about virgin queens kicking Spanish naval ass. Oh how I love that shit. And it is shit: these flicks are the cinematic equivalent of pulp like The Godfather (the novel). But I ate it up, because it was pretty and grave and Cate Blanchett is amazing. And at the end of the day, it's nice to have it reaffirmed that it's just really freakin' challenging to find a spouse, and a co-monarch especially. Fortunately, I've come to an important decision. I need no queen.

Posted by tederick at 5:15 PM in dr. jones & tiff 2007
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Hey, whaddaya know? Ask for Grimlock and ye shall receive. Because my brain needed that.

It was fucking flickapalooza last night, folks. Fortunately I survived reasonably well and reality only started to bend during Vexille - which probably would have happened anyway, animé always does that to me, particularly after midnight. Before that it was the Indian lesbian South African apartheid love story - which was probably the worst film I've seen so far, on account of the Bailey factor. That dude just does not get it. The lesbians in question were really frickin' hot but there was no nudity in the flick at all so even when they finally started making out in the third act, I was far more interested in watching the 50-year-old dude across the aisle from me fingering his wife. Yes, he was. Hey, whatever gets you through the night.

And sandwiched quite tightly between World Unseen and Vexille - so tightly that I left the former about ten minutes before the end, because they started late - was the double-Wang. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers was the real deal, man, but really really slow. Henry O was fantastic, so that got me through. The Princess of Nebraska, on the other hand, just didn't connect with me at all, which is odd because I should be all about that shit. But it really impressed me only as a technical exercise and not so much as a movie. So that's the whole thing.

Mamo #95 continues on from the aborted previous installment, and this time, there are eggs. Now I'm waiting for Burrito Boyz to start serving - did you know they don't open till 11:30 and that by the time they do, people are queuing up outside? Cuz now I know that, on account of I'm in the queue. Hey, I just made fun of a dude from Montreal cuz he's been waiting here for 40 minutes. But I took it back. It's the B-boyz.

Posted by tederick at 11:20 AM in podcastery & tiff 2007
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I've got girls on the fucking brain right now, man. Every time I tune out of whatever I'm supposed to be tuning into, girls is where I'm going. It's good. Apparently I had a lot of built-up stuff in there that needed gentle sifting, prodding, and sorting to make some kind of coherent order. I've actually figured a few things out in these few short days, and that is another benefit of this stripped-down emotional state in which I am living. It clarifies, it gets you closer, and it shakes shit around of its own accord. New patterns can be pulled, pensieve-like, from the mist. Until about Tuesday at 1:30 in the afternoon, when it all officially goes to hell.

Let's dispense some wisdom:

You don't fuck with the festival volunteers. That is rule numero uno. No matter how bad it gets, no matter how tired you are, no matter whether they're right or wrong or know more than you or less than you or if they're trying to murder your puppy. Losing it at a volunteer gets you nowhere, every time. When that NBC Universal trailer comes up, you clap, every time. And that's all.

While we're up with the stories and homilies, let's speak on the crow's nest. The crow's nest generally refers to the very back row of whatever theatre you're in, on the balcony if there is one, or just at the back of the room if there isn't one. A theatre without a slant has no crow's nest, though, because a crow's nest is dependent on elevation. (There is no crow's nest in the Varsity 8, Cumberland 3, or ROM theatre.) Now, the crow's nest is important. It is the last refuge of the damned, when the damned are about. When it's all been too much, you're late to a screening, or you've just seen too many movies in a row and it's time to get some perspective, the crow's nest is where you go. Particularly bad Midnight Madness movies can be saved by a visit to the crow's nest as easily as by downing a bottle of scotch. Also, pretentious European dreck that looks like it was shot on unfiltered off-market film stock is improved by the crow's nest. And if you've just basically had it - with the fest, with the volunteers, with all the fucking people and the bad food and the smell of your own overused clothes - then the crow's nest will save you. Trust the crow's nest: it is your friend.

Brandy and I just got out of Les Chansons d'Amour, which I literally could not have loved more for its first act, was kind of "meh" on for the next hour or so, and then dropped dead at the end to such a degree that I turned to Brandy as soon as the credits rolled and whimpered, "I'm unsatisfied!" The film is a musical. But a musical shot like a regular movie where people are just hanging out dealing with their shit and then they start singing. I've always been fascinated by that form; some day I'll do something with it in one of my own movies. I even wrote a musical scene for the third act of subculture that just comes out of nowhere and is never spoken of again - just to do it. But I ended up discarding because it was just too fuckin' weird. But generally speaking I think the idea of using musicals and people singing songs as though you were using a radial wipe or a zoom in, i.e. just another technique in the handbag and one that you don't need to "present" to the audience as the overall thematic technique of the film as a whole, is a tremendous idea. For about twenty-five minutes, Chansons was doing every single damn thing I ever wanted to see with that trick, aside from doing it too regularly to be anything other than an unabashed musical. Someday, a someone in a regular movie will just sing a song to say exactly how they're feeling about something, and then they'll stop, and then the movie will go on like it never happened. You know, like how no one can hear Hamlet soliloquoyzing, even though they're all just standing right there. Someday, or possibly in Magnolia.

Wayne Wang's double feature is hovering like the Death Star in my future. Scheduling a double between the lesbian South Africa movie and the anime Midnight might have been a major mistake from an emotional stamina standpoint. I can't believe it's 6:00 and I've got four movies to go.

Oh shit: why the fuck is Cameron Bailey here? CAMERON BAILEY PROGRAMMED THE WORLD UNSEEN??? I gotta get outta here...

Posted by tederick at 5:44 PM in tiff 2007
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Weather in Toronto: overcast, with a light drizzle; coolish. Yurt proximity: close without overlapping. Left ass cheek: numb. Last shit: 36 hours ago. Films down: 15. Films to go: 35.

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

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

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

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

Posted by tederick at 2:42 PM in blogTO & podcastery & sex (theoretical) & tiff 2007
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In Mongol, Genghis Khan goes to reward a dude and says "Give him a hundred horses and put his yurt next to mine." Yurt proximity is now the measure by which Matty Price's friendship with me is measured. When we piss each other off, we tell each other to back the yurts off a bit. When he does something nice for me, I tell him to connect his yurt-door to my yurt-door so that we can't ever get out but can only visit each other. Right now I'm saying that when I get up in the morning, I hope that Matty Price's yurt is reasonably close to mine, though not close enough to smell, because that's gross.

Also in Mongol: excellent use of blood in the battle scenes. I know that's a weird specific thing to notice, but I really noticed it. For whatever reason the blood sprays and gobs of hack-justice that came a flyin' while old Genghis went to his Khanin', looked really really real to me. So I'm saying if you want to see blood splattering done right and not for comic shock value, look to the Mongolians. They had it right. Or wait: the filmmakers who made this Lord of the Mongolians flick complete with Pellennor battle had it right.

Right now I'm getting grinded up in the Ryerson pulp mill; Juno and Nothing is Private and Dead back-to-back-to-back in the same theatre, and all running late and all very crowded. The entire fucking cast showed up for Juno - Alias, and Teen Wolf (2), and Kitty Pride, and J. Jonah Jamison. All here for the little movie about the knocked up 16-year-old and her merry pregnant adventures. Which, by the way, ow my soul. It's like Little Miss Sunshine without the intense post-manipulative-cinematic-crap need to shower for about a hundred years. In other words, it's gloriously heartfelt, achingly funny, and thoroughly earned. One of the best films of the year.

And yes, I was the guy in the balcony who, when Jason Reitman said something along the lines of "you're going to know this girl's name very soon: Ellen Page," yelled out "YEAH - I KNOW HER NAME." This is because, as has been proven umpteen times before, I should not be allowed to say words. Ev. ER. Didn't hurt that I wanted to plant a sloppy wet one on Allison Janney by the time the movie was over, or that the screenwriter's name was Diablo and she was, in fact, a perfect human. Actually, it only really hurt that Page's character in the flick - the titular Juno of the growing belly-bulge and the many witty wordplays - made me miss Grimlock a bit, and the movie in general made my nipples hurt. Otherwise, Juno is the happy dance. It's a little ball of happy lovin' sunshine and I heartily hope it makes sixty-five billion dollars.

Posted by tederick at 8:56 PM in blood & tiff 2007
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Got up on the early-brights and took in Volgograd with D-Coc. The film was Czech. Its morality, however, I found to be surprisingly Buddhist; D-Coc disagrees. The flick was about a Polish immigrant's struggle against the insensitive bureaucracy in modern-day Eastern Europe, with flashbacks to the Soviet rule during the Cold War. I wish I lived during the Cold War. Everything was so nicely photographed.

They're telling us the prevailing theme for this year's festival, by accident or by design, is films about how cultures overlap and intersect - of which I've seen at least two, Persepolis and Ballon Rouge, though I guess cases could be made for some of the others as well (Pink, particularly). Once you've been told this is the throughline it's damn near impossible to not notice it, like the Marla Singer on the roof your mouth that would heal if you could just stop tonguing it. Still, it never hurts to have breadcrumbs.

I just got out of Chacun son cinema, the omnibus collection of short films by filmmakers from all over the world made to celebrate Cannes' 60th anniversary. Not unlike another programme of shorts with which I am intimately familiar, some were terrific, some were awful. David Lynch snuck a real piece of shit "finished just in time for TIFF" into the front of the show, and if the next three films had been as bad as that one I would have left straight away. Fortunately, they weren't. Takeshi Kitano, Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Zhang Yimou's films were all predictably awesome, and the Coen Bros.' sure as hell didn't suck. The Bresson and Fellini references began to make my head spin after a while, but there was one film (can't remember who made it) that fairly gloriously expressed the furious dichotomy of loving 8 1/2: the melancholic old woman who knows things will never be like this again, and the oblivious young couple fucking in the back of the theatre. Because that's the movie: you're either too young, hornied up and stupid to know what the fuck you're seeing, or too old to be as young, hornied up and stupid as the lusty cinematic ecstasy makes you want to be. 8 1/2 has no middles. There were about seven awful films in a row in the second half of the show that really tried my patience, including Atom Egoyan's bulljive that might as well have been subtitled "Hello, I'm Atom Egoyan. I'm a Great Canadian Filmmaker. I enjoy masturbating in a cup and then drinking it." Fortunately, Lars Von Trier showed up to knock things back into shape (with a hammer). Alejandro Gonzales Innaritu actually managed to find the nicest pair of eyes on the planet, and photograph them. And there was some brilliant concluding work from Walter Salles. Yup, all in all a thrilling, maddening bunch of films.

Now I'm off to play a little game I like to call, "where's Matthew Price?"

Posted by tederick at 1:09 PM in tiff 2007
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Doing this thing this way - seeing more films in a week than most people see in five years - has value, serious value, as well as flaws. I always have "the moment" in the first few days where I am reminded of this once again; it happened tonight. It's something about peeling back the layers a bit, exposing the raw skin, being as thoroughly "in it" as you can be for a short space of time. I got so fucked around by movies tonight I was literally stumbling in the street outside the Ryerson as we waited to go in to the Midnight. I got completely enthralled and fulfilled by Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge. As with its predecessor, Cafe Lumiere, any rational assessment would say that I, particularly, would hate this movie. Yet it was the first film I've seen this year that's going on the list - the first really great one. I would have turned around and seen it again on the spot. After that Matty Price and I detoured to Shoot 'Em Up and then I had all kinds of time to rush Control, so I did; I ended up running into Tut in line and hanging out with her for a while, and then into the movie, which started hella late due to Star In Attendance issues. And then the movie handed me my ass. There are just movies that, for whatever reason, make me feel that I am going to be this lonely for the rest of my life and that there isn't a single fucking thing I can do about it. It's rarely due to any obvious connection; I mean, I don't give a toss about Ian Curtis and never have. But I was within a hair's breadth of losing it by the end of this movie: the skin was peeled back, I was feeling it right on the bone, right on the raw tissue. And I pretty much just wanted to go home, crawl into a hole, and die. But I pushed on to the Midnight and I'm glad I did, because Frontière(s) basically handed me my ass again - but in a far better way for a guy that saw six movies today. Frontière(s) is so balls-to-the-wall gruesome that it basically wrung me out like a useless old wash rag. Stunningly, surprisingly, a way better film than I had any business expecting, particularly in its anti-torture-porn torture-pornness as regards the women. And by the end, I felt like I'd bled every single powerful emotion in the universe out of every pore in my body. And I came home clean.

Posted by tederick at 2:40 AM in tiff 2007
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I may just have inadvertently picked up a homosexual. You know, a queer. A packer of fudge. Hey, why not be crass? After my explosion last night on the subject of why gimp should keep being called gimp and not changed to something else to avoid offending the crippled, I might as well declare my equal fondness for offensive gay slang.

Anyways: I was about halfway through conversing with this Differently Sexualized White Male when I realized that a) I had heard recently that he was gay, and b) I was currently flirting with him. I was making entendres and "the bedroom eyes." Why? Because I'm a fucking moron, that's why. I can't even blame senility: I'm not 31 for two more weeks.

At this point in the festival I'm wishing I had a better memory for peoples' names and where I know them from. Aside from the usual TIFF game of Know Your Festival Volunteer (Without Looking At Their Badge), with bonus rounds of Did They Volunteer at 1MFVF? and Do They Hate You For Something You Did Five Years Ago?, there's also the plethora of people I know only during TIFFtime who pop out of the woodwork, plus the usual mill of running in a slightly tighter circle of my normal cadre of cinephiles, web geeks, program nerds and high art iconoclastic fetishists. I smile and nod a lot, and ask probing, open-ended questions.

Glory to the Filmmaker this morning was the perfect thing to be seeing on no sleep. It was like Takeshi Kitano just decided to skull-fuck an audience for two hours just to see what they'd do. Film was fucking nuts. Really fun in a lot of parts, too; overstayed its welcome a bit but I do tend to enjoy movies where I feel like I'm the only person in the theatre in on the joke. Which in this case, I really was. Oddly enough I think every single genre that he was fucking around with is something I'm only familiar with because I saw it here, in years past. Incestuous.

After that D-Coc and I saw a tight-knit spymaster thriller from South Korea called It Were, and then it was over to the Scotia (I'm finally getting used to it) for Pink, which was a double Greek no-no (Greek film / programmed by Eipedes). It wasn't bad, it just wasn't good. But then I began to realize that the story actually was about a grown man having a beautiful love affair with an 11-year-old girl, and I officially stopped trying to guess where the flick was going. I dunno. There was some cool shit in it, but at the end of the day it couldn't escape its spectacular underlying askewity.

Quick rush over to the Ryerson with MP to see Red Balloon. No Starbucks allowed - fuck! Ditched my coffee outside, and feel like I've lost a limb.

Posted by tederick at 2:44 PM in tiff 2007
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Thank god I can get onto the Tederick.com back end through the One Zone without logging in. I have no idea why that is and I can't imagine it's particularly intelligent from a security standpoint, but whatever, free wi-fi anywhere downtown for blogging purposes only. I'll take it.

So I think I may have made a big mistake. Did not sleep last night pretty much at all thanks to opening night jitters and a cat who, very literally, came within an inch of losing her life to my enraged hands after the 4th or 5th time trying to shut her up at four in the morning. I scheduled my only midnight-to-9 a.m. turnaround on the first Friday because I figured my body clock wouldn't be reset yet and getting up at 7:30 would be no problem. WRONGO. I am suffering serious braindeath here.

But them's the lumps.

Yesterday was pretty fucking terrific all around. I spent the afternoon in Trinity Bellwoods reading comic books and just chilling out thinking about life; I'm also really enjoying reading Nausea, which I'll finish today so that I can start Warrior's Camera tomorrow (it has become a semi-annual tradition to read books about Kurosawa during the film festival). I also ran into someone that I only ever see during the film festival - not at a festival venue, nowhere near one actually, so it was weird that it happened today and not on any of the other days of the year. (Plus: I hate that guy.)

I got home to a bit of meanspirited fucking-around by a certain TGS member who shall remain nameless, but that's girls for you. Doing it just to do it. Otherwise yesterday was tip top. I cruised down to the Elgin at 7:00 and ran into Sonomi (!) in line, so we hung out for a spell and that was pretty cool - haven't seen her in a solid 2 years or more and she's about to vanish to France for a long term stay, too. Some other former Bexites were about but there wasn't much to say other than "hey, you know Bex - so do I!"

Persepolis was my first film of the fest and it was pretty damn good. Animation was gorgeous and it maintained a pretty solid balance between the sheer awfulness of life in Iran and the wry sense of humour with which one, I suppose, is able to survive such things. It didn't so much conclude as just stop dead, which was a problem, and the last act didn't work nearly as well as the first two, but I'm giving it a pass overall if for nothing other than the fact that in the middle of this movie, an old woman actually maps out the meaning of life in about three sentences, and you go "oh yeah: that's really fucking obvious."

Then it was up to the Ryerson for the opening Midnight, and so shitty a Midnight I have rarely seen before. Holy mother of god, Mother of Tears is fucking awful. You kept wanting it to break out into full-on pornography (that was certainly the feel of the thing, between the Z-grade acting and the laboured dialogue) but aside from some titty shots from the Evil Witch Trying To Take Down Rome, no joy. Oh, plus: there was a fire drill right in the middle of the movie. A fucking voice comes over the P.A. system in the balcony of the Ryerson and says "we are about to test the fire alarm, don't evacuate the building," and then a horrible BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOP goes off for the next three minutes. With director and star in attendance. Oh Colin. I suspect these opening Midnights might just be cursed. But it was still fun to just be back in the venue... plus I saw someone that I had the world's biggest festival crush on last year (festival crushes differ from regular crushes because they're, you know, festive), and was sort of surprised by how... well, I guess I was just surprised to be surprised. It all seems so long ago. I can't believe how much has changed in a single stupid year, while still feeling like there's so much further to go.

Now I'm sitting outside the Ryerson waiting for Glory to the Filmmaker! to let in, and I can't believe I actually had enough time to get all the way to the end of this entry with no problems.

Posted by tederick at 8:18 AM in books & tiff 2007
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Last minute laundry: check.

Emergency foodstuffs / supply run: check.

Tickets, lanyard, etc: check.

blogTO redeye Midnight posts in draft mode: check.

Afternoon of reading comic books and eating burritos on the godfuck-gorgeousest September Thursday I've ever fuckin' seen: imminent.

First screening: Persepolis, 9 p.m., at the Eglin. Check and mate.

Posted by tederick at 10:53 AM in blogTO & tiff 2007
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Here we stand:

In this corner, Andrea had Johnny and I in as guest-stars on this week's moviesTO to talk about, what else, the Toronto International Film Festival. Wherein I realized that I have actually become that exact kind of film critic I loathed when I was younger: the crotchety old dude who hates everything.

But... I swear... there are reasons for all of it...!!

Damn.

And over here: our annual Mamo, wherein our heroes discuss the other Toronto International Film Festival, the one that directly overlays the festival mentioned above but in which, for whatever reason, I apparently love every single thing and am as excitable as the average chipmunk.

Plus: free beer for every fifth listener. Can't beat that deal.

Posted by tederick at 10:41 PM in podcastery & tiff 2007
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Box shmox. My score this year was even better than last.

What I didn't get: Lust, Caution (fuck!); The Tracey Fragments (fuck! FUCK! rush line here I come); The Babysitters (meh). Yeah as per usual, two movies that I would have listed in the films I most wanted to see, I didn't get. But I am unafraid, for my rush lining skills are above D-Coc.

What I did get: Persepolis, The Mother of Tears, Glory to the Filmmaker!, Pink, Le voyage du ballon rouge, Frontiere(s), Chacun son cinema, Mongol, Juno, Nothing is Private (gonna bring my SFU box set for Alan Ball to sign, if he's there), Diary of the Dead, The Orphanage, Les Chansons d'amour, The World Unseen, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers / The Princess of Nebraska (two tickets for the price of one!), Vexille, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (I have a conflict for this one so this ticket is officially up for grabs), Chrysalis, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Une vielle maitresse, The Exodus, Stuck, Chaotic Ana, Operation: Filmmaker, Very Young Girls (watch the search engines light up for that one), Naissance de pieuvres, SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO, Cassandra's Dream, Encounters at the End of the World, Le Fille coupee en deux, The Take, Dr. Plonk, Reclaim Your Brain, L'Age des tenebres, Angel, Smiley Face, Flash Point, Encarnacion, Hollywood Chinese, Terra, Son of Rambow, Weirdsville, DAINIPPONJIN, La Citadelle assiegee, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, XXY, Mad Detective, Ex Drummer, and A l'interieur.

Yeah The Tracey Fragments is the only one that really pisses me off. I'll owe a baby to anyone who gets me a ticket for that one.

Posted by tederick at 10:59 AM in tiff 2007
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I'm getting pantsed over here. Pantsed!! Who wrote this schedule? DID THEY NOT KNOW I WOULD WANT TO SEE BOTH PERSEPOLIS AND YOUNG PEOPLE FUCKING???

Jack Sparrow does know what he wants. The earlier title was ironical, you stupid TIFF programming bastards

Posted by tederick at 2:58 PM in tiff 2007
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Hello Internets. Guess what? I got to carry a hot schoolgirl's schoolbooks today.

OK so "schoolgirl" is pushing it a bit, but let me have this one. I have so little.

Hey I'll say this: there's nothing like actually starting work on your Hallowe'en costume to really focus your life down to a laser point. This one is going to cost a damn fortune, mind you, but whoa... so worth it. Also because there were certain... um... "time sensitive" elements, I'm glad I got going now instead of post-TIFF. Post-TIFF would have been bad. Because then it's fatigue and birthdays and whatnot and before you know it it's Nuit Blanche and then the October offsite and then where are ya? Huh? You're on October damn twentieth with not a stitch stitched, that's where!

If only the same get-up-and-do-it-ness applied to my filmmaking projects. In the plus column, I finished VCR 5.1 on Friday. In the minus, VCR: The Ninth Gate pretty much has to start going to camera this weekend, or it's not happening. Man when this is all done and you see the madness I have wrought, you are going to split your unmentionables right down their vie en rose.

Otherwise it's all about the grid right now. I live and die by the grid. I put the "musts" and the "midnights" in the grid first because it made sense to do that, and then I took the first picks from the Vanguard programme (because for whatever reason, there ended up being a really nice corridor in there of flicks I'm really excited about). Already had to knock two first picks down to second picks just due to time conflicts, so it's been a rough road already. But that's all right, it's fun as fuck and I've got plenty of time to move things around.

Four down, and the timing's uncanny. Summer's over.

Posted by tederick at 2:36 PM in pirates & tederick films & tiff 2007
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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..."

Since we last visited Fran's for a BenChro, they have diversified their Benny menu. (Benu.) They're serving a Blackstone now which I'll get to as soon as I can; I wasn't feeling the salmon this time, though, so I went with the "Chicken Classic Benedict." It's basically the exact same meal as their standard issue, only with a slice of chicken instead of the peameal.

It was goddamned well done, man.

I can't say that the chicken necessarily changed the overall presentation of flavour in the benny much, but it certainly made some difference. The meal was, you know, chickenier. Plus on the whole it was just a better-prepared benny than the last one I had at Fran's, so I was pretty satisfied. This was up to the Fran's standard as I perceive it. (The Frandard. Boy I'm all about new words today.) Plus I think I cracked the code: there's cheese of some kind involved in this thing, I could tell when I started taking apart the eggs. Maybe they melt a bit of cheddar or parmesan on top of the hollandaise or something. Who knows? It works.

The only problem with the chicken benny that I can see is that it costs a full two dollars more than its antecedent (thereby $10.95). That just seems silly to me. Is chicken that much more valuable than ham? No sir. Not where I'm from.

A muscular three eggs out of four.

The Fran's in question is located at College and Yonge in Toronto and serves as the traditional launching point for my TIFF season. The Benedict Chronicles is an ongoing, non-regular series.

Posted by tederick at 2:23 PM in the benedict chroncicles & tiff 2007
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Here are some things I bet you didn't know:

• Every year, I get into the wrong line at College Park. I then get into the right line. I then get my programme book and my envelope; I then go to Fran's and have something to eat; I then deface the picture of the executive director of Telefilm; and then I start.
• I now have 49 first picks and 64 second picks. The first picks are divided into M's and A's (the M is for "musts"); the second picks are divided into B's and C's (and the C's are basically "if absolutely nothing else can be done about it, pick this).
• I talked to Matty Price at about 1:30 this afternoon, a few hours before I picked up my book and a few hours after he picked up his. I got so excited just from hearing him describe the flicks he knew I'd be interested in, that my chair was slightly damp when I left it.
• It was not an easy transition out of work today, and yet not five minutes into my Fran's meal I was so immersed in the world of this thing that I couldn't remember what I'd done at work today, at all. I am all on board with the fetish right now

So yeah, 49 first and 64 seconds. The selection process is subject to a labyrinthine matrix of influences and interests that overlaps and negatively interferes with itself in unusual ways. Like, Dimitri Eipedes has a pretty tall hill to climb to get me into a flick he programmed, but it can be done; Cameron Bailey, on the other hand, can suck my dick (and has). His name on the page is an automatic page-turn. After a while going through the book becomes more of a pissing contest about what you're not seeing than what you are. "I'm skipping the Coen Brothers movie, how do you feel about that, Film Festival??" "OH YEAH? Well I'm going to fucking Portugal for two weeks, I'm not seeing anything!! SO THERE!!"

But as much as it's fun to go through the listings and find stuff that you just genuinely respond to as a filmgoer, it's even more hilarious to read the ones that completely checkmate you: you couldn't possibly not see them, even if you have every seeming reason to try to give them a miss. "Ellen Page? Check." "Mongolian hoard racing across the plains? Check." "'Adaptation of Satrapi's acclaimed series of darkly humourous graphic novels about her experiences as a spirited young Muslim woman coming of age in Tehran?' Check and mate."

So tomorrow I've got to grid this out into a comprehensive survey of theatre travel times, overlapping start schedules, rush lines holes, and meal breaks. Oh boy, I needed this.

Posted by tederick at 7:49 PM in tiff 2007
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