I’ll try to start blogging about the films I’ve seen at the Toronto Film Festival tonight or tomorrow, but for now a few odds and ends:
- I’ve seen five films over the past four days, and I’m tired. Saturday night was the only chance I’ve had thus far to sit down and do nothing. But still, I’ve seen two great films, two very good ones, and one okay one, which is quite a good ratio. I’ve also seen Ron Perlman, Forrest Whittaker, and Guillermo Del Toro in person, as well as the Finnish ambassador, which isn’t quite as impressive but still pretty cool.
I will also make this prediction now, before everyone else gets in on it: Forrest Whittaker will receive an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland. Partly because he’s very good, but also because he’s playing a real-life historical figure who’s kind of crazy. The Academy loves that kind of thing.
- I am going to be spending entirely too much on comics over the next couple months. As if Lost Girls weren’t expensive enough, I found out that the Beguiling managed to get me a signed copy after all, so I get to exchange my copy and shell out another hundred bucks. Expensive, but worth it.
Next, Brian K. Vaughan’s Pride of Baghdad comes out this week, and I’m looking forward to it enough to pick it up in hardcover. Also this week, Drawn & Quarterly has the next collection of Yoshihiro Tatsumi‘s work, Abandon the Old in Tokyo. That’s probably not an immediate purchase, but The Push Man and Other Stories was good enough that I want to see more of Tatsumi’s work.
And later in the fall, there’s going to be League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Dark Dossier and Absolute Sandman.
I will be poor.
- I don’t have a strong emotional reaction to September 11th. As much as it was a horrific event, putting it in perspective with world history shows it to be just another atrocity, more evidence that thousands of years haven’t done much to evolve certain parts of humanity. (Perhaps it’s just my recent infatuation with Lars von Trier, but I think my point of view fits nicely with most of the Scandinavian movies I’ve seen over the past decade)
But still, the little things fascinate me. It seems bizarre, perhaps even perverse, that the date that’s emblazoned on our recent past should appear in such mundane and insignificant ways: A phone bill due on September 11th, or tickets to a movie or a baseball game. It seems strange, but at the same time inevitable, since the only alternative is shut down society entirely on that day, which doesn’t seem like a particularly good idea.