couldn't the film fest come up with a more macho acronym than "tiff"? like, that's sooo predictable...

From The Famous Brother [and let me just point out that I always find it funny to get mail from him because I'm like, jeeeeez that guy is so funnnneeee...hey wait, no wonder we have the same sense of humour (well, ok, aside from his taste for the actually and truly revolting and for some weird camp stuff he loves like really obscure German black and white films and y'know, let's give him a break, he's gotta branch out on his own somewhere along the line) but getting back to my point, no wonder I find him so funny, he's by frickin' brother! I've said it before and I'll say it again but I shore do love my siblings. They entertain me to no end and along with their spouses (spice? zesty italian-iowahan and let's see...exotic pomegranate and juniper berry?) there are no people I would rather make laugh than them. And maybe Mum and Dad. And perhaps Phet. Ok, and Ji and Seung Yi. But that's it. I mean it. Wahhhooo! Stream of consciousness, you rule!]:

I've decided to just start bolding random words, like in comics.

Woot! Hilarious as usual, Da. We saw The Science of Sleep a while ago in theatre and came out of it thinking that for a movie, it was a great music video...for a pretty dull song. Thanks again for the tix, and huge propologies (props&apologies) to Em 'cause we ruined her day but she dropped by our picks anyways.

Thanks to all, our new dishwasher is here...pics and more on the way as soon as we buy batteries for the camera.

Favourite Festival Moment
Ryan and I were just sitting down in our seats at Lou Reed's Berlin, which is a concert film of (you guessed it) Lou Reed's album Berlin -- a critical and commercial failure that today is classed as one of his best albums. Julian Schnabel, who directed the amazing Before Night Falls, directed, and did a great job, though because they stitched the video together from five nights worth of shows the musicians are often out of sync with the audio. Mr. Schnabel had another film at the festival about a writer who becomes completely paralyzed, and then dictates his memoirs by having his nurse read through the alphabet and blinking when she hits the right letter. Skipped that one as it sounded like it would make Paint Drying (by Fellini) look like a roller-coaster ride of adventure. So who walks up from the front and sits three rows behind us? Hint: his name's in the title. Lou fucking Reed. Ryan and I instantly turned into teenage girls. "And Laurie Anderson's with him." "Ooh, you don't say!" He looks cooler than ever, and sounded great. Also: Julian Schnabel is mad, if his pre-film chat is anything to on. Barking mad.

Other New Business
Dad, you should keep an eye out for Boy A -- you'll like it a lot, I think. For anyone who follows Takeshi Miike (Ichi the Killer, and my favourite romantic comedy, Audition), avoid Sukiyaki Western Django. It's a Japanese spaghetti western that's about an hour too long and has Quentin Tarantino in it. Acting. Or rather, "Acting". The last alone is enough to cause it to be burned. Ryan's line about Quentin, in general: "It's like he was practicing for Pulp Fiction with all the movies he made after it." Nail. Head. Hit. On the.

Can I repeat: we love our dishwasher. We love it more than one of our cats.

For your viewing pleasure, I'm enclosing the following, which Emma threatened would be our films if we didn't get our act together and send her our pics. Take it away, Emma.

STOUT OLD EASTERN EUROPEANS

Stachnya - A grandmother must come to terms with the death of her husband Grigor, who left her only a broken tractor in his will. Together with her grandson, Tomis, she must fix the tractor, which in itself will come to symbolize her growing hope while growing old, as well as her disillusionment with the Soviet government.

Vikktor/Vittoria - A stout serbian soldier must endure the shocking photos that emerge after his divorce from the lovely yet vacant Katttya. Will his transvestitism endanger his tenuous job in the military kitchen, or could it provide a nuanced look in to the sexuality of his fellow soldiers?

Lublo - A group of Polish street urchins in the 1940's learn the age-old game of bocce from a former mafia henchmen turned off crime after his dog is assinated by a rival gang. Can this motley group come together in time for the grand bocce champynyata, and will a nearly-forgotten romance between Lublo and his former toothless mistress be rekindled?

AVANT AVANT AVANT GARDE

ser809234lkjw - This film is an erotic presentation of communication at its most basic. To the casual observer, it is a compendium of Sesame Street sponsors, yet there is a glib undertone with strong references to film noire in the arrangement of the Sesame Street vignettes. Subtly interwoven are scenes of execution with only the sound of numbered countdowns and a keen and weeping bagpipe. ser809234lkjw will shock you, but may leave you less fearful for the fate of mankind.

teaching ms. jones - In the tradition of 'Dangerous Minds', this film shows a naive and peppy teacher leave her home in Indiana to teach in East L.A. Unlike Dangerous Minds, this film provides the viewer with a more realistic, less "Hollywood" ending. After Ms. Jones is beaten and left for dead by her Grade 4 students, she hears her home burned down and her car stolen. This film shadows her as she spends 5 months in traction and 4 months in a mental institute, before ending her own life by eating classroom chalk.

blank - This film is what you make of it. There is no dialogue. There is no plot. There is only an opportunity to use your imagination to fill the blank canvas of the dead screen in front of you. This film cost $150,000 to make but is worth every penny.

Future TIFF Pitch Contest winner? All signs point to...yes.

Love all
xJ(&R)

And, from Dad:

2007 FESTIVAL MUSINGS

Rats, the Film Festival is over for another year and here I sit on Sunday morning somewhat relieved that my normal life can return but still wanting a few more after my usual 15….

Best Pop Culture Moment
It took me 4 films to figure it out but it finally clicked.  Every screening is preceded by a written anti-piracy rant and someone was muttering  “Arrrrrrrrrrrr…..” every film; finally, ahah, it’s the pirate “Arrrrrrrrrr…..”.  I bumped into a student teacher from last year who says the whole process gets totally depraved at the Midnight Madness showings but the best was when the English director of Son of Rambow comes up to the mic for the Q and A at the end and very honestly asks, “What’s with the strange muttering at the beginning of each film?”  at which the entire theatre gave him a massive “ARRRRRRRR….”.   He looked blankly then someone in the front row filled him in and he roared with laughter, ending with  “….You Canadians....”

Best Film to Start the Final Saturday at 9:00 a.m.
I sat down with my coffee in my preferred aisle seat and Claude Chabrol took over:  La Fille Coupee en Deux.  Only the French can make films like this with the young but worldly tv weather girl torn between the somewhat jaded, conceited, very married but happily philandering famous novelist and the flawed, whacko son of the local aristocrats…and all filmed in sun-drenched Lyon and area…. Are the French snooty or what?  Set me right up for a race up the 427 to the Eddie Bauer Warehouse store to find a down-filled coat for my Dad.

Not-Guilty Pleasure Award
By far, Son of Rambow, was the ultimate pleasure- provider and on the final Saturday afternoon to boot.  By the team that made Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it is set in early 1980s England and pairs a Brethren boy forbidden to watch tv or otherwise engage with the modern world and a worldly rascal who abuses him horribly but funnily until they bond as literal blood brothers.  They film their own sequel to Rambo I, starring themselves and Didier, the French exchange student.  Laugh? I thought I would die…..

Most Awkard Akward Moment
Climbed 2/3rds of the way up as usual but on the left side facing the screen, dropped my knapsack on the second seat from the aisle and headed for coffee and the peepee place. Came back to find my seat surrounded by a throng of Rosedale matrons with their  day passes swirling around their necks as they went on very loudly about all and sundry but not very knowledgeably about the films they had seen.  I managed two sips of coffee before excusing myself repeatedly through the throng to get to the safety and relative silence of the right side facing the screen.  As I found walking space in the row, there was a brief silence as I felt their eyes pierce my back….

Best Feel Good Film
Rohinton Mistry is my favourite Canadian author and I sense Richie Mehta may someday be my favourite Canadian director.  A South Asian born in Canada, he pitched the screenplay for Amal 3 years ago at the Telefilm Canada pitching session at TIFF and there we were three years later,  giving him a 2-3 minute standing ovation.  And me only 3 weeks from Delhi watching this great film about an honest autorickshaw driver in Delhi who always charges the meter rate and never accepts tips.  And the familiar images:  hey,  his auto is stopping in front of the National Museum right where I got off… I think most of the street footage was filmed on the route between 97 Golf Links where Thaba and Phet live and where Phet and Thaba work.  I even recognized the monument on the way to the airport!  During the Q and A, a woman thanked him for making such a wonderful film and doing a fantastic job of directing, to which he replied:  “Thanks, Mom”.  And at the very end, after filling the stage with the stars and the technical staff, he asked everyone else in the audience who was involved in making Amal to stand up, to even more applause.  Only in Canada, eh?

The Worst of 15
Okay, so now I know but I was kind of desperate after not getting 5 of my first 17 choices so on the first Friday night I succumbed to my Central European bias and chose The Man From London, “Hungarian master director, Bel Tar’s existential take on the human condition…”  All those who read this learn from my mistake:  for TIFF programmers, the word “existential” means BORRRRRRRING.   The director’s name says it all:  what do we pave roads with?  What sticks tiles to roofs?  What does Bela Tar oil his camera with?  I have never seen such slow, deliberate focusing and camera movement.   Like never have I dozed off in the first 10 minutes of my first film at the festival.  Take a Georges Simenon short story of the same name (ie. about the French fictional detective, Inspector Maigret), then  why not set it in a nameless port city on the docks, film in black and white and then have your characters speak MAGYAR!  Have all the characters look Hungarian and have them move and speak VERY SLOWLY IN MAGYAR.  And talk about existential, Hungary is a land-locked country; it has no seaports!  And better yet, make the audience sit for 135 minutes which may not sound like much when expressed in minutes but that works out to 2 1/4 HOURS!!!!  I knew the final scene had arrived when the wife of the dead man was told to forget police action and was given an envelope with some money:  think of the Scream painting…..I glanced down at my watch and Bela, the master, kept the camera on her angsty face for 32 SECONDS TO END THE FILM……arrrrrrrrr…..

Best Historical Film  (L’Ennemi Intime)
Think of Platoon but set in Algeria in 1961 where the froggies are getting their butts kicked by the NLF, led by Algerian Arab veterans of the French feeble effort in WWII. Yeah, funny thing, they actually knew something about how the French fought.  Quite a movie, considering the French only finally admitted in 1999 that there had actually been a war in Algeria in which 27,000 French troops were killed and some half a million Algerians.  It also builds on last year’s film that focused on those same veterans but during WWII itself.  The new idealistic officer arrives but eventually grows to accept torture, illegal napalm attacks and all the usual stuff….

Best Danish Film
Like there were more than one?  Yup, there were actually 6, which means like one for every 26 Danish citizens.  How can such a tiny country make such excellent films (excluding those by Lars von Trier which I find nauseating and anyway, how can he make films critical of the good old USA without every visiting the place?……)  Just Like Home was directed by this blonde Viking woman who also directed two of my favourite Danish films:  Italian for Beginners and Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself (which was somehow set in Glasgow)….remarkable how the European Union works…..  Just Like Home is a small film in a small Danish town in which a midnight streaker has reputedly been seen running through the central square with a newpaper in one hand and who knows what else in the other; quiet desperation ensues to find the streaker.  What an unlikely plot but then why did the audience giggle, chuckle and smile through the entire film?  The other Danish film sucked……

Best Hong Kong Film About A Police Sergeant Who Uncovers A Plot By A Group Of Women To Kill All Men
The Exodus.  Hmmmmm.   I really liked it and it was hilarious at times but during the last 20 minutes all the Chinese people in the theater were laughing and I wasn’t and I lost track of who was who (like were both his wife and girl friend par of the group?) and maybe something was missing in the subtitles and I’m not really sure what happened at the end……

Best Film For History Department Colleagues to View Followed by Korean Grill House Meal
Ping Pong Playa:  Chinese-American family run ping pong emporium…Mum and Dad were champs in China….Older brother is current champion…Younger brother, Christopher “C-Dub” Wang loathes ping pong and dreams of being the first American-born Chinese American to make the NBA….Trouble is he sucks at basketball and life in general….But when older brother gets injured, can C-Dub rise to the challenge and save the family’s reputation?   Think of Bend it Like Beckham but with ping pong ball and basketball bounce noises (does that make sense) censoring the repeated f-words and other bad language.

Odd, Barely Worth Watching, Esoteric, Basically Stupid Artsy Pick of the Festival
Mister Lonely is the third feature by the director of previous TIFF appearances for Gummo and Jules Goat Boy (see above title).  But how could I resist Diego Luna (Mexican Heartthrob from Y Tu Mama Tambien) playing a Michael Jackson impersonator who meets Samantha Morton, a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (is there a movie she was not in recently?), who takes him to a castle in the Highlands to share communal life with a bunch of other impersonators:  Charlie Chaplin, Abe Lincoln, Madonna, Larry/Moe/Curly, the Queen, James Dean etc…..  Thankfully, someone asked the idiot director the obvious question at the Q and A:  “Where did the recurring image of the skydiving nuns in blue habits come from?”  Yup, in addition to the above nonsense, we also spend time in Panama with Werner Herzog playing the flying priest who airdrops food supplies to poor villages; one of the nuns falls out of the plane along with the bags of rice and she lives.  So it must be the will of god (God?) so they all try it and they live…Can I stop now? Or should I tell you that a few years back the director starting getting images in his head, one of which was of skydiving nuns in blue habits holding hands as they plummet to earth and he wanted to work that image into a movie…. Who funds these wackos?

Hottest Film With The Most Celebrities
I try to avoid the glam, stars and flashes; just give me a humble Czech melodrama or an Uzbek romance anytime…. But I just love the acting of Mexican heartthrob Gael Garcia Bernal, good buddy of Diego Luna (see above).  His body of work is awesome:  Amores Peros, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Motorcycle Diaries, Bad Education and a bizarre thing I saw on Air Canada recently called the Science of Sleep.  And there he was, directing and acting in Deficit, a take on that old Solzhenitsyn classic, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.  Only in this case it’s spoiled rich boy, Cristobal, who heads to his wealthy family’s country house for a weekend of partying BUT his entire life falls apart in one day.  Excellent film and I loved the 30-40 young women after the Q and A all screaming “Gael, Gael, look this way” as they tried to snap him with their camera phones…..

Biggest Disappointment
Angel, directed by Francois Lozon, whose previous work I love, especially 8 Women.  Think of Gone With The Wind but starring a young, turn of the century working class girl who wants to be a famous novelist.  But she is too busy writing to read very much so a lot of her facts are wrong, like you don’t open champagne with a corkscrew which her publisher gently suggests. Long and very boring with a female lead so obnoxious that we yearned for her lingering tragic end which was clearly on the way….

Best Hot Tip and Buzz Via the Times of India
First read about it in Delhi in the Times of India and The Last Lear was a fine, fine film worthy of its gala appearance at TIFF.  Rumours today in the paper that the cast was busy lobbying to get the Indian Academy Awards here in Toronto next year and since they change location overseas every year, who knows?  It has the hot young director befriending the reclusive and retired Shakespearean actor and luring onto the set for his first film. I can see why Bollywood loves Amitabh Bachchan; we know it is a tragedy but cannot guess the ultimate cause until the very end….

Worst Way To  End The Festival
Why oh why would I choose a film set in Auschwitz to end my festival?  Mind you it is 2006 and a young German does his one year of civil service (ie volunteering) at the visitor’s center instead of one year of military training.  Too bad he didn’t choose the military training because maybe then the film might not have been made.  It was very weak and I must not trust that programmer again; I met her during the winter at a TIFF session for teachers and she seemed very knowledgeable…Ooops…..Naturally the young man has to care for the crotchety old Polish survivor who repairs the display suitcases taken from those arriving 60 years ago.  Throw in the perky Polish tour guide for a bit of romance, some stereotypical Polish drunks and uber-efficient Krauts managing the local factory,  and you have another German film to rival that other German film, about another young German coming of age called The Forest For The Trees which is the worst film I have ever seen at the Festival.

Until 2008….

[Toronto-20-September-2007]