Last two days of TIFF

Which were Saturday Sept. 16 & Sunday Sept. 17.

Saturday our first movie was at 11:30 so we went back to the St. Lawrence Market so we could each get the type of bacon sandwich we really wanted. For me that meant a streaky bacon sandwich and for Mark it meant another peameal (Canadian) bacon sandwich but this time with mustard and tomatoes. We also got some baked goods. We ate the sandwiches at the market with Balzac’s coffees then we walked over to the dog fountain while we still had some coffee left so we could drink it with the bakery.

Our first movie was Wildcat, Ethan Hawke’s biopic about Flannery O’Connor starring his daughter, Maya Hawke. It was non-linear and interesting, interspersing Flannery’s life with enactments of her stories. Mark liked it better than me because he’s more familiar with O’Connor, although I do have an ebook collection of her short stories on hold at the library right now. The movie is definitely part of the continuing saga of Ethan Hawke’s exploration of artistic creativity and inspiration.

Wicked Little Letters was movie #2 Saturday and it’s another one where we liked it, but the critic’s reviews are mixed; The Guardian said “foul-mouthed farce wastes Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley”; Hollywood Reporter “strained period comedy” but the buzz at TIFF was that audiences loved it. We liked it a lot; thought it was just plain fun, and lots of creative swearing. The movie is set in Littlehampton, a small village in England, in the 1920s, not too long after the Great War when all the men left and women were running things. The men are back with a vengeance now, especially Olivia Colemen’s father, who actually was probably too old to go to war and is overcoming any lingering inferiority feelings by squashing his wife and daughter, too. And, yes some of the characters verge on caricature, but they’re caricatures we’ve grown to love from other books and movies and TV shows set in little towns in Britain. I guess it’s based on a true story – the women got in an argument over their gardens and back yard rabbits – and there’s a book about it.

Our final movie of the day was Thank You for Coming. It was in one of the bigger fancier theaters, and there were a lot of well-dressed people, out on a Saturday night, there to see it. Plus several of the stars and the director were there, too. Definitely another funny and totally entertaining movie for a Saturday night.

Sunday we started with an early-ish movie, Alice & Jack. We were in the ‘nice” theater, TIFF Bell Lightbox. (since TIFF is losing Bell as their primary sponsor after this festival, we wondered if they’ll change the name – I think no, because the place was all built while Bell was the sponsor; Mark thinks they will. I guess it depends on if whoever they get to sponsor buys naming rights. “TIFF Netflix Lightbox” anyone?). Alice & Jack was another one that’s two episodes of a series. This time we don’t get to the see the rest until next spring, when it’ll be on PBS Masterpiece.  It was nice to see Domhnall Gleeson playing an ordinary guy – last time we saw him was as a baddie in Star Wars prequels. And use his pure Dublin accent – Mark says he speaks the closest thing the Irish have to English. Gleeson & Andrea Riseborough are an attractive couple – both pale and thin. Her face has kind of an angelic, Renaissance beauty, but she’s so thin, I can hardly stand watching her. Hope she survives the Oscar flap of last year. I suppose she’ll hardly get nominated this year. I also suppose her thinness was perfect for To Leslie. Haven’t watched it but I think I can stream on Amazon Prime.

On my way to Lightbox, I took my last day photo of the CN Tower from the corner of Richmond and Duncan.

We decided to go for brunch at Le Petit Dejeuner, back in our neighborhood from when we stayed at the loft near St. Lawrence Market. I contacted the owners of that place – we had stayed there in both 2015 and 2017, because we liked it so well – and they had stopped AirBNB-ing it, because they sold it to raise the money to rehab a big old house they bought. Anyways, we were considering either Le Petit Dejeuner or the George Street Diner because they were both on George St. near Adelaide, my biking route. Neither took reserves, but since I biked over and got in line and we hardly had to wait much once Mark got there. We opted for Le Petit Dejeuner because it always seemed full when we walked past it when we were in the neighborhood, and because it has waffles, which we got. I had mine with scrambled eggs and Mark has his eggs Benedict style.

While we were at the restaurant we figured out that the People’s Choice Award went to American Fiction – had to check X, née Twitter. So, essentially we called it – remember, American Fiction was our first movie of the festival that we walked out of saying, “that was really good”, with no caveats. And it also meant that we didn’t need to try to get tickets for any of the People’s Choice screenings. I hope the author of the book it was based on, Erasure by Percival Everett, gets some recognition now the movie’s doing well. I read an interview with Cord Jefferson where he said he showed the movie to Everett who said he liked how Jefferson had taken the novel and created his own art.

So, we headed back to the AirBNB and got my bike loaded into the car in the bowels of the parking ramp, the lowest level, level 5. I wanted to make sure the car started, and it did. We did as much packing as we could, and just relaxed until it was time to leave for our last movie, His Three Daughters. Which was quite good, three sisters dealing with their dad dying in hospice in his small NYC apartment. I thought it might be a little bit funnier than it was, since one of the sisters, the seemingly slacker pot-smoking one, who probably has the closest relationship with the dad, was played by Natasha Lyonne. The other two sisters were Carrie Coon (a UW-Madison alum, IMDB tells me – I did not know that when watching her in Gilded Age), the driven one with at least one teenage kid who lives in Brooklyn but never seems to visit much, and Elizabeth Olsen as the spacey one with a much younger child who she’s never been away from, who lives in California.We took the subway to the movie, which was shown in the IMAX at Scotiabank – which was a little odd for a talky movie like thisone was; it almost felt like their faces were pushed up against the screen

After the movie we decided that we couldn’t leave Toronto without getting burgers at Matty’s Patties, because we like everyone else, have been watching Matty on the Bear. We took the street car out, and I had the single cheeseburger and fries and Mark got the Matty with onion rings. There is kind of a common thread in the Yelp reviews that the single burger like I got could be inhaled by the average young guy in less time than it takes to get which is usually a 15-minute wait, vs. the Matty that’s  7 ounces with pickles & onion, and a lot more heft. We had a little trouble ordering, figuring out what was a burger a la carte and what was combo, because the place was kind of noisy and the guy at the counter had a thick British accent, from some part of London. While I was sitting waiting for the burgers, I overheard him recognize the accent of another Brit who came in and they talked about London, and the counter guy said he had not been in Canada for very long. It reminded me of one of the funnier things in Alice & Jack: since Alice seems to have dumped him, Jack starts seeing someone else. They get pregnant, and get as far as sitting in the black cab outside the abortion clinic, where they decide to get married and keep the baby. The woman says you know this child with have an English accent (not Irish like you). Anyways, this all meant that we ended up with an extra Matty, that we gave to the guy sitting next to us who seemed to be having the “gee that went down quick feeling” expressed in the Yelp reviews, so was glad to take our extra. And even we ate fast enough that our remaining streetcar and subway rides back to the AirBNB were all free transfers, and I think the fact that it was Sunday night, off peak time, might have added to that.

There were a bunch of Toronto things we usually do that we didn’t this trip. We never ate at Senator, although it seems to have shi-shi’ed up a bit to get through pandemic.

We never went to see the cows (sculptures at Dominion Square in a grassy area between several Mies van der Rohe buildings).

The farthest north we went was Whole Foods, which is only about Bloor Street, and just generally didn’t get around Toronto quite as much. I guess some of this was because of me not walking long distances, and also because we packed in 28 movies, although that’s the same number we saw in 2019 and 2017. But that only means we’ll have to go back.

Meanwhile, Jasper turned 10 months as soon as we got back, and he has two toofs and is pulling up on things. I went to take care of him on Wednesday and got a lot of nice pics but I’ll save those for another post.

So here’s his 10 months portrait, and one other shot from Wednesday, to close.