The second Saturday of TIFF was a four movie day. Two were easy and two were hard, and one of the easy ones wasn’t very good.
The first hard one was A Hidden Life, Terence Malick’s gorgeous, slow-moving story of an Austrian farmer who refused to pledge allegiance to Hitler, and fight in the German army, and is imprisoned facing execution. Production must’ve been very slow moving as well – at least two of the actors in it, Bruno Ganz and Michael Nyqvist – died before it was released. The thing that made it hard to watch was its slow pace, but it was also just so gorgeous that you stuck with it. It was partly in German and partly in English; you did not need subtitles nor were they provided.
The title came from George Elliot.
The first easy one was Abominable, Disney-style animated fun from Dreamworks, updated with a girl heroine, and villain. And Coldplay. Reviews are all saying fun for the whole family, and “the journey may be predictable, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth taking.”
We had time for a lunch break, followed by a couple of hours of work for me. We went to Cabano’s Comfort Food, near University of Toronto, which had to be the cleanest fast food joint I’ve ever been in. I had the Cabano burger, 2 smash burger style (thin and crispy) patties, with cheese and deep fried jalapeños, Mark had a chicken sandwich, and we split an order of spicy cheese fries that came with more deep fried jalapeños.
Both morning/early afternoon movies were in Scotiabank, and both late afternoon evening movies were at Bell Lightbox. Seberg was the second easy movie, easy because it was easy to watch, but unfortunately it just wasn’t very interesting. It’s got Kristen Stewart playing darling of the French new wave, actress Jean Seberg, and purports to look into how Seberg started supporting the Black Panthers, which lead to her getting on J. Edgar Hoover’s list of subversives, and placed under FBI surveillance. But it devolves into affairs and jealous wives and it’s really hard to see why even the FBI is interested in these people, although they’re all very pretty to look at, and Kristen Stewart gets a lot of fab ’60s outfits to wear. A missed opportunity, says the New York Post; the Guardian gave it 2 stars out of 5.
In between movies we had time to sneak out for a drink or snack. I was determined NOT to have coffee too late in the day like I did the day before, so we got a bottle of water, gummy bears, and a Snickers bar at the closest drugstore, and went back in for out last film.
The second hard movie was American Son, the film version of the Broadway play, with the same cast, Kerry Washington and Steven Pasquale, and the same director, Kenny Leon. It’s intense, an estranged couple, parents – a Black woman and a white man – waiting at the police station trying to find out what’s happened to their 18-year-old son, who never came home that night. Afterward, all we could do was kind of stumble home and go to bed.
Kerry Washington and Steven Pasquale on set for the Netflix production of American Son