The second film of the day was the musical/love story, Perhaps Love. I almost didn’t go to it because it was a gala presentation, but a friend talked me into it and I am so glad she did. It’s definitely one of my favorites of the festival.

The IMDb boards are convinced that it’s a rip-off of Moulin Rouge, but they’re wrong. The trope of the play-within-a-play predates Baz Luhrmann by quite a bit, and that’s where the similarities end. Perhaps Love tells three parallel stories: the musical being filmed, the cast during the filming, and the cast before they were stars.

It’s worth another viewing or several. I had trouble following some parts of the musical numbers because of the combination of quick cuts and subtitles.

(Also, the lead boy was very pretty. Oh! He was in Chungking Express! No wonder he looked so familiar.)

The conceit behind Three Times is three short love stories set in three different time periods, but with the same set of leads for each story. I chose it because I am a sucker for form. In the introduction at the festival we were told that the title referred to the minimum number of times you would want to see the film, that it was the speaker’s favorite of the festival, and that she was going to go out to the lobby and stuff the ballot box with 5s.

She must have been -on- something.

I quite liked the first segment, but the second was mind-crushingly slow. It was presented as a silent film, with title cards and mellow, tinkling piano music and oh my goodness. I could hardly take it. I think if it had had dialogue I would have been fine, and I know why the director chose to present it that way, but eh. I don’t buy it. The third was better, but on the whole, it didn’t work for me.

Gorgeously shot, though, and strong performances by said leads. Still, definitely my least favorite of the festival.

And then! I had a day off from the festival/concerts/having a life on Friday night, and so I was able to dive back into my Netflix queue with His Girl Friday which I utterly adored, with the mile-a-minute dialogue delivered as only Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell could. So much love!

(Okay, I have three more SIFF movies to post about, but I think I have spammed this space and you all enough tonight/this morning. It’s the last week of the festival and my schedule is slowing down, so expect those three plus Million Dollar Baby, Mysterious Skin, and possibly some Amazon purchases soon soon soon.)

A friend recommended The Iceberg, and I am so glad she did. I hadn’t picked it out of the schedule earlier, but I enjoyed it so much! It’s a Belgian comedy about a woman who is locked overnight in a fast-food restaurant freezer, and develops an affinity for things cold, culminating in a trip to the iceberg of the title, much to the chagrin of her husband.

It’s stylized with broad (but not crude) physical/slapstick comedy, and it has a terribly charming framing device. It’s the sort of movie that never ever would be made in America, surreal and delightful. The more I think about it, the more I like it.

Definitely one of the coolest things about the festival is the archival presentations. We get some at other times of the year, mostly via midnight movies at the Egyptian, and it’s films like that that remind me how there’s nothing like seeing a movie on the big screen with an audience.

When I posted the list of things I was interested in seeing, told me that I absolutely had to see Black Orpheus on the big screen, and he was right. The music and the color really require a theater setting to appreciate. It’s a retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth during the Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, complete with early bossa nova music. Marvelous. And the leads were gorgeous, which is always a bonus.

Daniel MacIvor. Callum Keith Rennie. Rebecca Jenkins. All three were reasons why I was excited to see that Whole New Thing was playing at the festival. It fed neatly in to my Canadian film obsession, and the fact that it was a queer story, with a 13 year old formerly homeschooled boy developing a crush on his male teacher, well, that was just a bonus.

…and then I took a moment to look up the IMDb link and got distracted by comments on a Yahoo blurb about the film. All the (barely literate) commenters flipped the hell out over their perception of the plot and, of course, a few NAMBLA jokes.

Oh, the rage. Because, okay. For one thing, no. Not to be with the spoilers, but hello. Students develop crushes on teachers ALL THE TIME. That doesn’t mean they are having the sex. The more I read, the angrier I get, and that makes me less articulate. If it had been a story about a heterosexual crush, that same group of posters would think it was adorable. Of course, if it was a het crush, I wouldn’t see it, and MacIvor wouldn’t have written it. What’s the point? -That’s- an old story. That’s -not- a whole new thing.

So, I’ll just say that this film started from MacIvor’s own memories of being queer and 13, that everything is handled with delicacy and complexity, and that most of all, the characters feel real.

(Plus, there’s a reference to the sex lives of hobbits, and that’s always a good thing,)

For SIFF this year I bought two Cinematic Six-Packs, a handful of matinees, and a Gala ticket. At the counter, the clerk pointed out to me that one film in a six-pack was a matinee and thus could be bought separately for less, and so I flailed a bit to find something to take its place. In a panic I chose Wristcutters: A Love Story, mostly because it starred Patrick Fugit and I think he’s pretty darn adorable. Honestly, I thought the movie would probably suck. (On a related note, it sounds like my biggest miss, ie the movie I almost went to but didn’t, and yet keep hearing about, was another Fugit film: Bickford Schmeckler’s Cool Ideas.)

And oh my goodness. Excellent choice. It doesn’t have distribution yet, so I hope -someone- buys it because -I- want to buy it on DVD.

I haven’t read the short story it’s based on (yet), or the graphic novel that drew influence from both story & film, but I’m looking forward to it. The basic concept is that Fugit’s character kills himself and winds up in a world populated by suicide victims. And then he sets out on a road trip, complete with touches of magical realism, some from the story and some added by the filmmaker consistent with the universe.

Plus, the flick included tunes by Gogol Bordello & a perfect turn by Tom Waits. Much with the squee. I really have a hard time talking about it without wavy hands. The write-up in Siffblog pegs it as the poster’s current favorite of the year. It’s mine too, in spite of the fact that it also starred Shannyn Sossamon. So there you go.

I went to 3 Needles a) because Thom Fitzgerald also directed one of my all-time favorite movies: The Hanging Garden b) because he had discussed it when he was in town a few years ago for The Event (Don McKellar fans represent!) and c) because of the cast.

It tells three stories about the transmission of HIV: one in Africa, one in China, and one in Canada. It was intense & hard to watch in points because of several scenes of rape, and also because of people doing very bad things for -very- human reasons.

Thanks to really dreadful projection issues, including several minutes of dropped sound, I’m going to want to see it again when it comes out on DVD. Need, maybe, more than want. I’m curious if some of the issues with cohesiveness, etc, will be remedied by seeing it properly.

To be perfectly honest, I picked Snow Cake out of the schedule because it had Callum Keith Rennie. And James Allodi. And Alan Rickman. I didn’t know much about it; I had read the official summary a few times, but it was pretty much an in-one-ear-and-out-the-other sort of deal.

It’s a UK/Canadian film, and the IMDb describes it as a friendship between a high-functioning autistic woman and a man who is traumatized following a fatal car accident. Frankly, he was a rather traumatized before it. It was good stuff, so right on Callum for being in it; I never would have seen it otherwise.

I broke away from the “films about death” theme that I seemed to have going for the festival and caught The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T., which was just utterly insane and fabulous. It’s written and designed by Dr. Seuss, which was pretty much all I knew about it and really, it’s all you need to know too. It’s available on DVD. Go! Watch! Debate queer themes on the IMDb message boards! (Oh my.)