When I started to write this, Toronto’s film festival had only been over for a week. Those ten days for me are almost an alternate universe. Closing night always brings a mixture of relief that I won’t have to queue up for a 9:00 am screening and ennui that it’s all over.
Events of the past month in transit-land have preoccupied me, and now, in early October, I am finally getting to the business of converting rough notes into fair text. Over the next few weeks, I will publish them aiming for completion before my personal deadline of Thanksgiving weekend. (For those who don’t know the background, I started this practice back in 1986 when “online” meant a single-line dialup BBS with an entirely text-based interface. The world of online reviewing is huge now, but I keep up the tradition both for friends who ask “what did you see”, but tire after I have spoken for 20 minutes and show no sign of stopping.)
The 2008 festival, for me, was good, but not great. Three stars. Lots of solid, worthwhile films, a few gems and a few dogs, but there was no day where I went from screening to screening buoyed on the cumulative effect of what came before.
This post contains general comments about the festival itself together with reviews of:
- Plus tard, tu comprendras
- Passchendaele
- 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould
Steve Munro 