Last two days of TIFF50

And back in Madison, nine days+ already.

Saturday started with Glenrothan, about a Scottish family and their whiskey distilling business and the son who left and the one who stayed home. Verging on Hallmark Channel sappiness, but with great actors, Alan Cumming as the son who left and Brian Cox as the one who stayed, with Shirley Henderson as the faithful family retainer/best friend. Brian Cox directed. And filmed in Scotland so great scenery.

For lunch we walked over to the Saint Lawrence Market and had the battle of the bacon sandwiches. Mark has always liked the peameal bacon better, what we call Canadian bacon, and I like the side bacon, streaky bacon, better. Ever since the first time we had one at TIFF.

Here’re some possibly better pics, peameal in 2019, and side in 2017. Really both are good. The test was a little skewed, though, because somehow my order at the side bacon place got messed up and I got ribs instead that I had to take back. I should’ve known from the size of the package, but the booth people were quite gracious in exchanging. I hadn’t gotten any Canadian cash, because so many places are cashless, but ended up with about $4 CA  in the exchange of the ribs for the sandwich, a couple of loonies and a toonie. We bought a Montreal sweet cheese bagel that I think I paid for with my card, and some bananas, the latter turning out to be like $1.28 Canadian. I had one of the loonies in my hand and completely forgot the toonie in my pocket but the fruit market lady decided $1 even was enough for the bananas. I dropped the toonie in the guitar case of the guy busking outside the market. He smelled strongly of cigarettes and I bet that’s where the money went, but he was playing Country Joe McDonald when we were on the way in and Dylan when we were n the way out, so OK.

We took our purchases back to the apartment and had a bit of the sweet cheese bagel. It tasted like I remembered and I liked it, but Mark declared it not sweet, when it was supposed to be.

 

Movie #2 of Saturday was Drivers Ed, a lightweight, cute and funny, 1990’s-style comedy set in the 2020s, where a bunch of kids steal the drivers ed car to drive to Winston-Salem because the girlfriend of the leader of the bunch, played by Sam Nivola, is in school there. Actually the mismatched group of kids, with Nivola’s film-school-bound boy, a pretty & popular girl, a supersmart girl, and a stoner boy, was about the most realistic part of the movie to me, because in my high school experience those groupings really did happen. Unrealistic maybe but it was funny and fun to watch. Kumail Nanjiani and Molly Shannon have parts in it playing supposedly responsible adults; Nanjiani is the drivers ed teacher, and he’s weird and funny, Shannon is the high school principal and she’s just weird. And ineffective. This Variety review pretty much expresses my opinions. It doesn’t seem to have a distribution deal as yet – probably going direct to streaming.

In between movies we stopped in at Hot Black for a cookie and a coffee. I think I took tea, and my best pic of their jam cookies.

We finished the day with New Year’s Rev, kind of a midnight madness movie, playing a little earlier; it started at 6:30. And in the “nice” cinema, TIFF Lightbox. This was a ’90s movie actually set in the ’90s – the only phones were corded or flip phones. I loved it – it’s another one where underage kids go on a long car trip in a stolen vehicle. Three kids have a punk band called Analog Dogs. They go to an in-store with Green Day and hand Billy Joe Armstrong a demo tape. The older brother of the lead singer/guitar player pranks them into thinking that they are going to open for Green Day in L.A. on New Year’s Eve, and they end up stealing his car and taking off. The look and feel of it all down to the lead singer meeting a pretty girl and them taking a detour to play at an outdoor free concert is so much like my kids growing up years, blurry video and all. Green Day themselves produced it so there’s plenty of legit Green Day footage. And the ending with Billy Joe is perfect.

I think we just went back to the Airbnb after and had an early night.

Sunday morning we nibbled on leftover pastries at the Airbnb.

Movies started with The Man in My Basement, horror in the style of Get Out, where things start off relatively normal and get weirder as the movie proceeds. It’s based on a novel by Walter Mosley, and as the NYT review suggests, I think I might go back and read the book. It’s about Charles Blakey (Corey Hawkins), who’s living in his family’s home that he’s unable to pay for in a historically Black neighborhood of Sag Harbor. He tries to make some money selling off family heirlooms, but working with a dealer it turns out it will be some time before he sees any cash. Among the artifacts in the house are some African masks that interest the art dealer and Blakey gets a bit obsessed with them as well. Since selling heirlooms isn’t going to net quick cash, Blakey accepts an offer he receives from an off-seeming white guy, Anniston Bennet (Willem Dafoe) to temporarily rent his basement for a huge sum of money. Bennet builds a cell for himself in the basement and that’s just the start of the strangeness. I probably should read the book, because as the movie started getting overpoweringly strange, like Blakey having nightmares where his skin peels off to reveal one of the masks and him coming home to take Bennet his food and finding Bennet naked in the cell, we walked out. With about 30 minutes to go. I think it’ll be on Hulu soon.

We didn’t have much time, even with leaving early, before our next film, Nuremburg, so we just kind of walked around a bit and then went to the multiplex, Scotiabank. Like I said on insta, Nuremburg is Hollywood-ized history, but definitely a cautionary tale for right now in the US, especially seeing it roughly 4 days after Charlie Kirk got shot. Some of the things Russell Crow as Hermann Göring says on the stand are especially chilling, like after WWI we in Germany needed a way to feel better about ourselves, and we decided that representative government did not suit our purposes. Rami Malek plays Douglas Kelley, a military psychiatrist who has come to Nuremburg to interview the Nazi war criminals hoping to verify his theory that there’s something different about men who could do such evil. Leo Woodall, playing a translator, gets the best line in the film telling Rami’s doctor that regular Germans let the Nazis happen. There’s nothing different about the bad men. 

After Nuremburg, we had time to walk to Matty Matheson’s Matty’s Patty’s and eat our burgers in a large park nearby that was just packed with people, arts & crafts and food vendor booths, drumming circle, pickle ball courts, people just hanging out.

 

We were full but still had time to stop for gelato at a place recommended by the lady at the next table at Sunny’s Chinese, and it really was the best gelato of the three places in Toronto that we tried.

Our last movie of the festival was Maddie’s Secret, written, directed, produced, and starred in by the comedian John Early. The TIFF employee/introducer was one of the best of the fest – this film was the only time we saw them – and they talked about how the movie was camp, and played us a cute recording of Early, who they’d talked to that day. The movie is about a woman who is a food influencer, who is concealing the fact that they have suffered from bulimia. It is charming and funny, but I had trouble with what is it saying about women’s bodies and how so many of us hate our bodies, because Maddie is played by a man, albeit a gender fluid man. The review in Variety I think echos some of my concern.

So that’s it for movies.

Monday morning we got up and had one last coffee at the library Balzac’s.

Back to the Airbnb, checked out by 11:00 on the dot as requested, and we rode the subway then the light rail to the airport.

Travel home was OK – United kept switching our departure gate in Toronto, but nothing very far away, and getting through customs was easy enough, although we should’ve gone to the kiosks to swipe passports instead of getting in line. And the bus service back to Madison at first said our bus was 45 minutes late, rush hour traffic from the Loop, but they were prepared and had a bus to put us on, and we only needed to change in Janesville to get home. So no travel hassle outside the ordinary.

Then things got busy. Tuesday I had yoga followed by a Dr.’s appointment that confirmed that despite getting some upsetting test results before TIFF, all was well.

I started practicing for a cooking class I’m teaching this coming Sunday, fall fruits and caramel.

Sunday was the most crazy, two volunteer gigs and then a show, Big Sandy at Bur Oak. Poorly attended, I think the bookers failed to consider that it was the Willy St Fair.

Then I poured beer at the Willy Street Fair, where there was a bubble person next to the beer tent. While the Packers managed to blow a 10-0 lead in the last 4 minutes of the game.

Monday Susan took me out for drinks & snacks for a belated birthday.

The view out of the bathroom windows was almost better than the bar. I took the bus home and it was verging on the cosmopolitan level of Toronto, with the bus quite full on a Monday evening around 8:00, but the crowd was younger – there wasn’t the mix of ages we were seeing on the subway at night in Toronto.

Tuesday was Rosh Hashanah, and while I didn’t do any other celebrating, I made a giant challah. Not quite round, but ovoid, anyhow.

We saw Nathanial Rateliff and Trampled by Turtles on the 18th (my pics are too awful to share, but it was a good show), and when I was in the bathroom line I realized I’d lost an earring. I found it in the driveway yesterday. See overleaf. And all shall be well.