Thursday was a 3-movie day but not starting until 2:30, so we walked to the Distillery District for breakfast. We investigated the menu at Cluny Bistro, but decided on an old favorite, a meatloaf sandwich and a bacon & egg sandwich from Brick Street Bakery. We ate our sandwiches outside, got coffee at Balzac’s, and then walked to Princess of Wales, the fancy theater with reserved seats.
Flowered peace sign at Distillery District, with a dog named Ollie. There was another sign that said Love, but I didn’t take a picture of that one; it had all white flowers.
Flowered peace sign at Distillery District, no Ollie.
Posters in Balzac’s coffee. I thought the King Crimson poster must be a historical leftover, but it actually happened Saturday night.
Since we had reserved seats, we stopped by to visit the cows at the Dominion Centre. When we walked back past it later, I said you know, I think the towers were designed by Mies van der Rohe, it looks just like Chicago without the post office.
Lucy in the Sky was the second movie we saw at TIFF with a Beatles lyric in the title (after Blue Suburban Skies). It’s Natalie Portman as astronaut Lucy Cola, who loves being in space and wants to go back, but get thwarted. It’s based on Lisa Nowak, who’s the astronaut who drove cross country to confront another astronaut, her boyfriend, supposedly wearing an adult diaper so she wouldn’t have to stop. The ladies in the rest room line Friday thought it was horrible. They didn’t like Portman as Lucy – they thought she wasn’t tough enough, and the part should’ve gone to someone like Hillary Swank. I thought Matthew Crawley (Dan Stephens) and Don Draper (Jon Hamm), who played her husband and boyfriend were both good. I had trouble figuring out when it was supposed to be – the cars looked like mid-2000s, but there didn’t seem to be enough computers or phones.
Next up, Dirt Music, a romance set in the “stunning landscape” of Western Australia, based on a book by Tim Winton. It was one of our few movies at Ryerson Theatre; mostly everything’s been at Princess of Wales with the reserved seats, sponsored by VISA, or the Scotiabank Multiplex. It was kind of empty even though some film makers were there – I think the film had shown several other times at the Festival already. It meant I had a whole chair for my backpack. It was really beautiful to watch, both the people, Kelly MacDonald & Garrett Hedlund, and the scenery. Music was important in the film and there were some nice performances of folk songs. I liked I Drew My Ship Into the Harbor/I Will Set My Ship in Order, which seems to be Scottish, most traditionally by Shirley Collins. Of course there’s a version by Colin Meloy, too, but this version by Ossian is the most similar lyrically to what’s in the movie. I haven’t been able to figure out if the actors did the singing or if it was someone else. The young women walking behind us when we came out, who seemed to have liked looking at Kelly MacDonald & Garrett Hedlund, as much as I did couldn’t get over that Kelly MacDonald is 43. I almost turned back to them and said plenty of women look their best in the 40s – for sure I did.
Our third and final movie of Thursday was Blow the Man Down, a more Indie film made by two American women, Danielle Krudy and Bridget Savage Cole, their first feature film, although they both obviously had lots of experience in the industry. It’s about two sisters in a small Maine town, trying to cover up a crime. Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who played Marnie’s awful husband in Girls, has a small part as a sleazey dude working for the local madam, but the cast is dominated by women. Again, music was important because there were choruses of fishermen singing sea shanties, to open the film, and to propel the action in certain places. It was funny and sharp and we liked it a lot.
Friday was our first four-movie day. We’d been in training for it all week.
We began with Lyrebird, with Guy Pearce as the art forger Hans van Meergeren. There have been a couple of books about van Meergeren, and two came out the same year – The Forger’s Spell, by Edward Dolnick, and The Man who Made Vermeers, by Jonathan Lopez. The movie was based on the latter, that the NYT blog post says is more about the man than the technique. Guy Pearce is well-cast as van Meergeren, who both authors describe with words like small and dapper; Joop Piller, the lead investigator, is played by Claes Bang and looks to me a lot like David de Wied, my father’s research partner, and the dad of our host family, when we lived in the Netherlands in 1968. I liked this one a lot – it was a little over-dramatized, with someone creating a distraction so paint thinner could be thrown on one of the paintings in the courtroom during van Meergeren’s trial, but believebale nonetheless. And, this was not explained in the film, but a Lyrebird is a kind of Australian peacock, that can mimic other bird’s calls.
We had time to walk to Saint Lawrence Market to get a bacon sandwich and pastries for lunch. We got back bacon, what we’d call Canadian bacon. I think the side bacon, or what the Brits call streaky, or what us dumb Americans just call bacon, would’ve been a bit fatter and more decadent. We ate the sandwich at the Market, then got coffee at yet another Balzac’s, the Saint Lawrence Market one, to eat with the pastries at the dog fountain.
[portfolio_slideshow pagerpos=disabled]
The afternoon movies started with The Last Porno Show, filmed here in Toronto, a father-son story about a guy who inherits his estranged dad’s run down porn theater, in a neighborhood that’s starting to gentrify. In a nutshell, I liked it, and loved the ending, but wish it had been funnier.
Next was the True History of the Kelly Gang. In the lobby of Princess of Wales before our next film, where I bought what the bartender told me was the last can of the local IPA they were selling, Muskoka Detour, I talked to a guy wearing a TIFF employee badge, and he said he walked out of Kelly Gang, because of the language. It was weird and just got weirder as it progressed. The first hint to me that historical accurateness was not the point here was Ned Kelly as a child in the 1840s, wearing a knit t-shirt of a variety that didn’t exist until at least the 1950s. By the end of the movie, Kelly and his gang are waiting for the British in a bunker covered in 21st century graffiti. I mean that’s fine, Kelly is a legend, afterall, so it doesn’t have to be realistic. One of the reviewers (Collider, often snarky) said, “True History of the Kelly Gang didn’t need to be a completely accurate account of Ned Kelly’s life. It just needed to be compelling, and it fails. D-“. All the characters were despicable; Ned’s mom is particularly awful. She says the mark of a good mother is children who are ready to die for her, and then coos at a baby, “would you die for mommy?” The only one I halfway liked was the corrupt British constable, played with perfect insouciance by Nicholas Hoult; some other review said with some of the mannerisms of Hugh Grant, which is kind of funny, because Hoult was the boy in About A Boy with Grant, 17 years ago.
That last movie we were going into, me with my beer, was Ford v. Ferrari, and it was a good antidote to Kelly Gang: good old American ingenuity, and going fast, like the Right Stuff. Christian Bale was perfect as Ken Miles, and there were some nice bits with Caitriona Balfe as his wife Mollie. She got to do a little more than be the left at home wife; they seemed to be more of a partnership than that. Matt Damon didn’t have a lot to do as Carroll Shelby, but the chemistry between him and Bale was equally good to Bale and Balfe.
We walked home happy, but didn’t get back to the apartment till almost 1:00, and somehow neither of us could sleep. It was either the coffee we drank between Kelly Gang and Ford v., or too much screen time. Or some combination of both. We made it through Saturday’s four movies somehow, though – tell you about that, next.