Category: Film

TIFF 2006: Early Picks

For the past two days, I’ve been working my way through the 440 pages of the programme book and have figured out ten films I’d like to see that fit into my schedule:

  • Saturday September 9, 2:30pm: The Way I Spent the End of the World (Romania, Director: Catalin Mitulescu)
  • Saturday September 9, 6:15pm: Indigènes (France, Director: Rachid Bouchareb)
  • Sunday September 10, 12:30pm: The Sugar Curtain (France/Spain, Director: Camila Guzmán Urzúa)
  • Sunday September 10, 3:45pm: The Host (South Korea, Director: Bong Joon-ho)
  • Sunday September 10, 6:30pm: Offside (Iran, Director: Jafar Panahi)
  • Tuesday September 12, 7:00pm: Renaissance (France/Luxembourg/UK, Director: Christian Volckman)
  • Thursday September 14, 5:30pm: Blindsight (UK, Director: Lucy Walker)
  • Friday September 15, 7:45pm: D.O.A.P. (UK, Director: Gabriel Range)
  • Saturday September 16, 4:30pm: Lake of Fire (USA, Director: Tony Kaye)
  • Saturday September 16, 9:00pm: Lights in the Dusk (Finland/Germany/France, Director: Aki Kaurismäki)

The next step is to hand in our choices (I’m splitting a 30-coupon book with my wife Brooke and my friend Jay) tomorrow morning and then pick up our tickets next Monday. If we don’t get all our choices, I have a few second choices up my sleeve. But I’m crossing my fingers we’ll get everything.

TIFF 2006: Preliminaries

It’s almost that time of year again. From September 7-16, Toronto is taken over by celebrities and celebrity hounds, partying into the wee hours and clogging up Yorkville with their bling. Oh, and they show a few films as well.

I’ll be attending for the 12th year, though I’m only seeing ten films again. Without taking vacation time off work (which I’m saving for our trip to Slovenia just after the festival ends), ten is about the limit for me.

I was a little bit excited for about thirty seconds when I saw that the official TIFF web site is offering a feature called “Your Blogs”. That is, until I read part of the lengthy terms and conditions:

You grant to the Toronto International Film Festival Group and its parents, subsidiaries, affiliates, employees, officers, directors, representatives, partners, and agents (collectively, “TIFFG”), a perpetual, royalty-free, transferable, irrevocable right to reproduce and/or quote from the original content that is placed on your blog or that you submit to the Toronto International Film Festival’s website. In addition, you waive in favour of TIFFG, all moral rights you may have in or to your content. TIFFG reserves the right to alter, edit, and/or delete any submissions you make to Your Blogs.

Uh, no thanks. Instead, I’ll be posting my reviews here as always, and cross-posting them to TIFFReviews, a site which has been covering the festival since 2004.

The complete film list was released yesterday, so now comes the hard job of deciding what to see and when to see it. If I’m careful, I might just be able to avoid anyone famous.

Inconvenient

Brooke and I went to see An Inconvenient Truth tonight, which was fantastic. The horrible thing was sitting through three car commercials before the screening. I’ve been starting to count the number of commercials that are for cars and I’d say, according to my unscientific guess, that one out of every three commercials I see these days are for automobiles or things that support the automobile industry. We are truly addicted to these things. I don’t mean to sound high and mighty. Though we don’t own a car, we borrowed my dad’s gas-guzzling SUV to drive up to see Brooke’s parents this weekend. But the car culture is so pervasive, we don’t even notice it anymore, and I think that’s dangerous.