TIFF, the end

Sunday was the last day of the fest, and my last day in Toronto.

Our last movie was Radioactive, based on the book by Lauren Redniss, that was the Go Big Read book during the 2012-13 school year.

The movie was live action, rather than animated, and the director is the author of another graphic novel, Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis, 4 comic books about her childhood in Iran.

Radioactive is live action (the Persepolis movie is animated), and it stuck to the storyline of the book, including images of the dancer Loie Fuller (born in Illinois) who inspired Mme. Curie, and flash forwards to the impacts of the Curies’ discovery of radium, like the atom bomb, and Hiroshima, and Chernobyl. These were really elaborately staged, and I wondered why they didn’t do those sections animated. Satrapi was there for a Q&A after. It was only old white guys asking questions, one of whom asked why the flashbacks were integrated into the film instead of at the end like usual – “because that’s how it was in the book”, I muttered. Mark thought my question was better and I should’ve raised my hand. As an old white woman I’m a step less privileged afterall. We usually don’t stay for the Q&As because people are so insufferable, they just want to talk about themselves, not ask real questions, but it was the last day, and we wanted to hear Satrapi.

The Guardian didn’t like it but I did.

While we were in Radioactive tickets for People’s Choice went on sale. You used to have to go queue up for the free tickets, but now that TIFF has gone to Ticketmaster, you can get them online, but it sold out before we could get any. The winner was JoJo Rabbit. It’ll be in commercial release soon enough – we’ve already seen the trailer.

So, we went to dinner. Woodlot, farm to table and most things coming out of the wood-fired oven. I didn’t take many pictures of food the rest of the week, so tried to make up for it in this meal, although all my photos are the awful, too-dark kind you see on Yelp. We started by splitting a tomato salad, that might’ve been the best part of the meal: all kinds of little tomatoes, lemony vinaigrette, croutons made of the same good bread we got served a basket of. I tried an IPA. Mark got the porkchop and I had stuffed delicata, with wheat berries and what they called savory granola, toasty nuts & grains. We had a side of roasted broccoli from the wood oven, too. And a caramel custard with strawberries and meringue kisses. I had a Poire William that could’ve been gasoline.

[portfolio_slideshow pagerpos=disabled]

We walked home after.