Movie review: TIFF EDITION!!!!!!

Like many bygone years, TIFF has come and gone. Unlike those bygone years, I've decided to take the big leap and participate in the festivities. And in doing so, I got a vague hazy look at what the film festival is like versus from what I've always imagined it to be... and it's an ugly thing. What used to arguably be the prime film festival in the entire world has somehow degraded into a blatant also-ran.

To be frank, I didn't actually go and see any of the films. Or moreso, maybe this is the first bone for me to pick on, they were too rediculously expensive. Alot of the media are commenting on preferential treatment that donors are getting versus the normal public. To them I give a big 'fuck you'. I applaud TIFF's treatment of donors (from my limited understanding). Anything that convinces more people to donate to TIFF so that it can complete it's Lightbox building is commendable. I'd bet $40 bucks that the same media complaining about the treatment would also be complaining about how embarassing a construction delay would be. How about them apples? Look at the bigger fucking picture for once.


Why would I be $40? 'Cause that's what the high-end tickets cost. To what you may ask? To a film that will be in theatres the week after (as in the case of Burn After Reading). Yes, the series of unfortunate events that is this year's TIFF is that it has a shocking lack of key premieres and celebrity appearances. I grew up reading the Toronto Star, and everyday of the festival there'd be entire pages upon pages devoted to glitzy/glamorous photos and commentary on riveting world premieres. This year we got simple text paragraphs of people who showed up, photographs of the people who weren't even here, and all movie commentary usually included the phrase "premiered elsewhere at the".


T.I.F.F. used to be T.H.E. film festival in the world, so what happened? It's undoubtedly that E.V.E.R.Y.B.O.D.Y. will be showing up once the Lightbox is complete, so maybe they're just spreading their wings elsewhere in the meantime? Or perhaps is it something more sinister?


Though I have been on Allah's green earth for only a short amount of time (came here three years ago from Jupiter), this is the first year that corporate sponsorship was front and centre with TIFF. There were corporate ads gallore at every TIFF office, Yonge/Dundas square was essentially Bell Square, the only credit card they accepted was Visa (don't get me started), and they sold naming rights to the People's Choice Award (don't get me started).

Screw that, i'll get started.

Don't get me wrong, I am a HUGE supporter of corporate sponsorships, but I believe that they all have their proper time and place. Naming rights for a public school is a bad thing. To subtly brainwash young people is horrible. But inevitably they'll be buying brand name products for lunch or at the vending machine, even 'No Name' is a brand name, so it's inescapable. So we might as well make a dime off it if we can and take in bids for food sources. I'm very a-ok with TIFF selling off naming rights to their Lightbox building. Yeah, it'd of course be better without, but 'Bell Lightbox' does have a reasonable amount of zing still to it, and given the amount of money that they are frontin', it's a win-win situation.

But oh my god, selling naming rights to the FUCKING AWARDS?!?! That's like the top movie prize being called the Oscar Meyer Awards. Fucking rediculous. And only accepting Visa? That does absolutely nothing to help break down the elitist reputation of the festival.

I'll try to swing back to topic.

So yeah, TIFF (in years goneby) had a great reputation for nicely balancing the top elite films of the world with the wonderfully folksy indie Canadian simple low budget independent fare, and giving them both equal footing. Lately it's elitist reputation has slowly been creeping up, but people have more or less been accepting of it since it was also increasingly stomping all over Cannes as the top festival in the world.

This year, possibly to combat that elitist reputation, TIFF opened it's arms for a week plus long festival in the heart of Yonge/Dundas Square. While it had some great hits and great intentions, the misses are huge embarassments for an allegedly world class city like Toronto. The public/free celebrations consisted of mostly live music and documentaries, and one sham of a spectacle.

Let me deal with the sham first. It was a dunk off with an appearance by LeBron James. The event started an HOUR late. People had no idea where the event was. They had an official NBA net in a truck, but they had no idea how to get it out of the truck. I grimaced as I watched a ton of TIFF staff, and even the Public Events Director himself, try to lift the net out of the truck to no avail. In lieu of that, they used this kiddy basketball net. The MCs were local, they were pretty cool. They picked people from the crowd to be judges, that was cool. Not cool was the wigger that they picked out, as I grimaced more as he pretended to be black for another hour, with all of the world's audience at his feet. The dunk off was alright. LeBron James was obviously late, so they obviously were trying to fill in time. Apparently NOBODY realized that the documentary LeBron was appearing in was premiering at the same time as the dunk off, thus the initial delay, and thus his lateness. So LeBron eventually shows up, and he's the angriest motherfucker ever, his grimace is ten times more worse than mine. The crowds are gigantic, he can barely move with all the media and horrible crowd management in place. He says a few words, makes a donation to a charity, then dons this amazing fake smile for a photograph with some under-priveleged children. What a fucking travesty.

The documentaries that screened were absolutely excellent. Fantastic range of subject matter, and each doc was a top pick in it's field. One problem is that the first doc had a horrible sound mix, S's and C's were ear piercingly loud... for the entire program. Second problem is that one of the docs was in anamorphic format. So when you watch an anamorphic video, you're supposed to put on letterboxing when viewing on a 4:3 monitor. Apparently NOBODY at TIFF has basic fundamental knowledge of video, and the entire doc was screened with a vertical stretch. Incredibly distracting for such a great documentary. Needless to say, also incredibly embarassing when a film festival doesn't even understand film.

The live music acts were equally fantastic. Great variety. I only didn't enjoy one act, but that's simply because they really were not my thing, which is alright since the crowd still loved them. But variety is the spice of life, so i'm glad they were chosen. What i'm not happy about is again the horrible sound mix. Every single performance had the performers signalling to the sound crew to fix various sound issues. The biggest travesty was in the final performance from The Midway State. Now of course I could be wrong, maybe that's HOW they wanted to sound... but I doubt it. They was singlehandedly THE best act i've ever seen on Yonge/Dundas Square Stage, and i've seen a few much more famous/popular acts. Too bad their sound mix was set to random. The guitar was excrutiatingly loud and vocals were non-existent. It was easily apparent that they weren't lip synching since you could hear them screaming into their mics, but nothing coming out of the speakers. Utterly embarassing for a final act. The crowd management was utter shit as well. The final day was only musical performances, so it naturally made no sense to have chairs, but it made sense of have crowd barriers. Of course, TIFF in their third-world way of thinking didn't setup any chairs, but they also didn't have any crowd barriers. So as the Stage has steps leading up to it at the front, people were standing on the steps, thus blocking the view of everybody behind them (essentially people at front row were on the steps). Yes, people are stupid, so we need barriers to save them from themselves.

But probably the most embarassing thing of all was the stage itself. As we were unfortuantely receiving heavy rainfall during the festival, it was nice that the stage had an overhanging canvas to protect it from the rain. But due to the heavy rain, TIFF poorly predicted low turnout and cancelled a few events at last minute (more on this later). Poorly predicted because huge amounts of people still came out for other rainy performances. The reasoning is probably moreso due to the fact that the fucking overhanging canvas is leaky. Anytime it rained, you could plainly see from 30+ feet away huge drops coming down from it and landing on the stage. The performers who did perform during the rain were often wiping down their equipment, using rags that got VISIBLY (from 30+ feet away) soaking wet. So not only do visitors now think shit of TIFF, the performers themselves know how crappy the Yonge/Dundas stage is, defineitly reducing their chances of a repeat performance (albeit in the rain). Utterly embarassing all around.

So in reference to my earlier point about event cancellations, you'd think that if an event was cancelled the staff would know. Nope. As an event time neared and the stage laid empty, all the volunteers/staff knew was "I dunno", "maybe", "I don't think so". "probably not", or my fucking favorite "check the pamphlet". Yes, they had a little pamphlet with all the events listed. Very nice thoughtful quick reference guide. Too bad it didn't sync up with the webpage.

The TIFF webpage is a travestical embarassment all unto itself. Go to it now and you can probably still see how horrible it is. It's didn't become truely operational until a day before the festival started, once the festival did start many pages still said "come back once the festival starts for more information!". Utterly embarassing and half-assed. The webpage for the Yonge/Dundas events looked like it was organized by someone with ADD. Information sprawled all over the page with minimal design or accessibility considerations taken into play. And for one event, the start time differed from what was on the pamphlet, which leads me into my next concern (fine: complaint)..

...the customer service... was horrible. I only called into the TIFF customer service line once, and it was such a bad experience that I never did it again despite my many questions. So I call in, and someone picks up surprisingly fast! I'm delighted to reach a rep so quickly. So the rep picked up.... and that's it. At least I think the rep picked up, I heard taht 'pick up' noise. I wait to hear something. I hear nothing. About 5 seconds has elapsed (seems much longer when you're reading). So I say "Hello?"
REP: "How can I help you?" (in that most-hated bitchy gay voice. Top companies really need to not hire bitchy gay people. Fun gay people are a-ok, not the bitchy ones.
ME: "Oh hi, I..."
REP: (interrupting me) "Hello!" (bitchy snarky tone)
ME: "Yeah hi. I had a question about the performance this afternoon" (pause, waiting for ya know, that natural thing that humans do, where they give intermittent feedback that they're listening)
(insert 5 second long pause. I don't even hear breathing)
ME: "Hello?"
REP: "Well!?" (very bitchy snarky tone)
ME: "Oh, didn't know you were there (ya I actually said that). The pamphlet says the concert is at 6 PM, but the website says it's at 5:30 PM, do you know which time it is?
REP: "Well check on the website"
ME: "Yeah I did, the website says 5:30 PM, but the pamphlet says 6 PM"
REP: "Oh, well the website is always right"
ME: "Are you sure? Can you confirm this with your manager or something?"
REP: "What does the pamphlet say?"
ME: "6 PM" (is this fag paying attention? his bitchy tone is making my ears bleed)
REP: "Oh, well go by what the pamphlet says"
ME: "Are you sure?"
REP: "Yes, is there anything else I can help you with?"
ME: "Nope, thanks" (Hang up. Then I yelled FUCK YOU!)
That's a customer experience i'd expect from Dell on trying to replace a keyboard, NOT from a world class film festival from a world class city. Fucking Zimbabwe probably provides better customer service during election season.

Unlike many of my other ramblings, I've ran into quite a few out of country visitors who think the same (Canadians are too nice to publicly voice their opinions). One girl was astonished at the prices for movies that were coming out very shortly. Another had a similar horrible experience trying to buy tickets, only in the end to not being able to due to the Visa-only credit card restriction (she had to go get cash from the ATM).

Hopefully this all was just a blip in TIFF's long standing history in film. Given next year's prescene of the Bell Lightbox, i'm more than happy if all the bad stuff happened this year rather than next year. TIFF has alot of ground to recover and alot of corporate sponsors riding on it's back. Hopefully it can improve where it can (a.k.a. customer service) and continue it's progress in breaking new ground (a.k.a. free events). We shall see in one year whether this was all for naught.