20000 leagues

20000 leagues under the sea is screening at the tiff bell lightbox this weekend, and it reminded me that i never posted the pics of the final sweater!




i think the model is the best part, natch. wish i could quit my job and just knit movie-themed curling sweaters full time! anyone willing to pay me to do that?

holy rainstorm

wow. did not make it to tai chi last night. barely made it home in one piece, and i should have ventured out to fetch the baby, but our car seat is in rosary's car... ah well.
meanwhile, ujein is blocking, and will doubtless take ages to dry, in this humidity. poo. but, i'm not likely to be wearing wool for a few weeks yet in any case. i have a new set of socks on the needles, we'll see how that goes.
in other news, the mobile has returned! it is currently charging, so there will be plenty of blurry lo-res pics here soon. and tiff madness continues - running around, prepping for the bravo! microsite, getting excerpts in our player, getting filmmakers in and out of interviews with bravo! and etalk, and general busy-ness. is it really going to be like this for another month?

movies: a great place to knit

if you have the right pattern, that is. ujein from knitknit: profiles + projects from knitting's new wave is great for film viewing, as it involves long strips of garter-stitch that you can do in the dark without thinking. i got a big chunk done on friday night watching black dynamite, the opening night gala feature of toronto after dark.
an awesome parody of '70s blaxploitation flicks, it hits all the marks without ever getting tired. this kind of project always runs the risk of saturday night live syndrome - think of all of those sketches based on once-funny jokes that chug along until they run out out of juice, usually long after the audience has. black dynamite is more like a louis armstrong solo that keeps hitting higher and higher notes. the tone is set from the outset with an ad for anaconda malt liquor (which later becomes integral to the plot).

the film takes aim at every stereotype of the genre, as well as stereotypical black characters (the oversexed pimp, the earnest activist) and the authenticity of street talk itself, but in a very playful and plot-driven way. actor/writer michael jai white plays it beautifully, never breaking character (even as a boom mike looms inches from his forehead) as he goes from slick ladies' man to kung-fu battle to "poignant" flashbacks to outrageous exposition. he's a one-man army out to fight for justice in a slick polyester suit, with too many quotable lines to count. the final fight scene against his ultimate enemy is just indescribable, but perhaps the finest moment is a scene in a restaurant when he has a wait-that's-it moment, and connects the dots with his posse in the ludicrously erudite way.

today is the day

that the toronto international film festival announces which short films got in - and eleven of ours did! woo! shorts include the visually stunning tungijuq featuring the amazing tanya tagaq; the beautiful found based on the poetry of souvankham thammavongsa, and dylan reibling's brilliant record. very exciting, but also much work to do... brunch to arrange, tickets to buy, yada yada...

smells good, sounds better

my final tiff movie excursion was with erin to the extremely awesome sounds like teen spirit: a popumentary. think about all of the things that make the annual eurovision song contest great - the costumes, the dance moves, the glorious cheese from the continent that brought us limburger, corvo, wensleydale, gruyere, and mimolette - and multiply those factors by a thousand for the goodness of junior eurovision - open to entrants aged ten to fifteen. these kids pour their hearts and souls into their music. twins with accordions! dancing sisters! some are shockingly professional, some are shockingly adult, but most are just kids, full of enthusiasm and hope. the film settles on four entrants - a band from belgium, soloists from georgia and cyprus, and a girl in a bulgarian band, with others making cameo appearances along the way. all of the glorious angst of teenhood is here, along with some really touching stories. it breaks your heart to watch basically an entire georgian village cluster around a fuzzy tv set cheering for their girl, especially knowing the recent troubles the country is going through. riveting, entertaining stuff.

so that's tiff. back in the real world, there is an arbour loaded with grapes that need harvesting; i brought a few in today.


and then an entire crate full.


so far i have made grape pie (!) and a lot of juice. let's see if i get jam made before the rest rot!

i love serbia

so here was a film i almost didn't see - almost didn't even look to see it was *about* due to my anti-bleakness sentiments - based on the title alone: tears for sale. probably about child trafficking or something equally horrible and dire. i get enough of that in the newspaper. but i checked the synopsis anyway, just to be sure.

and hm, it sounded interesting. and it was, it was!



visually arresting, engaging characters, compelling plot, completely bonkers. i loved it.

set in serbia roughly after the first world war, tears for sale takes place in a mountain village with only one man left - the others all went off to various wars, never to return. the local economy depends upon the vineyard, which the second last man, in trying to protect all the helpless women, sowed with landmines (you can guess how he met his end); during the harvest season, the remaining women draw straws to see who will attempt to enter the fields for reaping. there are a lot of funerals in this village, and our two heroines - orphaned sisters - work as professional mourners, offering a variety of services (sobbing, tearing of hair, face-scratching) for a fee. at the wake for a soon-to-be customer, she makes the girls promise to lose their virginity to the village's last man, a frail elderly fellow. he dies (although not necessarily in the way you'd expect), and the girls are sent away to find a new man for the village - not an easy task in the repeatedly war-torn serbia (and one of the brilliant things about this film is that it is anti-war in a completely non-didactic way - it is just a huge celebrations of life in all life's crazy exuberant grandiosity). tears for sale is a road-trip, a love story, a magic-realist experiment, and just plain awesome. i hope it gets distribution, it would be a shame if it got passed over for being too obscure or something.

the morning after

okay so yesterday was my first tiff film and i thought seeing a film at 9:30 pm and going to a clothing swap at 4 o'clock in the afternoon was a perfectly reasonable plan and would allow me to go home between to drop off my stuff.

ha. not when there was vinho verde involved.

anyway, last night's film, in keeping with my policy of going to see stuff that isn't likely to end up in wide release, was still walking by japan's hirokazu kore'eda. a drama that explores 24 hours in the life of a family that lost one member decades earlier, its gentle humour was a little more subtle than i was looking for, considering the content of my bloodstream. i think i would have enjoyed it more on a rainy sunday afternoon with a cup of tea. sad as it is to admit, i had enough to drink that i don't have much to say beyond that.

i can, however, say that when i get my swap loot (left with our charming hostess) i am keen on doing some recon, most especially using a black leather skirt in size huge - which the donor had also planned to use for sewing projects, before eventually admitting to herself that it just wasn't happening.

i also got a top back that i had passed on at a swap a couple of years ago - when i was getting bigger and it didn't fit right - but now that i am smaller than before post-baby, i am thinking it could be quite cute.

oof

the film festival has officially begun for me: i ate about ten thousand pastries today at brunch. got to chat with lots of people i like (karen hines, the makers of cattle call and pat's first kiss, shane smith whom i met when i worked on wsff, etc. etc.) and drink several dozen cups of coffee which was extra-good as i fell asleep the night before remembering that i had polished off the very last bit of coffee that morning and there wasn't any left in the house.

after the brunch there was the traditional tiff dollarama field trip, at which i bought some crafty supplies, and a side trip to kitchen stuff plus, where i bought a much-needed mandolin for half price!

then after erin and i picked up our tickets, we found a set of tickets to the gala for the secret life of bees, a film which neither of us really cared to see. after a brief dither (use them? sell them?) we decided to track down headset lady, and just as we did, she was set upon by an anxious-looking woman who had dropped her tickets. she was extremely grateful to us, and i'm sure that karmic retribution will ensure that we win the lottery or something in return.

i met the walrus

one of the shorts we funded got nominated for an academy award! woo hoo! it's called i met the walrus and all the info is available here. it's screening at sundance this week, too. i sense a busy month coming up for bravo!fact...

the story behind the short is interesting - when he was just a kid (14 years old), jerry levitan talked his way into john lennon's hotel room to conduct an interview. that tape is the soundtrack for some gorgeous animation. huge congrats to jerry and director josh raskin for their awesome work!

(edit)

while i'm at it, here's the trailer:

ha ha!

more dispaches from the toronto international film festival:

yesterday afternoon i was talking to someone else who was at the botched tiff borat screening, and he told us that the replacement screening was going to be at the elgin, and we'd probably have a not-bad chance of getting rush tickets, since it wasn't hugely publicised, and a lot of the industry people would have other plans.

since the film we were seeing at 6 o'clock was also going to be at the elgin, we were perfectly positioned to investigate the line-up possibilities.

the 6 o'clock film was brand upon the brain! by auteur of the bizarre, guy maddin. it's the story of the childhood of guy maddin, housepainter, who grew up in a lighthouse where his parents ran an orphanage. but something is strange about these orphans, so the lightbulb kids, harpists and stars of the series of mystery books, come to investigate. it's a silent film, mostly black & white, and the screening was accompanied by an 11-piece ensemble of orchestra members, a few singers from the toronto children's chorus, and three foley artists. there were a few technical glitches (they didn't even let us in the building until more than twenty minutes after the film was supposed to start), but the film was so compelling, so filled with strange and wonderful inventions, that the tech problems didn't really interfere at all. trying to describe it to tg after, erin and i couldn't stop adding more details - the aerophone! the hamster-and-metronome! the nectarite ring! and on and on.

when we left the theatre, there were only thirty people in the borat rush line-up, so we decided - why not? other than the fact that i would probably fall asleep before we got in to the midnight screening (we lined up at eight-thirty - i should have brought my knitting!), and if not before, then definitely during. i haven't been one to stay up past ten o'clock at the latest since i got knocked up.

our seats were of course in the very back of the elgin theatre, but it's a well-designed venue, so our view was totally unobstructed. borat: cultural learnings of america for make benefit glorious nation of kazakhstan was... well, borat was borat. as erin described it, "slightly more shocking and slightly less funny than i expected." very shocking (you don't see that much full-frontal male nudity, among other things, in most comedies). but still very funny. it tells the story of borat sagdiyev, kazakhstani television reporter, who goes to america on a mission from his government to find out what americans are like and how they got to be the greatest country in the world, so kazakhstan can follow in their footsteps. this allows him to work his schtick. if you're familiar with borat, you know what to expect - he does the fish-out-of-water thing, plays with stereotypes and through his apparent innocence and ignorance encourages people to show off their worst sides: their bigoted underbellies. you either like borat or you don't; i like borat, so i found the film hysterical. as did the rest of the audience - i missed more than a few lines because the audience was roaring with laughter. and i didn't nod off once.

wahh!

man, am i depressed. i was up at dawn on wednesday, on the phone and computer, trying to get festival tickets to see borat and for your consideration. couldn't get through till both were sold out.

so, this morning i had brunch with a bunch of filmmakers and the tiff programmers and miscellaneous other industry types. so i got the low-down on last night's borat screening.

the projector broke down 10 minutes in, so they have rescheduled it for tonight. well, no biggie, right? at least we didn't miss anything.

but, for 30 minutes or so while they were trying to fix the projector, sacha baron cohen got up on stage to entertain the audience!

...and he was joined by a couple of audience members... michael moore and larry david!!

doing an impromptu comedy routine!!!

gah, we should have been there, the pain is almost too much. this would be a perfect time to get drunk if i wasn't knocked up. phooey!