There’s a curious subtext to the 35th Toronto International Film Festival’s poster philosophy of communal filmgoing. Yes, they want us to see movies together, but take a closer look. For a Toronto festival, there’s an odd lack of diversity in those pairs.
Old black, old black. Asian teen girl, Asian teen girl. India Indian, India Indian. Annoyed I’m-not-sure, Annoyed I’m-not-sure. Old white, old white. Jesus Christ, identical twins?
Right. So it’s, “Share the experience, as long as it’s with your own kind.”
In this second and final look at my TIFF 09 (Part 1 way back here), you’ll notice that the Moviebuddies I’ve assigned to each of the films I saw may be a bit more integrative than the Toronto International Film Festival would like, but hey, man. Brotherhood, man.
I’m sorry Drew, but I’m talking about a list. Yes, lists don’t actually mean anything, they aren’t objective in any way, and no one should treat them as such. They should be approached as a conversation-starter, and they should be treated as nothing more than some guy’s opinion.
In this case, that guy is The Onion’s A.V. Club, and that opinion is on The Best TV Series of the ’00s. They’ve built up a list of 30 (series fiction only, so no talk show Daily Show/Colbert, no miniseries Band of Brothers, no documentary Planet Earth), which is a bit crazy since who the hell has watched much more than 30 different TV series in the past ten years? That’s three series per year, but since these series’ runs range from one season to nine, that’s … well it’s a lot of TV. So of course I haven’t seen them all.
But for those that I have seen, this is a pretty bang-on list. Makes me feel nice and tingly knowing that my tastes line up so well with the cool motherfuckers at The Onion. For more information on how similar I am to a cool motherfucker, read the article (or just skim the numbers), and then hit the jump.
I’ve been hanging on to a couple of things for another Visual Feast post for a while now, and since today I went down to the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography to look around and peer what I could peer, I thought it would be the perfect time to throw them up.
We all sort of knew this was coming, but the news is still sad, especially since the last episode, Belonging, was so excellent. Fox will air the remainder of the 13 episodes for this season. Here’s hoping Joss will continue the series in comic book form the way he’s done with Angel, Firefly, and Buffy.
The news actually broke because a writer from the show, Maurissa Tancharoen, posted it on her Twitter page.
This is what Joss had to say:
“Hmm. Apparently my news is not news.
I don’t have a lot to say. I’m extremely proud of the people I’ve worked with: my star, my staff, my cast, my crew. I feel the show is getting better pretty much every week, and I think you’ll agree in the coming months. I’m grateful that we got to put it on, and then come back and put it on again. I’m off to pursue internet ventures/binge drinking. Possibly that relaxation thing I’ve read so much about. By the time the last episode airs, you’ll know what my next project is. But for now there’s a lot of work still to be done, and disappointment to bear.
Thank you all for your support, your patience, your excellent adverts. See you again. -j.”
Here’s a nice photo memorial from The Live Feed to commemorate the passing of the show.
Let’s all look forward to Cabin in the Woods, and hope that the Whedon television curse is somehow lifted in the future.
ydennekaynatesuohllod
Ceremony, Eskimo Hunter, Screen Vinyl Image + Various Japanese Bands
Shindaita, Tokyo, Nov. 9/2009
This one was more an exercise in survival than anything else.
– 4+ Hours
– Sound levels that had to be at least 140+ decibals
– Enough smoking going on in what was a fairly small space to jerky-fy an entire cow.
If anything could make a person go instantly deaf and contract lung cancer, this show was it. To add further insult to the injury, almost none of the bands were worth it at all. Between the three Japanese bands there (which were called Caucus, 死んだ僕の彼女, and burrrn — you’ll have to forgive me for not knowing which was which), only one was decent, and by decent I mean they had two good songs. Every single other song by the three combined was just so derivative, repetitive and boring; 4 chords built on 4/4 time, over and over again. You know, something like: F, F, F, F, Em, Em, Em, Em, C,C,C,C, G, G, G, G. Accompanying this was either low male monotonic mumbling or higher pitched female monotonic mumbling. I’m not exactly sure whom it was a copy of — there are so many of these cookie-cutter shoegaze bands floating around these days — but it was all extremely tiring.
Two of the U.S. bands of the ones mentioned above didn’t provide any respite either — even though I (thankfully) didn’t stay for scream-thrashers Ceremony, their MySpace provides enough evidence that this is true; and Eskimo Hunter was again more of the same boring sort of droning stuff, though my brain’s not working properly at the moment so I can’t think of an immediate example of whom they sound like.
However, the last of those three, Washington, DC based Screen Vinyl Image, thankfully put on a good show.
The cemetery is supposed to be symbolic of something...I haven
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a beautiful, no-holds barred impressionistic masterpiece. If Monet and Picasso had had a love-child, and he/or she were alive today, had been given a camera and told to make a motion picture about a war between giant robots, this is the film they would make. Mr. Bay abandons plot, convincing characters, or any of those contrivances that we, puny mortals, consider to be important and instead produces a film that staggers the imagination, defies belief, and leaves the viewer completely and totally charmed by its boisterousness and good will.
You see, Mr. Bay enjoys the idea of the giant-robot-action-movie far more than he does an actual movie. He teases us, magician-like, by only revealing so much of his glorious metallic creatures, before ripping us away and taking us in a completely new direction. We see them in brief, fleeting shots, often through smoke or in silhouette – yet over the course of the film, Bay allows our minds to build up a picture of what his robots look like – his is a cubist vision, abstract and incomplete on purpose; we never get the tangible pleasure of watching these creatures as a whole, but we understand intellectually what they are.
Moviegoing is a communal experience. This year’s crop of Toronto International Film Festival posters shows us what we already know: if you’re going to sit in a dark room and stare straight forward at a giant image for two hours, nothing is more important than the person who’s sitting next to you and to whom you’ll be paying no attention throughout the show because god dammit shut the hell up, I didn’t pay my ten bucks to hear you yap about how great it is to Twitter! And you god damn well better not be Twittering during the movie!
But why is it only we humans who deserve to see a film with a friend? For the occasion of the 35th TIFF, I have taken the liberty of assigning moviebuddies to the films themselves; each of the films I saw between September 10th and 19th will get another film they could enjoy sharing a cupholder with and maybe trying out that smooth yawn maneuver on … and I might just drop a tidbit or two of what I thought about each one. Could be useful in your own moviegoing future.
This is another one we all knew was coming at some point or another: client gets obsessed with Doll, client wants to keep Doll forever, mayhem ensues. Despite the fact it’s obvious, it’s still a good premise, so of course the trick would be to do it properly so that it didn’t seem rote. Oh man, did they do it properly. This was the first episode to actually make me feel . . . emotional about the characters – Priya’s tragic story, Victor’s pure and simple love, Adele and Topher’s moralizing and the choices they each end up making, Boyd’s cold efficiency vis a vis the moral ambiguity of his position right now. It was extremely effective, even if you don’t mention the further strides that Echo continued to show in her ‘development.’ Basically — wow.
Another episode where what I was expecting made me roll my eyes, and where we ended up had me do something congratulatory. You might have been thinking the same thing, at first — crazy guy needs ‘people dolls’ for his family-fetish fantasy, he hires Echo, something goes wrong yadda yadda. Thank Mr. Universe that didn’t happen (guess I shouldn’t have doubted Tim Minear — guy knows what he’s doing, red herrings and all). This episode was everything that was needed right now: important, twisty-turny and funny. This is what every episode that’s not pure ‘arc’ needs — a little bit of arc with a good, intriguing story. So while they don’t seem capable of pulling it off every week (see last week), at least we do get it (mostly) regularly.
Before I begin: if anyone out there still had any doubts that porn had not gone 100% mainstream, the opening of this episode should relieve them of such; when a prime-time network television show can use subtle allusions to ‘squirting‘ and know that its audience will understand those allusions, and then use that ‘understanding’ to make a little joke afterward, well — that’s mainstream.
Anyway, aside from the raunchy/funny beginning, this episode was not so good. Not only was it not so good, it was exactly what Dollhouse didn’t need right now — another momentum killer. This felt like a first-season episode, and one of the lessor first-season episodes at that; plus, it was confusing. Let’s trudge on.
