With Chocolate last night, the show closed on my least enjoyable TIFF ever, and I am ready to move on to other things. My blogTO coverage is here, and our final podcast of the festival is here. And my inevitable breakdown of what was actually worth my time goes like this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile,

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

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

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

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

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

Jane Schoettle is my hero.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many conversations with other festival goers ensue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Wait, which one was Flame?"

which is our new favourite line.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right-o.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fortunately, there's TIFF.

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

I will be seeing:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by tederick at 5:05 PM in 1701 & blogTO & tiff 2008
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Sometimes, you just have to accept that some of your friends are stealing from you, and there's nothing you can do about it, and it's kinda okay anyway cuz everybody just wants stuff even if it's not their stuff, and really who wants to get into a fistfight over "stuff" anyway. Batman: that's who.

So the good news, TIFFwise, is that I got the thrill this morning, which is nice, given that last night I was so overwhelmed with work and the move and the festival and everything else that I never even wanted to hear the words "film festival" again. I am in box 41, and I await my results. I am also, however, about to go truly internet-free for the first sustained period in a long, long time - have to turn in all the modem stuff to Rogers before close of business today, and do not actually have an internet hookup coming to me at the new apartment next week. I will be surviving on the whims of free wi-fi until I can get things sorted out. So, fair warning, communication may be spotty for the next little while.

Plus, I shit you not, after 3 months of agonizing, $5 tickets for Avenue Q fell into my lap, for tomorrow afternoon. So yes, it's true that all of my friends went to see Evil Dead: The Musical without me, and in spite of its thrice return to this city I have never been able to go see it with anyone, and I will never ever see it for the rest of my life ever. But I will see the puppet sex. Oh lordy, shall I see the puppet sex.

All is well. It is cold, and rainy, and there's a fuck of a lot going on at all times, but I am happy, and I am going on vacation, and I am in love, and I believe that everything will fall into its proper place. So that's something.

Posted by tederick at 10:41 AM in 1701 & tiff 2008
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Greg Kinnear as the guy who invented the windshield wiper! Keira Knightley as Princess Diana's uncle! And many more.

Yes, today's the day. I used to - like, six or seven jobs ago, certainly not at my current job - just sit at my desk and do my TIFF schedule, a process which takes about 7½ hours and is fairly counter-productive. But I don't do that any more because I am Responsible. Instead, I book the day off, tour the city, and read the programme book cover to cover.

So yesterday after work I went down to the new/weird box office area at Dundas Square, got my stuff, went for some eggs, drew devil horns on Swayne as usual, and got cracking. I've got through the Galas and Special Presentations so far but as per the usual, there is less content for me there (many of those films will see wide release) than there will be in the other programmes. I will, of course, kowtow to the Hollywood machine at least twice, by trying to see Zack & Miri and also the six and a half day mega-epic Che. Those are the kind of yes-they'll-be-released-anyway films that you want to see in a festival environment, just cuz it'll make you feel like a pimp.

Last night I watched A Clockwork Orange and today I'll buy excellent shoes. It's all coming together.

Posted by tederick at 9:16 AM in tiff 2008
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Mushroom clouds in the Toronto sky, riots in Montreal, weather patterns so schizophrenic and unpredictable that they augur doom. It was not the best weekend to go to the cottage, perhaps, but we did it anyway - a narrow ribbon of time sandwiched between job responsibilities and highway shutdowns. But it was nice, y'know? Waking up not knowing you've slept for ten or more hours without noticing. A chill in the air and a bunch of warm blankets will do that to you.

There's an unofficial maxim in the movie-watcher business: if Harry Knowles hates a flick, it is fucking bad. I mean that guy gives positive reviews to pretty much everything. Well, last night Harry Knowles wrote a scathing indictment of The Clone Wars, and this morning... he pulled it off his site. I suspect conspiracy. There's a good tract of it here, and reading the thing last night - talk of racist Ziro the Hutt, and cutesy Stinky, and how terribile that tweener Jedi girl actually is - cemented my complete unwillingness to engage George W. Lucas on any matters Star Wars-related, ever again. It's an amazement to me that The Phantom Menace didn't dim my SW enthusiasm a jot, but a bad Indiana Jones movie is apparently enough to buy back ten years of disappointment and grief. And I tend to be on the "charitable" side of this argument.

I miss the old days.

Everything's funnelling down toward September now, the boxes are stacked ceiling-high at 3QF, my vacation is booked and the prep for 10 days of TIFF is well underway. I do a lot of rushing about. Scraping twenty minutes to read some Y: The Last Man in the rain. Sometimes though I spend a Sunday night watching dumb sweet Juno with my dear one, and afterwards, there's a bit of singing as we're getting ready for bed. And that's enough to get another week underway with.

Posted by tederick at 10:29 AM in galaxy far & the apocalypse & tiff 2008
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Just bought my Festival Pass for 2008, and as has become tradition, I am so goddamned excited. Might be the inevitable reality that I so very, very much need my vacation, but whatever it is, September can't come soon enough. And if everything goes according to plan I'll be able to walk home from Midnight Madness... outstanding.

Meanwhile, Batman. Ohhhhhhhhhh Batman. The marketing is out in full force, and I swear every time I see anything DK-related on any billboard, bus or balustrade (what?), the nervous strings of the Zimmer/Howard score start playing on an endless loop in my head. Duh-duh DUH-DUH duh-duh DUH-DUH duh-duh DUH-DUH duh-duh DUH-DUH duh-duh DUH-DUH duh-duh DUH-DUH duh-duh DUH-DUH duh-duh DUH-DUH.... It never pays to be this excited about anything film related, but fucked if I can't help myself this time.

After a fairly miserable late-last-week, the weekend augured on quite nicely. There were brunches. And delicious drinks. And at least one fabuloso bike ride cum personal awakening moment. With the confusion and mess-around of Canada Day it didn't really feel like a full 2-day I-had-a-weekend type weekend, but still, it will serve, at least until my Batman Be Blu-ray shows up tomorrow. I'm gonna sit on my couch writing performance reviews while Liam Neeson gets all sage on Christian Bale's ass on the telly. Duh-duh DUH-DUH duh-duh DUH-DUH duh-duh DUH-DUH duh-duh DUH-DUH duh-duh DUH-DUH duh-duh DUH-DUH duh-duh DUH-DUH duh-duh DUH-DUH.... Wow-woowwwwwwwwwrrrrrrrrr....

Posted by tederick at 11:25 AM in batman! & tiff 2008
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