TIFF- Day 8

Met up with Jadie in the line outside Ryerson for the screening of John Waters' "This Filthy World". Jadie was chatting with the parents of the girl who would become Peaches - internationally known smut-electro-rock-queen. I knew Peaches back when she was Merril Nisker in Fancypants Hoodlum. And she is still Merril, except that she is living out her dream fully. It was cool to meet her parents who seem very happy about all her success, including her last album "Fatherf***er" which she recorded in Los Angeles. They were there for the screening because I believe Peaches did a performance with John Waters in Los Angeles not more than three months ago (that I wished I had attended!).

Anyhoo, "This Filthy World" is a essentially a live comedy taping of John Waters' doing auto-biographical standup, directed by Jeff Garlin, a regular actor on "Curb Your Enthusiasm".

It is certainly insightful and enriching to hear the reasoning and motivation behind John Waters' works, as told by John Waters. The film itself could use some more editing. Strange shots of the world's ugliest audience are used as cutaways asGarlin cuts between a variety of performances. To his credit, you'd never know the show was taped on different nights - which is why you wonder why the hell the director is cutting away to this audience.

The film was packaged by CAA and paid for by Netflix, so I am not sure how it will show up n the marketplace - maybe as a Netflix exclusive? The Netflix production/distribution company is called Red Envelope Productions, whatever that is.

The Q&A was as wierd as one might expect of a John Waters' screening, although the strangest thing about it was that John Waters seemed the only reasonable gentlemen among the members of the crowd. Even Flyerman, that notorious pinhead egomaniac tragic starfucker was there in the front row, asking decoy questions so he could stand up an flash the audience with his sparkly Flyerman lightshow jacket. But it was, again, poignant in a way. Isn't the lust for fame by whatever means, the parents of an international smut rock Queen, the madhouse being run by the patients, isn't that what any and every John Waters film is about?

The only thing I was left wondering - what is John Waters' role, when his mission has been to push the limits of depravity and keep the boundaries loose, in the Internet age, where the lid has been blown off the Pandora box of depravity?

He answered a similar question in the Q&A in a manner that surprised me - where I thought he might have conceded to that impossible to outpace phenomenon, instead he inferred that he would just have to try harder to find what is depraved. Good luck to him. I guess indeed, someone will have to show us where are boundaries are, so at least we are conscious of it - and John Waters wants to be your man. Long live the ghost of Divine.

TIFF - Day 7

Last night, stood in the rain for forty-five minutes waiting to get into "Trapped Ashes". The usual trenchcoat crowd showed great enthusiasm for the nostalgic 80's "Tales From The Crypt" setup that framed five horror shorts by five different directors. The wraparound, directed by Joe Dante drew me back to the days of campy horror flicks that started on craneshots over suburban row houses in the Valley and led to all sorts of ghoulish mayhem. The best of the bunch was John Gaeta's thought piece on the six foot tapeworm, as well as Monte Hellman's period piece on a hundred year old witch.

Tonight we saw the Gala screening for Paul Verhoeven's "Black Book", an epic tale with an epic starlette, Carice van Houten, that was clearly a labor of love for the writer/director. I happen to be a huge fan of Verhoeven's and this piece was imbued with the same larger than life, visceral impact of his canon of works. He made a brief disclaimer before the film concerning the work he had done via Hollywood to support his career, and that this film represented a homecoming to his native Netherlands, and interestingly enough his first Gala at TIFF since The Fourth Man also in his native Dutch twenty-three years ago. A brilliant and utterly engaging film with a tour de force performance by van Houten that could very well become a classic.

Gonna try for the Jon Waters bio-pic "This Filthy World" at the Ryerson tomorow at 9pm.

TIFF - Day 5

Saw the world premiere of "Sharkwater" at Ryerson which was received with a unanimous standing ovation. What began as an endeavour to shoot sharks in all their splendour quickly turned into a much greater story, a pro-active document that goes so far as to show the documentarian alongside a fellow Canadian ship captain ramming into illegal shark poachers off the shores of Costa Rica, Guatemala and the Galapagos. Through incredible acts of bravery and covert ops, they expose a trillion dollar shark fin poaching industry based out of China/Taiwan that depletes the oceans of over 100 million sharks a year. Strongly recommended. For more information: www.sharkwater.com
\Sage and I wandered around Yorkville for the next couple of hours as we killed time before making our way to the Isabel Bader theater for Tsai Ming-liang's "I Don't Want To Sleep Alone."

The film follows a trio of Malaysian urban youth, one a homeless vagabond, the other a construction worker, and the third a woman whose life consists primarily of dry bathing her comatose brother in law. The narrative unfolds without dialogue and through achingly long shots that linger long after the mind has grown weary. Within the hazy, polluted grit of industrial Kuala Lampur these three find a strange dreamlike peace within their silent painful communion. Given that one of my all time favorite films is Andrei Tarkovsky's "The Stalker," I was able to appreciate the somnolent observation of those moments that unfold beyond the contemporary abridged attention span. Challenging, but necessary.

Tomorrow I have to put myself on tape for a last minute audition for Brittany Murphy's film "The Ramen Girl", and then we are off to try to get in to white hot "Death of A President". I overheard another filmgoer today recounting the presence of no less than 12 security guards at the first screening of the film here at TIFF 2006. Promises to be as charged as the widely protested screeening of the Kensingtion cat movie a couple of years back.

Then at midnight we have a pair of tickets to "Trapped Ashes" - the tickets given to us by the producer himself whom we ran into outside the Four Seasons today. Well it's time I got my horror fix for the year, so what better way to do it than via a series of horror shorts. More bang for my proverbial buck.