parabola.ca » TIFF 2009

TIFF09 – Days 1 & 2 Recap

Steve — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 01:11:32 +0000

The first day of the festival is really easy to recap, since I didn’t have anything scheduled! I did this so I could still make it for the first floor hockey game of the season.

My festival started with Perrier’s Bounty, where I met up with Mike beforehand in the lineup. The movie was really fun and darkly hilarious; the cast was fantastic, they put together a great group. They have distribution lined up in the spring for UK and Ireland, but nothing yet for North America. I don’t think it would be a huge hit, but lots of people would like it.

After that, I headed over to the AMC theaters for the Swedish film The Ape. I have to note one welcome improvement to this year’s festival: indoor lineups for AMC! In case of bad weather, this should be much better than the one giant queue outside on Victoria St. (and beyond) and then pulling people out of the line when a particular movie is letting in.

The Ape was … interesting. It starts off with some mysterious circumstances and follows the main character through his day. His edginess sets the stage and as bits of the story come into focus it gets more and more tense. Now, answers aren’t always apparent and there’s lots of symbolism if you want to interpret things … so it may not be for everyone. But definitely some interesting things done with this film.

Day 3 is a busy one, with a full slate of 5 films.

My TIFF09 Selections

Steve — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 03:25:11 +0000

My TIFF09 Calendar

Steve — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 02:16:28 +0000

Parabola (Hearts) Jonas Brothers??

Steve — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 01:55:05 +0000

My plan this past weekend was to drop off TIFF advance orders for Sven, Mike, and myself on Sunday by getting to the box office before it closed at 7pm.Â Sakina and I left my place in Mississauga at about 6pm, since I figured an hour would be plenty of time for what is a 25 minute drive, especially on a Sunday evening.

Little did I know that the highway would be suffocated with the traffic of tweens and their guardians.Â Destination: Jonas brothers concert at the SkyDome!

The route was slow-going from Mississauga all the way to the Spadina exit and as we slowly made our way it was clear we weren’t going to get there on time. The deadline for dropping off orders was Monday at 1pm, so that wasn’t really a concern.Â It was mainly an annoyance knowing that I’d have to make the trip again the next morning, and juggle my work hours to do it early in the day. We arrived at Nathan Philip Square at about 7:15; I tried anyway to see if there were any volunteers hanging around who could simply take my order envelopes, but no such luck.

The next day I left work at 11:15am, made the trip all over again, and got to the box office at about noon. After a short wait in line, I hand over our envelopes and watched them go into box 49.

By the time I got back home and set up my laptop to work there for the afternoon, it was nearly 1pm and time for the lottery draw to determine the first box the festival would use to start filling orders from. As a sign of the changing times, instead of trying to find out the results by calling the box office, I simply waited for the news to spread on Twitter.Â Much to my surprise, it was box 48 that was selected!!

So basically it comes down to this: if I had managed to drop things off on Sunday evening as planned, we would have been in a box in the late 30s or early 40s — and our orders would be some of the last to be processed.Â But as it turned out, we were in the second box of orders and so we got tickets to ever first choice that we wanted.

All thanks to the Jonas brothers.

TIFF 09 Is Upon Us!

Steve — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 04:06:16 +0000

Just a quick note to kick things off for this year’s fest. I have a draft schedule nearly done, which you can view here; so far I’ve slotted in 28 out of 30 films. Yes, I’m only going with the ‘lite’ Festival Pass this year. Since the second Thursday evening (U2 concert) and the entire final Saturday (to celebrate Dean’s recent wedding) are booked with other happenings, fitting in a full slate of 40-50 films wasn’t feasible.