Just dropping in quickly after a screening of A No-Hit No-Run Summer, a great little French Canadian film. Set in Montreal summer of 1969, a 12 year old kid who’s obsessed with the Expos’ first season and dying to play ball himself, tries out for the local team but is denied. His dad, previously unenthusiastic about his son’s obsession with baseball, decides to start up a b-team for all the kids who’d tried out but didn’t make it onto the main team. The film is beautifully shot and has a really warm nostalgic feel about it.
Now we’re just getting ready to go out to a party for Every Little Step at 6:30 which will probably just be a short visit since we’ll have to get lined up nice and early for Religulous at the Ryerson later on tonight. Bill Maher is an idol of mine - I can’t wait!
Just a quick rundown - guests arrived late last night and so not much time for writing over the next few days…
First flick was an Irish black comedy, A Film With Me In It - funny as hell - wickedly funny script, great performances by the actors, and a truly dark and absurd plot. Really enjoyed the movie, too bad about the audience… well, too bad about the woman sitting next to us anyway - one of the types that needs to laugh a little too loud, and react a little too much, and just comes off as fake and irritating. Didn’t ruin the experience, but came close a couple times…
Later on we saw the new Richard Linklater film, Me and Orson Welles. I’d really been looking forward to this one, and it was great - I was a touch tired though and a few parts of the film dragged a bit. But Linklater is a master film maker and as always he pulls some incredible performances from his actors, in particular Christian McKay who played Orson Welles. I took a bunch of vid of the Q&A after, I’ll try to get that uploaded soon.
A very rushed cab ride later and we checked out the Gala screening of Burn After Reading. We’d never done the big hollywood Gala, and I’m glad that we did, but don’t think we’ll do it again. We knew we’d be seated up in the balcony, but when we finally got up there after waiting out the massive “Priority Seating” line, we were rushing from section to section as volunteers told us “this section is full!”
and finally got seated as the introduction to the film was just finishing in a section normally reserved as “obstructed view” seating. The film was fantastic though - the Coen brothers were in their element, doing what they do best.
On to day three - we have invites to a party for Every Little Step tonight - we weren’t able to fit the film into our schedule, but who doesn’t love a party?
So now that the fest has gotten underway, I’m going to try to update this blog as much as I can. Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done - we’re going to have some pretty late nights and some pretty hectic days and we’ve got guests coming to join us through this weekend so I don’t know what I can guarantee. I’ll definitely be twittering quite a bit and you can follow me on twitter here. I will try to get in some quick reactions to films and celeb sightings and so on here when I can though.
Today’s been great - we arrived to find the apartment that we rented is even better than we’d expected - the photos didn’t really do this place justice, and the location is phenomenal - we’re just three blocks from Ryerson where most of our screenings are. We also found out that the place has a gym and a rooftop terrace with bbq - not that we have tons of extra time, but hitting the gym once or twice this week will certainly make us feel better about all that sitting around and eating crap food that goes along with festivaling.
Tonight we saw O’Horten, a really great little Norwegian flick by Bent Hamer - a great start to the festival for us - it was such a charming, quirky, fun little movie. Will definitely have to look up some of this director’s other work.
Next up was a film we (and it seems everyone else at the fest) were really looking forward to, JCVD. What a great film - Jean Claude Van Damme plays himself in a Being John Malcovich-ish self-aware reality where he riffs on his own career and persona and turns in a performance that you really just need to see to believe - I’ll never look at the “Muscles from Brussels” the same again.
And here it is, just got word that we got all of our picks, so here’s the final rundown of films we’ll be seeing at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival:
Thursday September 4
O’Horten (Bent Hamer, Norway) JCVD (Mabrouk El Mechri, France/Luxembourg/Belgium)
7 days to go! Since the schedule and programme information went live 2 days ago we’ve just been pouring over the information available, post-it noting the hell out of the program book, and putting together a list of all the films that are remotely interesting to us. Once that was mostly together (it’s never really complete), I started putting all the available screenings of those films into Google Calendar, colour coding the entries with my top choices as well as Danielle’s.
That of course makes for a messy messy mess to choose from (left) - I probably have 100 screenings on the schedule across 8 days, and we’ll only be seeing about 20 or so. Next I start narrowing things down - I pick another colour for our first choices and start pulling out screenings that we both agree on as our top favourites.
The general criteria I follow from there is no early mornings (hey, this is also a vacation), preference to first screenings (best attendance by cast/crew for stargazing), and I try to limit travel distance between screenings (ie, don’t schedule one film at Scotiabank/Paramount and then the very next one at Varsity 8).
And that’s how we end up with our final list of first picks. It’s a bit of a rough process - lots of movies have to get dropped off, compromises made. I feel like we’ve got a pretty good balance of films from different programmes, some foreign language films, some Canadian flicks, and we managed to keep most of the films at Ryerson and AMC which are both within a couple of blocks of our apartment.
So now we wait to find out if we get all our picks. I think we have a pretty good chance. Typically the ticketing process involves a lottery system where you have no idea what your chances are of getting your picks. This year though, they’ve introduced a (somewhat controversial) policy where donors who make a contribution to the Bell Lightbox fund get their orders processed ahead of the general lottery. We made a donation at the lowest level that would allow us to participate in this program - so I’m hoping that’ll be enough to get us all our picks - there are quite a few donor levels above us that will get processed first though, so who knows. We just wanted to give ourselves the best chance we can get since we don’t get to make it down to TIFF too often.
So without further ado, the final list:
O’Horten
JCVD
A Film With Me In It
Me and Orson Welles
Burn After Reading (GALA)
Un ete sans point ni coup sur
Religulous
Ghost Town
The People Speak
Zack and Miri Make a Porno
Not Quite Hollywood
L’Heure d’ete
Good
The Wrestler
Gigantic
Paris, Not France
Synecdoche, New York
Cooper’s Camera
Control Alt Delete
Martyrs
Je Veux Voir
I’ll do up a page with some writeups for these shortly. For now, we wait…
This website is the personal weblog of Dave Samojlenko, a web developer in Ottawa, ON. It was formerly known as blogbynight and has been sporadically updated with mostly useless information over the past 7 years.
Currently I am blogging my experiences leading up to and at the Toronto International Film Festival so I've stripped out a lot of the personal stuff and dropped in a bunch of TIFF related links below.
