I’m normally not a fan of animated films — Ratatouille being an exception — but I think I want to see Kung Fu Panda. The first trailer was really only funny for the long build up to one joke (“Don’t tell monkey!”) but the second one made me laugh a few times. You can watch the new trailer at the official website.
[tags]kung fu panda[/tags]
A friend emailed me recently asking how one goes about attending the Toronto International Film Festival. I wrote a long email explaining how it works, especially the quirky advanced lottery process, and realized that it’s probably the third time I’ve explained it in such detail. I decided to strip out names and details and post my response here, so that I can just point to it next time someone asks.
“We’re thinking of attending TIFF this year – being newb’s, what do we need to know? Was just at tiff08.ca and gave them my email address – looks like ticket info hasn’t yet been established. Can you describe the general process of acquiring tickets and picking films to attend?”
OK, well…there’re a few different ways. Being that you’re in another city some of those options become more difficult, but hardly impossible. The link isn’t active yet, but the TIFF website should soon have a section called “How to Festival” which explains it in detail, but it’s a little hard to follow for first-time attendees.
The first thing to figure out is how many movies you want to see. If you want to see less than five films, it makes sense to wait until late August / early September when the single tickets go on sale. A couple of days before the first screening (Fri Sep 5 this year) the tickets for all films still available (some sell out during the advanced draw…more on that in a minute) go on sale on the website. They’ll be about $21 each at that point, if I remember right.
If you want to do five or more, I’d recommend going into the advanced draw. What that means is that some time in July (I think) packages will go on sale on the website for 10 films, 30 films, 50 films, etc. When you buy those you don’t choose your films, you just reserve a place in the advanced draw for n screenings. In late August they publish the list of films, and then the schedule; on the day they publish the schedule — the last Tuesday, usually — you go to the box office here in Toronto and pick up your selection forms. If you’re from out of town, I believe they FedEx it to you.
Let’s say you buy a 10-film package and your package arrives on Wednesday. You make a 1st choice and 2nd choice for all 5 films (assuming you want 2 tickets for each screening). You do this in case your first choice is already sold out. Try to keep the 1st and 2nd choice in the same time slot; it’s easier to keep track of your schedule and you avoid time conflicts. You fill out the submission form using their crazy little colored highlighter system and FedEx it back to Toronto. When it arrives it goes, in order of arrival, into a numbered box for the advanced lottery; Friday noon is the cutoff time. Let’s say your envelope lands in box #55. On Friday afternoon the TIFF announces the box that’s drawn in the lottery. Let’s say there are 60 boxes in all, and they draw box #8.
What this means is they start in box #8 and give everyone there their first choice of screenings. They continue on to box #9, and so on, in order. When they get to someone who’s requested a screening that’s sold out, they go to that person’s second choice. If that second choice is also sold out, that person gets nothing for that slot…more on that in a minute. When they get to the last box (#60, for this example), they go back to box #1 and continue from there. I’ve been very close to the drawn box, and I’ve been very far away. Even the year that I figured I was screwed, I still went 14 for 15 with either my 1st or 2nd choice. Of course, it also depends which screenings you choose: if you’re out for the hot tickets with the big stars, your chances are worse in the crunch than if you went for slightly more obscure titles.
Some time on Saturday or Sunday you’ll get an email telling you what movies you got, and whether you have any that came up empty. On Monday — Labour Day — you line up at Yonge & College to pick up your tickets and, if you missed out on any of your choices, to select a new screening. I’ve only had to do this once, and if you go prepared (i.e., knowing your schedule) it’s no trouble. I’m not sure how out-of-towners do this, to be honest, but I’m sure there’s an existing process. They deliberately make it complicated, I think, to weed out the casually interested movie-goer. It sounds complex, but we’ve walked other people through it.
The other alternative, and it’s a pretty good one for first-timers, is the Visa Screening Room. You need a Visa (obviously) and I think it has to be a gold card, but here’s how it works: when the packages go on sale on the website you can get two Visa Screening Room packages (there are two options, the early screenings and the late screenings…two different films each night). It gives you eight films in eight nights at the same theatre, at the same time each night. You have no choice over what you see — you won’t know the lineup until later — but they tend toward “bigger” films as the Elgin (aka, Visa Screening Room) is one of the best theatres. Obviously if you’re not planning to spend eight nights here, this won’t work for you, but it takes out all the guesswork and scheduling and rushing between theatres. The catch is that you have to move fast: these packages sell out the same day they go on sale, probably within hours.
General tips:
Hope that helps.
Last night we watched Recount (imdb | rotten tomatoes), a recently-made HBO film about the 2000 Gore/Bush election battle in Florida. Amazingly enough (’cause we kind of knew the outcome already) it was tense, gripping stuff. I realized, as I watched it, that I knew almost nothing of the street fight — that’s really what it became — that broke out in those days immediately following the election. Normally I’d have been glued to my TV during that time, but I happened to be working on an insane project, locked in a windowless Mississauga data centre for days at a time. I remember waking up to find a Globe and Mail on my front porch declaring Bush the president, and my friend Jane (who was working on the same project) had a copy of the Globe declaring Gore the winner. Or the other way around. Anyway, that’s all I remember.
So this film was interesting to me, as it laid out the legal battles and protests and political maneuvers that were happening in those initial days, and finally resolved with the bizarre Supreme Court ruling. When you think about the ridiculously tiny number of votes separating the two candidates, and the legal minutiae that decided whether the votes would finally be counted, it’s staggering to think that these tiny events would lead to an eight-year term that will surely have monumental impacts on America’s future.
While the film was certainly more sympathetic to the Democrat point of view, it showed grudging respect for James Baker, cabinet minister under Reagan and Bush I and the lead attorney in the Bush camp. No quarter was spared, however, for then-Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris.
[tags]recount, hbo, florida 2000, james baker, katherine harris[/tags]
Just got back from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (imdb | rotten tomatoes), following brunch with CBGB at Eggstasy. I felt pretty much the same about brunch as I did about the movie: it was what I expected, just like every time before, except for one little wrinkle.
When we arrived for brunch we were seated near the door. The crowds on weekends at Eggstasy are such that you don’t argue about where you sit, you just sit. So sit we did, and eat, and everything was fine. Good food, everyone’s order showed up as planned, quick turnaround and off to the movie. But it was cold when we ate, being so close to the open door & windows; not cold enough to put me off the meal, just enough to make me notice.
It didn’t stop there: when we got to the theatre it was freezing. Cold enough that the girls kept their jackets on and my nose felt frosty for the first half of the film. Somebody got a little anxious with the a/c, methinks. Anyway, the film: it was a good old-fashioned Indy movie, no doubt about it. It started fast & never really slowed down, it was exciting and funny, it gave the whip and the hat starring roles…everything I’d expect. It definitely got a little weird toward the end, but I can live with that. There was just one little thing that bugged me: this unfortunate tendency to use CGI even when the story doesn’t really need it. Indy’s Indy because he bashes things and jumps off of stuff and makes with the smart-ass, not because he gets help from CGI ewoks monkeys. That sequence added absolutely nothing to the story, and it looked ridiculous.
All in all the brunch and the movie were good…the cold air, the a/c and the CGI just left me feeling a little cold.
[tags]indiana jones, kingdom of the crystal skull, eggstasy[/tags]
I looked out my window this morning and noticed two things about the Gardiner Expressway: 1) there were no cars on it; 2) there were bicycles on it.
My first thought, following Friday’s guerrilla action was, “Another protest? Already?” But then I noticed the number of bikes and lack of police (and honking motorists) and figured it must be on the level. In fact, it is the annual Ride for Heart.
There’s something refreshing and absurd about seeing all those bikes meander down that paved monstrosity. It should be like this every Sunday.
[tags]gardiner expressway, ride for heart[/tags]
Last night the Toronto Criterium was held near our place. I had no idea it was planned until my friend Duarte told me on Wednesday. I didn’t even know what a criterium was. It sounds like the name of a Tool album.
Scheduling didn’t allow for much viewing time — I worked later than I’d planned, we had to get some dinner and then Nellie went to see Sex And The City with her friend Cyndy — but we did catch the first few laps of the pro/elite race. I thought it was cool how they just shut down a couple of city blocks like that on a Friday night and held a race. Granted, the people trying to get to the shops (and their homes!) on Front Street didn’t seem too pleased, but for the most part everyone seemed to enjoy it.
I threw a few more pictures up in a Flickr set if you want to see them. We didn’t have Nellie’s SLR with us, just my little point-and-shoot, so I apologize for the dodgy quality. Those riders were less blurry in real life, honest.
Anyway…I still think criterium sounds like a part of the human brain that sits between the hippocampus and the cerebellum.
[tags]toronto criterium, sex and the city movie[/tags]
The media hurts my head. First up: a short presentation from the TED conference demonstrating, in graphical form, why the American news media is failing its viewers:
Speaking at the TED Conference, Alisa Miller (CEO of Public Radio International) explains why Americans know less and less about the rest of the world. Along the way, she uses some eye-popping graphs to put things in perspective. Watch the video below or find it on our YouTube playlist.
Next, we have Scott McLellan criticizing the news media for…umm…believing what he told them.
He excludes himself from major involvement in some of what he calls the administration’s biggest blunders, for instance the decision to go to war and the initial campaign to sell that decision to the American people. But he doesn’t spare himself entirely, saying, “I fell far short of living up to the kind of public servant I wanted to be.”
He includes criticism for the reporters whose questions he fielded. The news media, he says, were “complicit enablers” for focusing more on “covering the march to war instead of the necessity of war.”
Kind of reminds me of when I was kid and my older brothers would grab my wrists and beat me in the head with my own hands, asking “Why are you hitting yourself? Why are you hitting yourself?” Anyway…
My final example is a bit of a stretch, since Michelle Malkin can hardly be considered “media” but really, any news organization which actually reported on Malkin’s silliness and put pressure on the advertiser deserves ridicule.
Dunkin’ Donuts has pulled an online advertisement featuring celebrity chef Rachael Ray after criticism from conservative U.S. bloggers over her choice of scarf.
Ray, while promoting an iced coffee, was wearing a black-and-white scarf, similar to the kaffiyeh, a scarf commonly worn in the Middle East. Critics, including conservative commentator Michelle Malkin, argued that Ray should not be wearing such a scarf because, they said, it has come to symbolize Muslim extremism and terrorism.
The kaffiyeh “has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad,” Malkin said in her blog last week. Malkin welcomed the decision, saying, “it’s refreshing to see an American company show sensitivity to the concerns of Americans opposed to Islamic jihad and its apologists.”
Amahl Bishara, an anthropology lecturer at the University of Chicago who specializes in the Middle East, said complaints about the scarf reflect a misunderstanding of Arab culture. “Kaffiyehs are worn every day on the street by Palestinians and other people in the Middle East — by people going to work, going to school, taking care of their families and just trying to keep warm,” he said.
Malkin really does have a knack for picking the most absurd arguments out of thin air. Hey Michelle, I notice the Klan always carry around crosses (and occasionally burn them, but that’s neither here nor there); has the crucifix come to symbolize Christian extremism and racism? Should advertisers distance themselves from anyone who wears a cross around their neck?
[tags]news media, ted conference, alisa miller, scott mclellan, rachel ray, michelle malkin, dunkin donuts, kaffiyeh[/tags]
In less than a month we’ll be in the Rockies. This both worries and excites me. I have read no books. I have scoured no websites. I have studied no maps. I feel ill-prepared.
The MBA schedule won’t really afford me a lot of planning time, so I think once I’m done reading this Ibi Kaslik book (which should be any minute now) I’ll begin combing through the BC book we bought.
Our plan, should anyone have any suggestions, is:
[tags]rockies, british columbia, lake o’hara, whistler, vancouver[/tags]
The sexy & beautiful* girls are gone, flown back to Halifax. I miss them. It was nice having them here, and they were gracious guests: when we got home today there was a charming note and a funny list of rules on our message board and cold beer in the fridge. They’d even cleaned up the fresh cat puke.
I hope we’ll get to see them in October when we’re in Halifax. And they’d better buy some message boards; I have a few rules of my own. They involve the words “handsome” and “pipe-swinging.”
* Rebecca made me say that part. It was one of the rules. Not that they aren’t sexy and beautiful.
[tags]house guests[/tags]
Skirl | Dan Dickinson 