Toronto International Film Festival 2016

[Stay Puft]

http://www.tiff.net/?filter=festival
September 8 to 18.

The schedule just went up. Been busy lately and hadn't even had time to look at it before.

So much I want to see this year, and so many schedule conflicts! This is gonna be tough.

Anyone else going this year? What are you planning to see?

After a preliminary glance at the announced films I've got my eye out for:

two new films from Pablo LarraÃ*n (Neruda and Jackie)
two new films from Werner Herzog (Salt and Fire and Into the Inferno)
two new films from Jim Jarmusch (Paterson and Gimme Danger)
Albert Serra's latest assault on TIFF audiences (starring Jean-Pierre Léaud!)
Maren Ade's Toni Erdmann
Denis Villeneuve's No, not that Arrival
Mia Hansen-Løve's Things to Come (with Isabelle Huppert!)
Kim Ki-duk's new film and when was the last time I got to say that sincerely?
Michael Dudok de Wit's The Red Turtle (a Ghibli co-production)
Terrence Malick's Voyage of Time (90m Cate Blanchett version)
In Conversation With... Hiam Abbass, Isabelle Huppert, Zhang Ziyi, Sonia Braga... literally all of these really
Kiyoshi Kurosawa's first film outside of Japan (I mean that could go either way but I'll give it a go)
Mijke de Jong's Layla M.
Iko Uwais kicking and punching his way through the latest Mo Brothers joint
Adam Wingard's Blair Witch reboot (ok not really but eh fuck it why not)

[Henry Gale]

Anyone else going this year? What are you planning to see?


Absolutely, busyness permitting. My top targets for the festival are definitely La La Land and the 90-min Voyage of Time you mentioned. Also interested in Bayona's A Monster Calls, and kind of holding off on looking at the entire line-up schedule for fear that I'll get too attached to things I can't schedule and/or afford.


Denis Villeneuve's No, not that Arrival
Michael Dudok de Wit's The Red Turtle (a Ghibli co-production)
Kim Ki-duk's new film and when was the last time I got to say that sincerely?

Considering these too. Actually saw Kim's Pieta at the festival a few years back. Fun!


Adam Wingard's Blair Witch reboot (ok not really but eh fuck it why not)

Thought about this too but it comes out only five days after its initial premiere, so I'll sacrifice seeing it amongst fun of the festival in the perfect sort of audience for a regular viewing price (likely still in Scotiabank anyway haha).

[Winston*]

Michael Dudok de Wit's The Red Turtle (a Ghibli co-production)


This is good.

[Henry Gale]

Of the ones I knew I could definitely see, so far I snagged tickets to Arrival and A Monster Calls.

This new deal of having Ticketmaster's site selling the same tickets congruently to the TIFF one at the same time for more money is very wack though. Even if that surcharge also means it's significantly easier to deal with.

[Stay Puft]

The experience of buying single tickets gets worse every year I swear to god.

What is the rationale behind the wildly fluctuating ticket prices? Why is ticketmaster powering all of this? Why are tickets on both the TIFF site and the ticketmaster site at different prices and with differing quantities? What the fuck is going on?

Also, TIFF's new website is the worst. The worst.

And fuck ticketmaster.

[Henry Gale]

I feel ya.

Perhaps if we revolt then things can go back to how they once were! [Gets a flashback of sitting, waiting on the phone line for up to an hour a decade ago.. Wonders if it was ever decent....]

[Stay Puft]

Anyways, I got five tickets just to confirm a few viewings. Will probably just wing it for the rest (and maybe rush Voyage of Time). I'm seeing:

Things to Come (Mia Hansen-Løve)
Headshot (The Mo Brothers)
Daguerrotype (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
The Death of Louis XIV (Albert Serra)
Salt and Fire (Werner Herzog)

Hilariously, The Death of Louis XIV was the most expensive ticket at $32 (I got the rest for $25 and the Midnight Madness movie was $29).
Albert Serra commanding high ticket prices at TIFF. What a time to be alive. (This screening is going to be amazing.)

[Ivan Drago]

Of the ones I knew I could definitely see, so far I snagged tickets to Arrival and A Monster Calls.

They pushed the release date for this to Christmas. Needless to say, I am jealous of you.

[Henry Gale]

They pushed the release date for this to Christmas. Needless to say, I am jealous of you.

I knooowww. It suddenly going from October to Christmas (and January wider release) was a big last-minute shift in it going from "Oh that could be cool" to "Must see" for me.

[Stay Puft]

I just noticed they've added screenings for the IMAX version of Voyage of Time. Hmmm. I may try to see that one instead...

[Stay Puft]

Quickly checking in. Here's what I've seen so far:

Things to Come (Mia Hansen-Løve) ****
Headshot (Timo Tjahjanto, Kimo Stamboel) ***
Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience (Terrence Malick) ***½

More on these later. But first, a few random musings on the fest so far...

TIFF has a new tagline this year ("infinite views"), and the logo is actually pretty snazzy, looking something like a special effects reel for Doctor Strange. It looked particularly cool in IMAX when I saw Voyage of Time tonight.

Otherwise, there are a lot of old ads repeating this year that kinda dampen the start of every screening. RBC is playing those damn screenplay ads AGAIN and the Midnight Madness crowd, most notably, is having none of it (they're shouting and jeering through the ads and yelling "NO RERUNS" every time an old one appears). It definitely smacks of lazy, when TIFF creates new logos, but then almost everything else (even the commercials telling you to vote for the Grolsch People's Choice Award) is recycled from last year. Update that shit and make it thematically coherent at least.

I love that the biggest story so far this year is about Scotiabank's escalator (it even has its own twitter account now, haha). Seriously, though, amongst the critics I'm following on twitter, there seems to be a general consensus that this year is super good, with lots of ironic "film is dead" jokes being made. That's encouraging, and I'm happy to say it has been a pretty good fest so far, movie quality wise, for me, too. Three films in and I've greatly enjoyed all of them, even handing out four stars for Mia's newest (although I'm a little afraid I may have started with what will invariably be my favorite of the fest, and it's downhill from here).

Snowden seems like quite a bust, however. I'm hearing nothing but negative comments (and some pretty scathing, at that) about the film. Oh well, I wasn't planning on seeing it.

The early rumblings I've heard re: Daugerrotype have been pretty bad, too. I'm seeing that one tomorrow. Oops? (I've got a soft spot for Kiyoshi Kurosawa, though, so we'll see...)

[Stay Puft]

Checking in again:

Daguerrotype (Kiyoshi Kurosawa) **½
The Death of Louis XIV (Albert Serra) ***½
The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography (Errol Morris) ***

I love getting five days deep into a festival and having exhaustion kick in (I've been working the whole time on top of this), resulting in nodding off during a couple movies and kinda just trancing through the last day and maybe I'm losing my mind now or did Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Errol Morris really kinda make the same movie? Film festivals! I'm too old for this shit.

Also, it seems Toronto is actually warming up to Albert Serra. The screening was a success! The film was well received! I don't think anybody walked out? Welcome to the party, Toronto. (This might be his best movie yet. Maybe. I'll have to give it another look and also revisit Birdsong, which I still hold dear in my heart and is my current favorite.)

Lots of talk about the Nate Parker film. I haven't followed it closely, but I heard about the press conference and yeesh. I dunno about that. I'm hearing from a lot of people that Moonlight is the movie I should be seeking out instead. That one does sound pretty damn good (and I see E saw it at Telluride), but unfortunately I work during the only screenings. I'll have to make a note to catch up with it later.

I couldn't get in to see The Red Turtle. I'm a little bummed about that.

Blair Witch was sold out so I wasn't even going to bother rushing or anything, I'll just see it after the fest. Lots of mixed reviews, though. Fingers crossed, I guess. (Not the biggest Wingard fan but on paper the concept sounds like a great sequel.)

Anyways, the escalator at Scotiabank is working again. :cool:

[Ezee E]

Yeah, I'm definitely curious at how Moonlight does away from Telluride considering it's such a darling at the fest with the director having staff-ties for so long.

[Stay Puft]

Three more:

The 4%: Film's Gender Problem (Caroline Suh) **½
Salt and Fire (Werner Herzog) ***
ARQ (Tony Elliott) **

And I'm hoping to see three more before it's over. I've got one lined up tonight, plus I'll try for two tomorrow. I'm thinking I might try to hit the free screening of the People's Choice Award winner. I've never done that before, and even though the winner hasn't been announced yet, fuck it, it's free. TIFF gets more expensive every year, and this year saw big jumps in prices (those galas, LOL). I've been cutting some corners here to save money, so for example, when I couldn't make it to Nocturama (lots of good buzz, really wanted to see it, super disappointed I couldn't) my fallback plan was ARQ, also playing at the festival, but also streaming on Netflix as of its release yesterday. I had to put in overtime this week so when my schedule got fucked, it was straight home yesterday and ARQ on Netflix, then right to bed. That's how I TIFF now. I haven't even made it to another Midnight Madness screening because I can't even physically stay up that late.

The premiere of Salt and Fire was pretty great, though. As in, it played even worse here than My Son My Son What Have Ye Done. As in, I actually heard people saying "that was worse than My Son My Son, and I didn't think that was possible" on the way out. Obviously, I had a good time. If you hated My Son My Son, steer clear. If you dug it, though, as I did, then Salt and Fire may be of interest. They're certainly in the same mold and share a similar sense of humor.

[Henry Gale]

My final tally before I too go for the free People's Choice screening tomorrow (which could very well be one of the below):

Strange Weather (dir. Katherine Dieckmann) — **½ / 6.0
Voyage of Time: Life's Journey (dir. Terrence Malick) — *** / 7.0
The Handmaiden (dir. Park Chan-Wook) — ***½ / 8.7
A Monster Calls (dir. J.A. Bayona) — **½ / 6.2
Loving (dir. Jeff Nichols) — *** / 7.8
Arrival (dir. Denis Villeneuve) — **** / 8.9
Manchester by the Sea (dir. Kenneth Lonergan) — **** / 9.5
The Bad Batch (dir. Ana Lily Amirpour) — ***½ / 8.1
La La Land (dir. Damien Chazelle, 2016) — **** / 9.5

Both the best and most time I've ever had at the festival since I first attended a full decade ago. Friends' volunteer vouchers and free passes were lifesavers for my wallet though. Managed to keep my spending from veering into the triple-digit dollar range. Met some cool people in line from all over. And obviously the movies just really, really brought it. The fact that I saw as many as I did and there's still a good dozen I'd have loved to, both before and after hearing great things, is just awesome.

Definitely a weird time of the year when you can casually say you saw Amy Adams twice in two days.

[Stay Puft]

And three more to put the cherry on top:

Layla M. (Mijke de Jong) ***
Into the Inferno (Werner Herzog) ***
Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt) ***½

A great finish to a great year. The first and last movies I saw were the two best movies I saw, and I couldn't ask for much more. I've seen some pretty bad movies here in the past, some that have even outright offended me to my core, but damn what a hot streak this year. Out of 12 films, I'd probably only nay the one I watched on Netflix haha. And I didn't even hate that one, it's just sorta mediocre and forgettable relative to the other great films I saw. TIFF had a pretty impressive, diverse slate of extremely high quality films this year. I'm seeing this sentiment echoed all over. It's great when Henry Gale and I, for example, can both walk away hugely impressed with (mostly) everything we saw, and we both saw a good share this year, and the only overlap in our schedules was a movie we didn't even see the same version of!

I mostly trudged through the summer season, but this is maybe the first year where TIFF really turned the whole year around for me. So many great movies, and so many countless more I still want to see.