From The Archives: Toronto '04

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Category: Eric Lurio

Published on Tuesday, 25 August 2009 00:56

Written by Eric Lurio

Every year there are hundreds of film festivals, but four stand out above the others: Sundance, Cannes, Venice and Toronto. These are the ones that make headlines above and beyond the cities they’re in and while New York has some great stuff and Telluride is cozy, the big four make headlines throughout the world.

Toronto, the jewel of Canada, is last of the big four. There are literally hundreds of films being screened during the ten days of the festival and except for a few local critics who’ve been viewing a couple entries a day for months, it’s impossible to see anywhere near anything.

So, if you’re lucky enough to live in NY or LA, you can get to see maybe five or 10 before you leave home. What I do is leave a couple of days early and have dinner with my friend Kevin and his wife Lucy before taking in a few of the advanced screenings.

The last of the advanced screenings are at the National Film Board screening room down by where the local TV/Radio conglomerate is having it’s annual party for the festival, and as usual, I’m not invited. But then I’m not going to any of the parties this year. There’s nothing but movies, movies and more movies. It’s either one or the other. You can’t do both.

So I head south from my ratty hotel on Church and Dundas Streets (right next to the subway), and head over to the venue. It’s my fifth year and doing this is like putting on an old glove, except that I stay at a different hotel every year.

So with that "same as it ever was" attitude I bring with me I try to find where the entrance to the venue is this year. For some reason they’ve closed the regular entrance, and after a bit of looking, I find a sign. So far, so good.

Then, at last, we get in our seats and look around for familiar faces. There’s a few and we greet each other and promise to gossip when the first film is over…

Our first flick of the festival is Hari Om -- an Indian story of a girl left behind (Camille Natta) and her meeting the eponymous rickshaw driver (Vijay Raaz), who happens to be on the run. So she decides to follow her boyfriend (Jean Marie Lamour) to the next stop on the train and somehow, our hero finds our heroine at the side of the road [the bus had a flat of course], the two of them take the rickshaw [a motorcycle kind of thing, not a seat with wheels powered by a guy running] and go across India where they meet several interesting people and sort of fall in love before our hero has to start a worker's rebellion and the boyfriend.

It’s actually not that bad…

Our second selection is Forest for the Trees which is a sad tale of a relatively nice person (Eva Löbow) who’s looking to start her life over. Unfortunately, she makes a botch of it and spends her life lonelier than ever. It’s depressing as hell, but Löbow is a brilliant actress and is cute as a button and is terrific as the protagonist. I'm not sure if it's worth the bucks, and I don't think it's going to come to the arthouse anytime soon, so don't sweat it.

Our third selection for the day is an exercise in Weirdness for Weirdness' sake. Innocence is about a bizarre prison/ballet school for a select group of little girls who enter the place in a coffin and are told weird stories about kids who try to escape and are turned into old hags who must serve the girls forever and the like. The whole thing is very strange and not very effecting, and the ending is particularly disappointing...we were hoping for more murders....bummer.

The discovery of the day is that the day passes don't work until 9:30 which makes them almost useless, me having to get to at least half a dozen places in the early morning...%^&*

So the next day, we head up to the Transit authority to figure out what to do with the extra day pass, we argue and a compromise is reached. That being done we head south to the NFB and see what’s apparently the only film of the day:

One of the themes this year is the Rwandan genocide of 1994. There are a number of films on the subject and the first I've seen is Shake Hands with the Devil which is about Canadian General Roméo Dallier, who was the head of the UN peacekeepers in that godforsaken place when the lord forsook it a decade ago.

He returned for a conference and the filmmaker Peter Raymont decided to tag along, and the results are both infuriating and heartbreaking. One tends to wonder if the wanton murder of between 800,000 and a million people killed mostly with machetes could have been prevented, and if Dallier could have done more in that direction. But the simple fact is that while it probably could have and he couldn't.

There was plenty of blame to go around, could the French told the perpetrators to not go there? Should the UN have gone to war when there were two thousand UN troops briefly there to get foreign nationals out? One could go on for months on this topic.

But the simple fact is nobody did a damn thing and then nobody did anything after that. What did happen is that Dallaier was kicking himself about it ever since.

This film is especially important when we see what's going on in Darfur, Sudan.

The reason nobody did anything was simple, by the way. Look at how Bush was treated over Iraq...in other words the world would go nuts blaming the rescuers and nobody wants that.…

Finally, we head up to the press office and get our credentials. There were problems over the summer as none of the hotels in the area wanted to deal with the press and refused to house the thing, so they had to rent an office in the Cumberland Mall, which turned out to be extremely convenient. They had wireless internet, and the underground tunnels made life much easier for me and all involved.

I always knew that there were tunnels underneath Bloor Street, where the main venue for press screenings were, but I’ve never had to actually use them before. This year is different. One just gets off the subway and then goes through a series of tunnels and violá, you’re there, and you don’t have to dodge traffic. This would be routine for most of the next eight days.

The routine was for the most part the same. Five to seven screenings a day, one party and one of the panels, actually an interview with Terry Gilliam that was called misleadingly called a master class, but more on that later.

The venues were primarily at the Varsity multiplex, which for hundreds of us critics was our home away from home. There are seven large screening rooms and three smaller ones, which made traveling between them rather easy…that is unless one discovered that you had to go over to the Cumberland Theater about four blocks away, then you could either dodge traffic or use the tunnels to wind up across the street and run like hell, something I did rather frequently during my time up there.

But Toronto is famous for scheduling conflicts, and this year was no exception, as one friend told me "You don’t see what you want to in Toronto, you see what you can."

The way to deal with conflicts is to find out where the public screenings are and if it’s possible to get on the "rush line." I tried that three times and managed to get in twice.

For the public screenings, getting there’s a bit trickier. There’s the Ryerson Theater at the college of the same name about a half a mile from the Variety multiplex. When I was there, they had a false alarm and we had to wait out in the courtyard for almost a half hour. Nothing like that happened at the Paramount Googleplex, which was across the street from the NFB office and has some really good seats. Finally, there’s the Famous Players screening room, which is next door to the Cumberland inside a dank basement.

Thus was the routine for the great Sitzfleich marathon, my personal best from last year is five: will I manage to break the record?

We wake up sometime around a quarter of seven and do the normal morning ablutions, then we take the subway up to Bloor Street where we head to one of the local cafes (either Starbucks, Timothy's or some other trendoid place) before heading over to the Variety multiplex in where one takes one's seat for the first screening of the day, which is about 8:30 AM, which is usually too early to go to the movies but this is Toronto…

…So we managed to get a total of 45 films in all told and a personal best of seven in one day. The films ranged from animated cartoons for children [Shark Tale] to hard core gay porn [the Raspberry Reich].

I’m stoked for next year.

From The Archives: Toronto '03

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Category: Eric Lurio

Published on Tuesday, 25 August 2009 00:36

Written by Eric Lurio

The most memorable thing about the Toronto Film Festival are the lunch wagons. The city has the best curbside hot dogs in the world, no doubt about it. It’s one of those things I look forward to every year when I make my annual pilgrimage to the Great White North and the #2 film festival in the world.

I always come a couple of days early. The festival always has some left over pre-festival screenings the week the big show starts, the locals want to cover the parties and they begin to watch movies sometime in July. There are almost four hundred films shown, and seeing them all during the fest is clearly impossible.

10% is hard enough.

This means that most of the parties were out. I only was invited to two at any rate.

After one day watching at the Canadian Film Board screening room, us critics moved uptown to Bloor Street where the various venues are located.

There are three of them, the Cumberland multiplex (159 Cumberland Street), the Cineplex Odeon Varsity multiplex (55 Bloor Street West) and the Uptown multiplex (defunct); all within easy walking distance of each other [assuming you can run fast].

The press office is another matter, that being more than half a mile to the south. Blame the Toronto hotels for that. We seem to interfere with the “real” guests for some reason. This hurt the festival’s publicity quite a bit, and that’s why the festival is going to have its very own building in a couple of years. But in the meantime, we avoid the press office and stay uptown.

The first problem one encounters is the schedule. There are two, one for press and industry screenings [that’s us] and one for everyone else. Both have conflicts galore, especially for those of us who don’t have to pay for it [600 bucks to get in for free-ya gotta sleep somewhere, I guess]. For some reason nobody can explain, all the best movies are scheduled at exactly the same time. Sometimes a film one HAS to see will begin fifteen minutes before another one ends, and a lot of people see snippets and chunks while rushing from one flick to another. I don’t do that, but that doesn’t stop from seeing around forty films all the way through in 10 days.

But some success doesn’t ameliorate the challenge. People bitch and moan about it every year and we all know that the problem will never go away, so there are a number of ways of getting around this: First off, there’s begging. You go to the PR offices that are set up in all those hotels that have kicked out the press office in previous years and ask as politely as you could if you can get into an already sold out public screening. This works about half the time. The failure rate isn’t because the PR people don’t like you, it’s just that everybody else is doing the same thing.

Then there’s the industry/press ticket office. The industry people, who pay huge amounts of money, can get a couple of “public screening” tickets a day early, and some in the press can as well. But only those like Roger Ebert and Elvis Mitchell. The rest of us have to wait on the rush line.

The heart and soul of the Toronto Film Festival is the rush line. Fifteen minutes before a public screening begins, any seats that are empty in a sold out show go on sale again. For the big flicks, these line tend to wrap around the block and with volunteers sometimes going  up and down the queue announcing the odds of actually being able to get in.

I’m still amazed that I managed to get into every film I lined up for.

Once in, there’s the standard opening credits, followed by one of three shorts. This year’s crop all has the theme of “live the dream” and were all rather good the first couple of screenings. There was one where an airline steward gives the safety speil in an overly dramatic way, another one has a private detective critiquing a video cinematically while his client cringes at his wife’s adultery, and a court reporter reads off testemony  as if it were written by Micky Spillane.

The festival is divided into categories: At the top of the pack are the Galas, the big films from famous directors and usually distributed by the big Hollywood studios. In other words, Oscar®-bait. [Either that, or they’re extremely Canadian, this IS TeeO after all.]

The best of these was a French film called Bon Voyage. An action comedy taking place during the fall of France in 1940, it’s about a movie star, played by Isabelle Adjani, whose childhood pal (Grégori Derangère), tracks her down to Bordeaux, where she and her lover (Gérard Depardieu), who’s Minister of something’er’other in the final French government are on their way to Vichy. She’s oblivious to what’s actually going on, and the old boyfriend meets a young student (Virginie Ledoyen) who’s involved in a plot to get the world’s supply of heavy water [for the use in atomic research], out of the country in order to keep it out of Nazi hands. Of course, there’s a Nazi spy (Peter Coyote), who’s privy to the whole thing….It’s a hoot!

The next category is “The Masters.” These are famous directors who don’t actually have major studio backing, stuff like Robert Altman’s The Company, which is for the most part a vanity production by Neve Campbell, who was at one time a ballet dancer. This film is supposed to be about the Joffery Ballet of Chicago, whom does all of the dancing. Campbell can dance, and Malcolm McDowell is hilarious as the head of the company, but unless one is into that sort of thing, this isn’t really much of anything.

Next on the list is “Visions.” These are mostly “a walk on the wild side.” Stuff like Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 3, the most overrated film of the 21st century. This doesn’t mean it’s not good, far from it, but Barney’s amazing visuals don’t actually make up for the utter lack of story. Yeah, the sight of a bunch of men in 1930s gangster suits dancing around the maypole is arresting, and Barney’s climbing like a monkey around the Guggenheim Museum while trying to escape from the Rockettes is actually quite fun, but genuinely weird doth not a great film make.

Then there are the special presentations, which are the films that are just plain good, and while not “big enough” to qualify for “Gala” status, are going to be out soon and are definitely worth the bucks for a full price ticket. Stuff like “Sophia Coppolla’s masterpiece about nothing really going on in Tokyo, Lost in Translation, and Jim Jarmusch’s sketch comedy compilation, Coffee and Cigarettes.

Both have Bill Murray giving brilliant performances and both are basically about nothing. C&C has about a dozen short pieces where two or three people sit down to a cuppa and a smoke and discuss either life in general or the subject implied by the title of the movie. The best skit has Cate Blanchett in a black wig and biker chick clothes talking to Cate Blanchett dressed up in expensive movie star duds. It’s hilarious.

If you haven’t seen Lost in Translation yet, you should be ashamed of yourself.

There were eight other categories of film presented and the quality was for the most part rather high. The best of the bunch was a Russian film called The Return which was about the mysterious appearance of a long-lost father who takes two boys on a mysterious journey. The acting by the children is riveting, and the tension in the film is so thick one can almost touch it. Director Andrey Zvyaginstev is going to be recognized as a major talent.

But most of the people at the festival don’t go to see movies. In fact most only see two or three at most. What they do do a lot of is go stalk celebrities. There are lots and lots of actors and actresses who come in order to promote their films and that doesn’t take all that much time. So the rest of the visit is taken up with partying, and sometimes these are semi-public, which means that the common people can stand outside either the Toronto Exhibition grounds or the CHUM radio parking lot and try to catch a glimpse of someone only read about in the tabloids.

It’s a blast.

Hitting The Ground and Running At Comic Con 2009

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Category: Eric Lurio

Published on Monday, 24 August 2009 20:22

Written by Eric Lurio

Humor is one of those subjective things that either works or it doesn't. Andy Borowitz's  recent "critique" of last week's San Diego Comic Con is just one of those misfires that's just pathetic.

The reason I bring this up is that there may have been more women than men -- not much this year -- having seen the line for the Twilight Panel with literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of teenaged girls waiting for hours on end to get in.  Which brings me to my real point here: How big is too big?

I've been going to this thing on and off -- mostly off -- for around 18 years, and while the TV and movie panels and swag were always there, it was much smaller and more about what it was called. Comics.

Don't get me wrong, the guys doing the panels needed to be there as much as the people who paid to get in, and the media parties were pretty good (you can get a healthy and filling meal from hors d'oeuvres, and I especially liked the fact that none of them kicked me out). But aside from most of the actual stuff that had to do with comics, it was impossible to get into anything without waiting on line for hours on end.

The first full day of the event, I attended a panel on the Astroboy movie, and left early to get to the Disney 3-D thing at the main hall H. I'd kind of forgot the aforementioned Twilight fans were there en masse, and discovered, to my horror, that the line went across the street, then into the park and went back and forth three times. There was a guy claiming to be from the staff who said to give it up -- we wouldn't get in until four at least, which I knew wasn't true as half the hall would clear out when the Twilighters left, which is exactly what happened. I managed to get in to the Avatar thing, but only after waiting for over two hours and missing two panels that I really wanted to see (and Twilight, which I didn't).

The TV lines were even worse. One of the stars of Dollhouse  is a friend of mine, and due to situations that were nobody's fault, we didn't manage to hook up last month and not showing up for this would possibly ruin our platonic relationship. I missed most of it, and had the security guards not been looking the other way for a second, that would have been it for her and me. The happy ending notwithstanding (nothing is more validating than having one guard stopping another from throwing you out of a place), the simple fact is, is that unless you are prepared to just sit in one place all day, you cannot see anything that didn't have to do with the actual art of cartooning. From what I heard, the Pat Oliphant tribute wasn't particularly full.

It wasn't always like that. When I first started going, San Diego was the place every cartoonist in north America would get together to schmooze. The parties to get into were not the ones sponsored by IMAX®, (who were kind enough to drive me to their presentation), Wired magazine or Entertainment Weekly; the pick-up soirees were where the top cartoonists in the industry -- and I mean newspaper strips and underground stuff -- would get together to jam on paper while getting wasted in places that no longer exist. But time marches on I guess...

The crowds and the lines are bringing the event to a crisis. The whisperings about moving the place to Las Vegas are beginning to get louder, and to be perfectly frank, I'm not sure that's a bad thing. Unfortunately, they may not be able to pull it off if they tried. San Diego became what it was because it was convenient to LA and easier to get around. Getting around LA is difficult even with a car, and Las Vegas in the summer even more so. Besides, I don't think they would have a venue large enough.

It could be possible to split Comic Con in two, with the movie stuff run as a giant film festival and the comics stuff returning to the art of drawing and storytelling.