Angry Robot

First Post from TIFF: Suckitude

Man my festival experience is not shaping up well so far. The weeks preceding it are full of articles with words like “buzz,” “star” and “carpet” which make me rage-tingle a little. My first film – my fault for choosing it, I’m sure – is a 900-hour-long art travesty that features 5-minute takes of people sleeping. The film this morning is Rwanda: The Day God Walked Away which is actually fairly decent, but still smacks of art-colonialism as the funding and writer-director are French. I skip Jennifer’s Body because a sandwich now sounds like a more exciting proposition, and then at the AMC for All Fall Down, which hardly sounds like a line-up attractor, I’m forced into Satan’s Own Line which contains people who are lining up for two other, surely more “buzz-worthy” films, and we are all screamed at by ferocious, sex-starved volunteers to pack closer together, then told my film will in fact leave the line, then when I do I’m told I should get back in the line – to the back of the line I just left. What the fuck? I impulsively walk out, whether because of personal sense of outrage, my introvert’s severe dislike of lines, or a purely rational calculation that I would rather pay the $10 value of the ticket than remain in that art scum fattening pen.

It’s too bad, I would have liked to have seen that film.

The whole festival so far has a villainous feel to it, Mos Eisley for corporate sponsors, Indiewood marketers and the aspirational middle class, where people line up to exchange cash for artistic cachet. Because of the money I paid, I can now have a delightfully scathing opinion of Face, or a somber, scolding recommendation for the genocide flick, or crow that I’ve seen the shitty Diablo Cody film two weeks before it sits empty in regular schmuck theatres.

Maybe I should stick to my fucking downloads.

Nah, I’m sure this will get better, it’s the weekend and the daytime screenings will thin out during the week, and I think my picks will be more agreeable even as of tomorrow. But I’m starting to think Jesus invented Blu-Ray so I could avoid bullshit like this.