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Met up with T-Bone today for lunch at Volo before our movie. Our screening was at the Ryerson theatre at 3:00, and we figured if we left around 2:10 we’d get in line with lots of time to spare, so we met at 1:00. Lots of time, right? Not so much. Just like the last time I was there they were short-staffed, and 45 minutes after ordering our food still hadn’t arrived. It showed up a few minutes after 2:00…but they brought me the wrong dish. Fortunately it only had salmon in it (and it wasn’t half bad) but T-Bone’s food wasn’t great. They knocked the price of my meal off the bill and forgot to charge me for my first drink, but I didn’t feel too bad about it. We wouldn’t have had time to correct it anyway. As it was we had to scarf down food and drink, and got to the Ryerson just in time to join the end of the line entering the theatre. Too bad; T-Bone’s first experience at Volo wasn’t a very good one, and it’s gone from being one of my favourite places to being a little sketchy.

The movie we saw, however, pretty much made up for it. I was kind of worried about Battle In Seattle (imdb | rotten tomatoes)…the title seemed corny (it was later explained in the film), it was a director’s debut film, I’m not typically a big fan of either Charlize Theron or Woody Harrelson…I’d kind of set it up in my mind to be rather bad. However, it turned out to be the great film festival movie. Not a great film…a great film festival movie. I’ll explain.

This was, according to Noah Cowan, the world premiere of the film. As such the director Stuart Townsend was there, as were some of the actors: Woody Harrelson, Martin Henderson, Michelle Rodriguez, Andre Benjamin and Charlize Theron, Townsend’s girlfriend. This is one of those experiences you have at the festival that you don’t get when watching a movie normally, when a director is living or dying with his cast and crew, surrounded by hundreds of movie fans. You get to see a visceral, engaged audience react to a film, and you get to see the director absorb that reaction. For Townsend today, it was quite a reaction indeed.

The film was about the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, and the violent confrontations that resulted…dramatic and emotional subject matter, to be sure, and particularly interesting to me as the issue of WTO patent regulation was the topic of my big paper last year. At the end of the film, as The National sang “Fake Empire”, the crowd stood, turned to Townsend and applauded. They stood and clapped for five minutes as he waved, thanked the crowd and hugged a weeping Theron. That, that moment is what you get at a film festival and nowhere else…seeing a man who has worked for five years to perfect a vision, and is witnessing for the first time the realization of that vision. It was pretty moving; not quite like seeing Hotel Rwanda a few years ago, but emotional nonetheless.

I’ll be interested to see how the film is received outside of that situation. Was it a great film, technically speaking? Not really. But for two hours this afternoon, it was a classic.

[tags]brian mulroney, volo, battle in seattle, stuart townsend[/tags]