"Just kidding."

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I didn’t survive this week at work so much as I climbed out of it. Pushing through this cold (again? seriously? dammit!) I suggested a pub near the Ryerson before our second-last TIFF film. Much to my surprise they had several Unibroue bottles behind the bar, including #9 on the Project FiftyBrew list: Don de Dieu! Kickass. It was very nice, by the way…tasted much smoother than a 9% beer should.

We had time to kill and full bellies, so we walked home, dropped our stuff and then walked back to the Ryerson. I was so wiped that I needed coffee; our barista at Starbucks mistook my ‘sticks of shame’ t-shirt for an indication that I actually speak Japanese and tried to converse with me. My blank stare pretty much answered that question for her. We strolled up to the Ryerson and the oh-so-familiar line-up spot: the concrete wall running along church, a tired movie-goer’s best friend. Oddly enough we were shown in to the theatre 35 minutes before the scheduled start time. That never happens.

Speaking of Japanese, many of the people in the audience spoke it. That’s because we were there to see Confessions (tiff | imdb), aka Kokuhaku, Japan’s submission for best foreign film Oscar. I think I like it more now than immediately after I watched it…it felt a little long at the time, but now I appreciate all the story threads it had to pull together. The filtered slo-mo was beautiful for a while, as was the droning soundtrack, but it wore a little thin in the second hour. Still, very good. It deserves a B, says I.

Tonight is all about relaxing. I could only get about 3 hours of coherent work in at the office today, and tonight — while Nellie is off doing girly things with other girlies — I plan to do nothing more strenuous than write this blog post to the following soundtrack:

  • Ida Maria . “Oh My God”
  • DevotchKa . “How It Ends”
  • Uncle Tupelo . “Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down”
  • We Are Scientists . “Pittsburgh”
  • The Tallest Man On Earth . “Graceland”
  • FemBots . “Count Down Our Days”
  • Vampire Weekend . “Ottoman”
  • Rogue Wave . “Electro-Socket Blues”

Those last two were from the closing credits of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist, playing in the other room, and about as highbrow as it’s gonna get around here tonight. Peace.

"I'm a lot stronger than you think I am."

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I’ve been so busy all week I’ve not had a chance to write about TIFF films #2 and #3: Blame and Let Me In.

Blame (tiff | imdb) was a decent, uncomplicated little thriller from Western Australia, filled with pretty young actors in fancy clothes (for reasons explained as the film goes along). Thankfully never falling back on the crutch of a hidden twist, instead slowly revealing hints about who and how and why we are where we are. Unfortunately the ending just felt forced, which poisoned the whole thing. C+

Let Me In (tiff | imdb) was the North American remake of Let The Right One In (imdb | rotten tomatoes), which I admit sounded like a recipe for disaster. I saw the Swedish original last year and loved it, as did many other people, and we all assumed a North American remake would rob it of everything that made the story great: the sweetness of children mixed with the savagery of a desperately hungry vampire (not some sparkling moon-eyed twat), the atmosphere of the housing block, the feathery snow, the brilliant swimming pool scene. But then I read that it had been programmed at the festival by Colin Geddes, he of midnight madness. There’s no way he’d pick a shit remake of a film he must have loved as much as the rest of us. So we picked it. And we got it. And it was amazing. A scene-by-scene, nearly shot-for-shot remake, as true to the book (apparently) as the original Swedish film was. The biggest difference was that the violence was more brutal, more effect-laden; it didn’t hurt the film, it just made the schism between the sweet 12-year-old girl and the vicious monster seem all the more jarring, and interesting. It’s not just me who liked it, either; early reviews on Rotten Tomatoes are running at 100%. Highly recommended. A

Corne du Diable / Noire de Chambly

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I’m making a surprising amount of progress on Project FiftyBrew. Last night I met some colleagues in town from Chicago and took them to Volo. Both big beer fans, luckily for me, as that place is a FiftyBrew gold mine.

I started with a Noire de Chambly, #39 on the list. A nice light dark (if that makes any sense), if not quite the equal of their Blanche.

My second glass was a Dieu du Ciel Corne du Diable, #10 on the list. As I’ve said before, I’m not the biggest fan of IPAs, and this one was no different. Drinkable, but not something I’d order again.

Dieu du Ciel Aphrodesiaque / Mill Street Coffee Porter

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Yesterday, on our way to TIFF10 film #2, we stopped in at Beerbistro. They had two Project FiftyBrew beers on their list: Dieu du Ciel Aphrodesiaque and Mill Street Coffee Porter.

The coffee porter was okay…what can I say? It tasted like coffee, and I don’t really like coffee. I was also very full from lunch and my previous beer. I should probably give it another go some other time, but…meh.

The Dieu du Ciel Aphrodesiaque, on the other hand, was fan-freaking-tastic. As in, one of the best stouts I’ve ever tried. It somehow tasted like chocolate AND vanilla simultaneously. It wasn’t heavy or chalky, it was just…tasty. This will not be the last time I drink this beer.

Trust

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This film festival hasn’t felt like a film festival yet. I’ve been so busy with work that I haven’t seen or heard or read anything about the start of TIFF10, and by the time we attended our first screening yesterday morning, all the excitement that comes with the first two nights of screenings had worn off. It felt to me like we were joining something late, rather than really being a part of it.

What did feel kind of nice was being back in the VISA Screening Room at the Elgin Theatre. It was our first ‘home’ at TIFF when we started attending, but lately it’s become more and more off-limits to simple movie-goers (and not celeb watchers) like us and the Ryerson has become the new core of our TIFF experience. Yesterday we were able to sneak in because the screening of Trust (tiff | imdb) took place at 11AM; the gala screening had taken place the night before. Even so, David Schwimmer showed up to introduce his second film, and at least gave us a preview of how difficult it would be.

I don’t want to give away much, but if you read the synopsis on either of those links or watch the trailer you’ll get the gist: that a 14-year girl is lured by a sexual predator online and…well, bad things happen. Schwimmer donates a lot of his time and money to a rape crisis centre in L.A., and heard the stories of victims and their families, and a lot of that showed up on the screen. The emotional responses of the girl (played disturbingly well by Liana Liberato) and her father (Clive Owen) seemed more believable to me than anything I’d expect to get from a Hollywood movie.

There was also a subplot: the ubiquitous sexualization of teens. Clive Owen plays an ad exec who did a big campaign, and threw a big party, for a barely-disguised American Apparel. Middle-aged executives talk about what they’d do to 19-year-old waitresses if they weren’t married. The mall is plastered with pictures, appearing barely in-frame, of girls in lingerie. Schwimmer nearly beats us over the head with this, but manages to keep it on-track.

I also can’t describe how important it was that the star really was a 14-year-old girl when this was shot. Again, this is probably not what would have happened had this been a typical Hollywood film. Typically a better-known actress in her early or mid-twenties would be cast, and the audience would never have felt that visceral reaction one has to a child being in danger. They would never have accepted that her emotional response would be naive and childlike. We would know she’s a young adult, and expect her to react accordingly. Tragically, in the end, this commitment to realism may be what keeps the film from a wide release, or even US distribution. As of this writing there’s no American distributor.

B-

St-Ambroise Pale Ale

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Last night, after dinner at REDS, we popped over to Smokeless Joe for a beer. Or four. Happily I was able to knock off another Project FiftyBrew entry: McAuslan Brewing’s St-Ambroise Pale Ale. I was hoping to do more than that, but they were all out of Hockley Valley Dark, Mill Street Coffee Porter and Scotch Irish Sgt Major’s IPA.

No matter. Kaylea suggested a Traquair Jacobite Ale (which happens to be rated #10 among UK/Irish beers) and it was so good I had a second bottle. I circled back to Canada for my final drink, a Unibroue Fin du Monde. Which is on the list, but lord knows I’ve had it before.

Time to speed this up. I think brunch at Beerbistro is in order.

Project FiftyBrew

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About a month ago Troy Burtch — author of the Great Canadian Beer Blog — reposted a speech by Steve Beauchesne, the co-founder of Beau’s Brewery entitled “What If Ontario Had A Beer Revolution?“.

What if Ontario had a beer revolution?

What do I mean by a beer revolution? Well revolutions usually involve overthrowing tyrants, and instituting a new form of governance, but my revolution is maybe a little less violent than that, although by no means is it less radical.

Right now in Ontario, 1 out of every 20 beers drank came from an independent, Ontario brewery. By beer revolution, I mean, what would happen if Ontarians chose to drink an Ontario-made independent beer 1 out of every 2 times they drank beer?

Mr. Beauchesne goes on to make an economic argument for Ontario craft beer which doesn’t actually work all that well, but no matter: there are benefits to supporting local — if not necessarily independently owned — brewers. Besides, no living human should be made to drink the likes of MolsonCoors CanadianLight or its ilk. I felt, after reading the transcript of his speech, that I should try to drink primarily local beers. But it was the summer, and it was boiling hot, and goddammit I love me some German weissbier.

Then, this past Thursday, Nellie and I ducked into Smokeless Joe on our way home from the TIFF box office. There we met the charming and gracious Kaylea from WineNotOntario who recommended the Dieu du Ciel foursome on feature. I was no stranger to DdC, having enjoyed their Rosée D’hibiscus and struggled through their Péché Mortel (seriously, man…it tasted like a peach fucking ashtray) but I wouldn’t have noticed them all tucked away down there on Joe’s chalkboard had she not pointed them out. So I tried. I liked. And I decided: I should do with beer what we’ve been trying to do with wine: drink Canadian whenever possible. Uh, this October trip to SanFran/Napa/Sonoma notwithstanding…vacations don’t count. Aaaaaaaaanyloophole, I needed a plan. It wouldn’t do to swear off all non-Canadian beer, that’s just too drastic. But I figured I should make an effort to at least try the best local stuff, especially those I might not normally try. Hence: Project FiftyBrew.

Here’s the project plan:

  1. Go to BeerAdvocate.com and download the list of what, according to their users, constitute the top 50 Canadian beers (DONE!);
  2. Mark off the ones I’ve already tried (DONE!);
  3. Vow to try the remaining 33 (subject to availability) over the next…oh, I don’t know. Whenever. No rush, right?

I’m looking forward to scouring the LCBO, Volo, Smokeless Joe, Beerbistro and C’est What for the unconquered bottles. I’m sure we’ll also plan a trip to Quebec ’cause, uh, they’re nearly all from there…Unibroue, Dieu du Ciel and McAuslan alone make  up more than half the list.

Also, by the time I finish these fifty I’m sure the list will have changed, but I look forward to trying the new entrants too. I may be coming at this from a somewhat different angle than Mr. Beauchesne, but I do hope one of his bottles of Beau’s climbs into the top tier.

Wish me luck.

Relief

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When we found out Monday that box #7 in the advance film selection lottery was drawn, and we were in box #5, we thought we were screwed. Proper screwed. Being in the second-last box is not usually a happy place for a TIFF film-goer.

However.

We just got our email…and we lucked out. Two #1 picks, three #2 picks. No do-overs. W00t!

  • We got Trust, not Biutiful. Trust is the one I’m shaking my head at the most…I think we only picked it because it worked in the time slot, not because we rated it that highly.
  • We got Blame, not Beautiful Boy, but Blame feels a little like a sleeper.
  • We got Let Me In (the remake of Let The Right One In) which is coming to regular theatres soon, but so is Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which is such a hot ticket I gave up any hope of seeing it the second I found out what box we were in.
  • The other two — Confessions and 13 Assassins — were our first picks, and I’m quite happy to close out the festival with a full-on Takashi Miike samurai battle.

And no, this was not "glamping"

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Nearly every year Nellie goes camping with her girlfriends. She has a special affection for sleeping in a tent and drinking from tin cups and sitting around a campfire. In recent years those girl-camping excursions have become less frequent, and last year she didn’t get to go at all. Since I couldn’t bear to see her miserable two years in a row I agreed to go with her. My one condition: a tent I could stand up in, more or less. So, a campground reservation in Algonquin Park and two trips to MEC and we were all set.

Of course, the worst part of Algonquin is getting there, and this was no exception. I hate long drives. Hate hate hate. But we made it, and checked in to our Mew Lake campground. Nellie had done her homework and picked one of the best sites available.

This was my first time car-camping, so getting used to having people on all sides was weird, but we were about as private as you can get there. We set up our fancy new tent (which is awesome), settled in, built a fire and started making dinner.

Our meals, by the way, provoked some mockery among our Twitter and Facebook friends…apparently eating steak and drinking wine, or having a spread of prosciutto and salami and cheese and bread and chocolate, or cooking a delicious breakfast of bacon, eggs and sausage is verboten, and we should instead have cooked weenies or roasted marshmallows. To which we replied thus: since we have no kids to entertain with such traditions, why would we voluntarily eat crap food just because we’re camping? I mean, really…what’s wrong with this?

Nothing, sez I. Anyrant, once dinner and dishes were out of the way we sat our asses down by the campfire and watched the sun go down. It got a little chilly that night so the fire, while a pain to start, was sorely needed to keep us warm until we could tuck into our sleeping bags for the night. Reports of a bear in the area had us a tiny bit jumpy, but nothing serious. The next morning I got up before sunrise and took in the view of the steam billowing off the lake.

As I took pictures of the lake and sunrise (both, in some cases) I heard a rustling along the shore right in front of me. I saw a…well, I’m not sure what it was. A small heron of some kind maybe?

Whatever it was it took a few awkward strides through the water and then took off into the grass. Any ideas? A quick Google search didn’t turn up anything. I saw it again that afternoon, in the same spot, so maybe it had a nest there. Not sure, but Nellie got a kick out of him/her.

Since we had such good weather (seriously, ridiculous weather…warm and sunny during the day, moderate at night and not a cloud in the sky the entire weekend) we went for a hike at the nearby Track & Tower trail.

It was a good workout, but worth it for the deep woods seclusion, lake views (like the one above) and amazing lookout from a cliff toward Cache Lake.

We even came across a very unexpected trail companion: a turtle sunning himself on a hill. I’d never seen a turtle this big in the wild…he was about a foot across. I think it was a snapping turtle, but didn’t get close enough to find out. We got some pics and said our goodbyes.

We were pretty pooped (and extremely warm) by the time we got home so we jumped in the lake to cool off. During our swim, half a dozen Canada Geese descended down to the lake, circled us once and water-landed twenty feet from us. Which was pretty cool.

That night we didn’t have the energy for much…fortunately our meal involved slicing, not cooking. Still, it was nice to sit there and drink a bottle of Southbrook Fresh White and build a fire and be entertained by a chipmunk.

Sunday morning we wanted to beat traffic, so it was a whirlwind of breakfast and cleaning and packing and road-getting-on. We did pretty well too; it was smooth sailing all the way down highway 11 and the 400. The only traffic we hit was on the DVP at York Mills. Nevertheless, when we unloaded, returned the car and walked home we felt…well, smelly. Hooray for whoever invented the shower.

So, lots of fun was had, but I’m hoping to minimize the driving next time. And yes, there will be a next time. And yes, we will be eating awesome food and drinking good wine. Deal with it.

First choice: subtitles

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At this year’s film festival, if all goes to plan, we’ll be seeing five of these movies:

The most frustrating part of this year (aside from the eternally unusable TIFF website) was finding out that the ‘premium’ screenings — into which ordinary movie-loving (as opposed to celebrity-slobbering) attendees are not allowed — are no longer limited to Roy Thomson Hall and the Elgin. We now find ourselves cut off from a few screenings at the Ryerson, Winter Garden and even the sad little Isabel Bader theatre.

If we get all our first picks we’ll have a nice little lineup, and a bad-ass samurai movie to close it out.