Friday we saw four movies and all of them were quite good, plus we ate delicious upscale Chinese at another Chef Zach recommendation, Sunny’s Chinese.
The first movie of the day was The Christophers, directed by Stephen Soderburgh, about an aging artist Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen) whose messy life seemed to me to be similar to Lucien Freud’s. The set up is that the artist’s horrible children played by James Corden and Jessica Gunning hire an artist/art restorer/art forger Lori (Michaela Coel), because they think if Lori gets hired as Julian’s assistant, she can sneak into Julian’s attic and put the finishing touches on a series of fabled unfinished paintings that’re up there. Then the children can sell the paintings for millions, and give Lori a cut. What happens is a lot more interesting and nuanced and is all about the art world and is it art or is it an investment and is an artist successful if their work makes money, are they a celebrity or something else. The Guardian liked it. We did too.
Michaela Coel and Ian McKellen in The Christophers
We didn’t have a lot of time between movies, so we went to Hot Black and had coffee and one of their breakfast cookies and a slice of toasted banana bread.
Movie 2 of the day, Mark’s favorite movie of the fest, Dust Bunny. It’s about a little girl who hires a hit man to kill the monster under her bed. It’s magic realism and somewhere in a big city, maybe New York, with a huge Chinatown, and it looks great.
Movie 3 was Easy’s Waltz, starring Vince Vaughn as an aging Vegas lounge singer. His brother is his sort of manager and they get in trouble with Al Pacino who’s a shady casino owner/booker who seems to be a bit like Captain Lou Albano. He’s got the hair anyways. It’s trite but enjoyable, and one review I read said that movies like these had to be at TIFF to give your brain a break from all the more arty stuff.
After Easy we headed to Sunny’s Chinese, a little hard to find in Kensington Market. Again we couldn’t get a reservation but getting there early worked just fine. At 5:45 they gave us a table that we had to vacate by 7:30, and we wanted to leave by then to get to the next movie anyways. We ate outside on the deck.
We had spicy green beans, orange chicken, and a noodle dish with pork.
Mark frou frou drink was some kind of lemonade and coffee. He didn’t like it much and they didn’t charge us. Everything else was delicious. We said we were leaving to go see Lost Bus, and server said America Ferrera had eaten there a night or two ago.
Lost Bus was a documentary dramatization of a true story of a bus driver, Kevin McKay, played by Matthew McConaughey, and teacher, Mary Ludwick played by America Ferrera, and 23 kids trying to drive around the 2018 Camp Fire, the one that destroyed the town of Paradise. It’s based a book, Lizzie Johnson’s Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire. With Paul Greengrass of Bourne fame directing, so we were expecting non-stop action. I think they used a lot of actual video edited with video of fires they’d staged for the movie. TIFF added an extra showing of Lost Bus, we didn’t have tickets for it in advance, and there was an awkward span of time, due to the hassle of Ticketmaster, like noonish Thursday to Friday morning when we only had one ticket. Happily Mark was able to get a 2nd ticket, in the front row of course, and he gallantly let me have the better one. In honor of how queasy I get when I have to sit too close. And even more happily, there was a moment right before they let in the rush tickets when the TIFF volunteers let the Mark & the other guy seated in the front row look for seats farther back. Even more happily, there was an empty seat in my row, and Mark got that. More feedback to TIFF about their Ticketmaster use.
Residences leveled by the Camp fire line a neighborhood in Paradise, California. Photograph: Noah Berger/AP
Jamie Lee Curtis was one of the producers of the movie so check her insta for more.
Follow this link for more or I think you can simply click on the picture.