Kat: Festival Diary Sept 14
Posted by Katarina Gligorijevic on September 21, 2010 · Leave a Comment
Day six. Over the halfway mark. By this stage of the festival, I’m already not making sense, but it doesn’t matter because my festival-attending autopilot is well trained. I started the day with a 9:30am screening (brutal) of The High Cost of Living (a Zach Braff drama which was thankfully not brutal), after which I tried very hard to catch up on work. This is becoming a common theme of the festival. Work-related emails pile up. I promise myself I will answer them, and then I go into a zombie-like state of blank-minded denial, fumbling through my day and promising myself that I’ll catch up the next day. Not really a good policy, so today I tried to really get it done. I even skipped the Harvey Keitel joint, A Beginner’s Guide to Endings, in favour of replying to emails, because I knew that at 6:00pm my day was truly beginning.
The Bruce Springsteen Mavericks conversation.
A lot of people love The Boss, and while I wouldn’t dare suggest that I love him the most, I certainly do love him enough that I might have been willing to camp out overnight in the rush line, as some die hard fans did (I heard the line started at 1:30am the previous night), to get a seat in the 550 seat Cinema 1 at TIFF Bell Lightbox to see the man talk for an hour. Thankfully, I didn’t have to sleep on the sidewalks of King Street because I magically managed to secure a single ticket. I was sworn to secrecy about where it came from. Just assume I had to sell my soul, or give up a pound of flesh, or lose a lesser finger for it.
I arrived about 90 minutes early to find The Ward producer Peter Block (one of my very favourite Midnight Madness regulars) already in line. We waited for a while speculating about how late the event would start while cute girls in Blackberry dresses offered to go to the concession stands for us if we texted them our orders from our Blackberries (not being a Blackberry user, I stood in line popcorn-less until they let us in (about 15 minutes behind schedule, but who’s counting).
Springsteen was being interviewed by Edward Norton, who is apparently his buddy IRL, but who is unfortunately not an amazing interviewer. Not being allowed to use any recording devices, I scrambled to write pithy notes on a pad & paper (so that I could later transcribe them into a little review here, which I still haven’t had time to do). It’s a good thing The Boss can spin a good anecdote out of just about any kind of question, because Norton mostly seemed to want to chat. Or hear himself talk. Or comment on stuff and not quite ask a question at the end. Some of his thoughts were interesting. It’s just that he wasn’t the main attraction, not by a long shot.
The best moment: when Springsteen started talking about the films he loved as a young man and started naming amazing ’70s classics like Rolling Thunder (starring William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones as Vietnam vets with a vendetta) and the Warren Oats joint Cockfighter. Swoon.
After an hour of staring dreamy-eyed at Bruce Springsteen, I raced into a taxi to make it to the premiere of A Horrible Way to Die. Full disclosure: I’m friends with the film’s producer Travis Stevens & writer Simon Barrett, but don’t let that discredit the positive review I gave the film elsewhere on this site. I just wouldn’t have written one at all if I didn’t think it was genuinely clever and inventive (but you don’t have to take my word for it – other reviews have been similarly positive, I’m pleased to report). The film looked and sounded terrific on the big screen, and afterwards Colin & I had the pleasure of escorting the entire 20-odd group of cast crew and assorted friends to the Imperial Pub on Dundas Street for celebratory drinks.
I probably shouldn’t have chugged three beers and pounded a glass of scotch before racing to the midnight screening of Insidious, but that’s what happened. Oh, and I forgot to mention earlier. Today’s TIFF diet consisted of a scone for breakfast and a muffin for lunch. Dinner, apparently, is for suckers.
In the Ryerson for Insidious, I broke the house rules by smuggling in a bottle of bourbon (good stuff, too – Woodford Reserve) to share with the pals in my row. The bottle disappeared fast, and Simon and I got shushed (rightly, I’m sure) by a guy in front of us, for our loud, drunken comments. They were undoubtedly hilarious, but we learned a lesson anyway: don’t get wasted then go to a hilarious scary movie. You will annoy others. That said, I thoroughly enjoyed the screening, though large parts of the plot are hazy.
Top three highlights of the day:
1) Sitting ten feet away from Bruce Springsteen for an hour. I mean, seriously.
2) Meeting the very hilarious star of A Horrible Way to Die, A.J. Bowen, and telling his (brilliant) costar Amy Seimetz that I know him “from Twitter” when she asked whether we’d met before.
3) Getting drunk at the movies. It never gets old.
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