Special guest post by Mike of The Substream (follow @thesubstream)
You never know what you’re going to get at the Toronto International Film Festival, just that you’re gonna have to pay for it. I bought my tickets like a month before they had even published the list of films playing – I and a bazillion (down, it seems, from the gajillions of previous non-economic-downturn years) other folks like movies just that freakin’ much – and will gladly do so again next year. For some reason.
As you’ve seen here on movieset.com, thesubstream crashed as best we could the Midnight Madness section of TIFF this year, making little documentaries about what we think is the best movie-going experience around, reviewing 10 of the weirdest, scariest genre flicks made this year, helping people navigate the byzantine ticket-buying processes and talking to people from all over North America that take their vacation time (!!) to come to Toronto and watch movies at 9 in the morning.
Of the midnight madness films, we loved, loved loved two: The Loved Ones from Australia and Hitoshi Matsumoto’s Symbol. Both were spectacular, and both are gonna be worth tracking down over the next year.
We were also kind of impressed, if that’s a way to say it, by Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers. He warned us in the preamble, telling us “This movie is called trash humpers and it’s about people that hump trash. If you’re the kind of person that walks out of movies, please walk out now because you won’t like it.”
Nobody did. The movie rolled, three wizened old looking terrifying mutants humped trash – bins, bags, piles, dumpsters – and within 20 minutes 20 people had walked out. We laughed our asses off. That’s what makes TIFF work. Note: Don’t rent Trash Humpers if you don’t think you’d like watching people hump trash.
We saw 33 is I think the total, a schedule that literally in one case led to a visit to the emergency room (one substream dude’s eye swelled itself shut in mute protest). We don’t know how we could have done more, but we know that there are folks that blew us out of the water. We met a man from Calgary who saw 50 and had his schedule printed out on a giant-sized spreadsheet that he had to print out on a special printer. We met Matthew Price from rowthree.com, who claimed and maintained that he saw 60 which… well, we didn’t see his spreadsheet, so we can’t confirm. But not even one of his eyes was swollen shut, which makes us suspicious.
People squirmed in Antichrist, people laughed politely and felt kinda disappointed about Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime, and the word around the volunteer ranks was that Oprah isn’t very nice, even though everybody liked her movie. The Road depressed people. Youth in Revolt cheered them up. It felt like bootcamp that somehow makes you fatter, that you paid for. That we’ll all pay for gladly again next year. See you there!
Check out the written reviews for ‘The Loved Ones‘ and ‘Symbol’, but if you don’t like to read there’s always….
Midnight Madness!
Check out these video reviews for the movies ‘The Loved Ones’ and ‘Symbol’
The Loved Ones
Symbol
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