Another TIFF, come and gone. Time to run over the Best-o-the-Fest(tm)!
Honourable mentions go to the following movies:
The Host - For showing us that the modern monster movie can be GREAT.
Black Sheep & Fido - For showing us that there's a lot of room for creativity in the Zombie genre, two fantastic movies that even non-zombie lovers will enjoy.
Starter For Ten - What's with all the good romantic comedies this year?
Exiled - For telling A Tale Of Five Hitmen, wonderfully entertaining.
Princess - For showing us what animation is best at: Doing what can't be done with live action!
Now let's run down the Top 5!
5) Winning the "Romantic Comedy With Superpowers" award: Cashback!
4) Winning the "Full Bodied Kung Fu" award: Jade Warrior!
3) Winning the "Romantic Comedy In Another Country" award: Outsourced!
2) Winning the "Drop-Dead Hilarious" award: Severance!
And our surprise top movie of the TIFF...
1) The Last Winter! If anyone else ever sees this movie, I would be unsurprised if it didn't get rated "one of the top films of all time", just like this one.
With the formalities out of the way, time to reflect a bit...
Personal Accomplishment:
I managed 26 movies this year, missing 0 showings. That's 3 over last years accomplishment and 6 behind the year before. So I guess that means next year will be 29 movies and 0 missed.
TIFF Accomplishment:
The new theatre (the Al Green) is small, with a small screen and small sound. Also, it has the really bad seats that we remember from the first year at Ryerson! On the plus side, it's got a good slope to it. The Varsity was only showing movies from about 8pm onwards most days, so I didn't get any movies in it till the last day of the fest (where it actually showed movies all day! Wow!). What, you might ask, is the reason for this? Apparently, they used the Varsity to show Press Screenings all festival.
So in previous years the buzz was "yeah, TIFF, it's as good as Sundance!". More recently, it was "better than Sundance, just not as good as Cannes!". This year, it was "Perhaps second only to Cannes". So it looks like the global opinion is that the TIFF is becoming "the film festival to go to" and Cannes has been overburdened by its glamour and glitz, now only a showcase of red carpet hoopla. Only look at this, more red carpet garbage this year than any year before. So in another 5 years I expect to hear that Sundance is the film festival to go to and they'll have tossed all the non-Gala movies out of the TIFF. Lord, I hope not.
The whole "advance ticket" thing is definitely a well-tuned machine now. Lots of movies are letting in very early. The only non-improvement to the festival is that there seemed to be fewer Q&A sessions than there used to be.
On the "massive plus" side: 11 movies so good that I had to mention them at the top of this post! 11! Only 1 truly awful movie this year. The quality level is simply amazing.
So the TIFF was fantastic, but I am QUITE worried about future TIFFs...