I missed the deadline for the advance ticket draw for the Toronto Film Festival, which meant I had two options if I wanted to attend: go to the box office early, early, early in the morning on Wednesday when individual tickets went on sale and deal with the lineups, or wake up early, early on Wednesday morning and sit on the computer and order them online. I chose online.
As is the case when any batch of limited, sought-after tickets is made available online at a specific time, the ordering system fails. It always does this. The load always blows the server. After a bit of hassle and slowness, and just before I was about to make my picks, the TIFF ticket ordering site blew up.
I persisted, got to the ticket list, made my picks and hit submit. Crashed.
It came back again and, having gone through the ticket picking process twice already, I rushed it, hit check out, and — score! — I got my tickets. Not long after that, the system went down again and wouldn’t be seen working again for hours. Score x2!
Since my list of “films of interest”, which I compiled elsewhere, was focused mostly on movies that didn’t feature any star power (because they’re guaranteed a wider release in the future) and because I had a lot of morning screenings picked, I managed to luck out and get most of my top picks. Tideland was sold-out but that was my one and only “star power” exception (Gilliam film) so it wasn’t unexpected.
In the next week, starting at midnight tonight, I will see nine eight film fest movies. They are:
- Banlieue 13
- Into Great Silence
- I Am
- Seven Swords
- Dreaming Lhasa
- The Shore
- Duelist
- Dreaming of Space
- SPL
The only dumb thing about this is that, in my rush during that one working online window, I accidentally picked Dreaming Lhasa and The Shore for practically the exact same screening time. Fuck. 10am and 11am on Wednesday. If anyone wants to see one of these, contact me. I will be trying to get rid of one of those tickets in the next few days.
This is my first time attending, so I’m excited. It’s costly, but it should be fun and rewarding. There are still some tickets available to a lot of movies, so if I enjoy myself enough I might try to pick up a couple tickets more. Anyway, off to Banlieue 13.
Banlieu 13 has some pretty nice action sequences considering there’s zero wire-fu involved (except, perhaps for the bit with the rope hanging off the building. Handy, that!). Story is a bit bleh.