We are into a regular schedule of 3 movies per day, starting at noon-ish. And since we’ve already got 3, no getting up at 7:00 to try to get tickets to add more.
Tuesday: We started with Family Fang, and despite the fairly snarky review in the Guardian we liked it. Jason Bateman just can’t get a break. More than anything it was about how much unbelievably bad parenting happens all the time. Just like Robyn Hitchcock songs (Evolove, Uncorrected Personality Traits ….)
We went and got lunch at Caplansky’s Deli. We ordered too much food, but we wanted to taste everything, even if we couldn’t finish it all. We split a smoked meat Reuben and a BBQ briskit sandwich on a bun, and an order of fries, and a small poutine with smoke meat gravy. Then we walked though the park to get to the Bader Theatre for The Meddler, with Susan Sarandon as a mom who’s way too much in her daughter’s life. We made friends with the couple standing next to us in line, and ended up eating at a restaurant they recommended on Wednesday night. The Meddler was kind of a mess – lots of cute vignettes, but the story never really jelled – but it was made really pleasant by Sarandon’s performance. The Guardian liked it.
We had enough time to come back to the apartment for iced coffee and a slightly odd ginger cookie with pink peppercorns on top that we bought at the shishi coffee place across the street (linking to a saved image, because tho their website is quite nice, wonder how long it’ll be there!?), before we headed to our last movie of the night, Full Contact, about a drone pilot trying to get over killing innocent civilians. It was the one movie of the Fest I seriously thought about walking out of. Almost no dialog, too much drifting in the main character’s inner life, while he was sleeping next to an open fire, killing food in the wild, shooting people, hiding in a wedge between rocks.
Wednesday: The day began with Louder than Bombs, another family drama, with Gabriel Byrne trying to cope with his two sons after his famous photo journalist wife’s death. One of the best parts is the boys watching their dad on YouTube as Dr. Scanlon in Hello Again.
We only had time to exit the theater, grab a coffee, and go line up again before Man Down. Which was another war-related story, that had the germ of a good idea, but ultimately didn’t hang together. None of the relationships felt real. The descriptions all talk about how it’s set in post-apocalyptic America, but, spoiler alert, the post-apocalypse is only in the mind of the main character, played by Shia LeBeof. There’s this moment where all the bombed out skyscrapers turn back into shiny glass and metal, and you know it’s his hallucination.
On the wall
We had time to get a real dinner at Tutti Matti, before our last movie, Zoom. Which was really charming, a cartoonist drawing a graphic novel, an author writing a story, and a director making a movie, who are all controlling each other.
Dinner was great – we started with burrata salad, with peaches and tomato and basil, followed by a pasta with beef short ribs, and finally the fish shown – it was a crispy skinned sea bass, served with a little dish of pesto and what they called caponata, which was kind of deconstructed. Caramelized onions, peppers, squash and capers served in that little cast iron pot.
Zoom was shown in the Scotiabank multiplex, in the IMAX, so waiting was standing between the cattle stanchions and vending machines and popcorn concessions. When we got into the theater, I thought it smelled like cattle, too. Even though I enjoyed listening to our line mates chat – they were locals and talking about volunteering at TIFF and one of them said she knew the mom of one of the actors, also a local – good thing we got our touch of grown up luxury at Tutti Matti.
