First night in Toronto, and TIFF, days 1 & 2

We were supposed to get to Toronto about 2:00 in the afternoon, but ended up not arriving till 4:00. The main downside was we had to lug our big suitcases on the rush hour subway. A Canadian-nice young guy gallantly helped me carry mine up the stairs to the street despite somebody behind us yelling “move it, bitch”, the nastiness of which was quickly eclipsed by their subsequent “F’cking N-er”. People literally gasped at that one, plus the guy helping me wasn’t Black.

All that to the side (which got said a lot in one of our movies, Personal History of David Copperfield, kind of an illustration of the various characters’ obsessions, some one would say, gently, “yes, shall we put that to the side for a moment”), we made it to our apartment, dropped off bags, and started making our way to the box office where we thought we’d pick up tickets, so we could build our traditional layout of tickets that starts off neat and ends up a messy heap. We needed fortification for the walk over to Bell Lightbox, so stopped at a Balzac’s for coffee & cookies.

By the time we got there, the box office was closed and, since TIFF has gone to the dark side, aka Ticketmaster, everyone’s encouraged to use the mobile tickets, or get printed ones at the box office of any of the cinemas, anyways. Unfortunately, Ticketmaster.ca doesn’t seem to work quite right for us Americans and Mark’s been battling it to get the mobile version into his phone. So no heap.

Since we were in the area, we went to dinner at Tutti Matti, a fave we’ve been going to since it was recommended to us in 2015, by other folks in line. I thought maybe it was a bit too much of a white tablecloth place for a week night, and our first night, but it wasn’t crowded and we admired their remodel, which opened up and brightened up the place, although, sadly as the host/waiter told us, it had to be done because they flooded last fall.

Thursday I worked; two online meetings, various other class stuff, before our first movie: Tammy’s Always Dying. About a daughter’s toxic relationship with her mom. The daughter develops a plan to get on a TV talk show to sell her story, and she is able to buy a new car with the money. Which made it kind of like Wild Rose, where the main protagonist thinks if she can just get Nashville her life will be fixed. It doesn’t work out quite like they expected, in either film.

Next was Clifton Hill, film noir with heavy use of the unreliable narrator, set in Niagara Falls, with David Cronenberg doing a kind of extended cameo as the old guy who knows where all the bodies are buried; “local historian and podcaster” Wikipedia says. Like spending a couple hours in Wisconsin Dells, seeing the inner workings of cheesy resorts and tourist attractions, I says.

Friday’s first movie was The Personal History of David Copperfield, with Dev Patel as some version of Charles Dickens/Copperfield, directed, or maybe deconstructed, and made even more satirical, by Armando Iannucci, of Veep and Death of Stalin and In the Loop fame. It was charmingly non-linear, lots of great actors, everybody agrees Patel was really good, but there’s also Tilda Swinton, and Hugh Laurie, and Ben Whishaw as Uriah Heep, and a bunch of other younger actors, like Aneurin Barnard. The producers and casters elected to choose actors of color in many roles, for example Agnes Wickfield is played by Rosalind Eleazar, who’s a Black British actor, and her dad is an Asian British actor. But the majority of the actors in the film are British, so as Mark pointed out, probably it’s more like the racial breakdown in 21st century Britain than 19th century Britain.

Movie number 4 was Blood Quantum, our zombie horror movie of the fest. Old school zombies, Night of the Living Dead style, lots of blood and intestines. The premise that made it more than just a zombie movie was what if there was a zombie apocalypse and the indigenous peoples were immune – only white people zombified.

Mark went to the St. Lawrence Market Thursday morning while I worked and brought back lovely strawberries and bagels, including the have-to-have Montreal sweet cheese kind, for breakfast. We still had time before “Tammy” to walk up to the Whole Foods in the more chichi shopping area, where we bought a salad and sandwich to take home and split before the movies.

We took some pictures of the Museum subway stop, our favorite. There was a fancy gallery up there with glitter Buddhas in the window.

In between our Thursday movies we got coffee and my name on the Starbucks order slip came out as Debh.

Friday we had strawberries and bananas and yogurt, purchased at Whole Foods, and toast for breakfast, grabbed cookies and coffee between movies at a Second Cup, and then had burgers for a late dinner on the way home, at a perfectly OK brew pub on Yonge, where we looked out at the entrance to the Eaton Centre and Friday night traffic – lots of white cars. There was a lot of construction on the way home.