Posts
There is a phenomenon known to cinephiles as the film festival bubble in which a person attending a film festival, like, say, the Toronto International Film Festival, its 10-day run commencing today, becomes so ensconced in watching movies and thinking about movies that the outside world ceases to exist. I don’t attend film festivals anymore, preferring to watch less and let it digest more, but I do miss that bubble, surfacing afterwards, wondering (or not) what I missed. If, however, you dip into a film festival bubble of life these days in America where the number of atrocities occurring can feel limitless, and their scale can feel infinite, it can also feel as if you’re burying your head in the sand. But then, to not occasionally stop drinking from the unrelenting firehose is unhealthy. They’ve got us right where they want us, in other words, forcing us to try and strike a nearly impossible balance, one that Not-at-TIFF, our annual counter-programmed festival to Real TIFF, did its best to strike, sort of. After all, somewhere along the line, round about 2020, say, Not-at-TIFF’s mission statement merged Here are Some Cool Movies to Watch! with a Festivus-like Airing of Grievances.
11th Annual Not-at-TIFF Film Festival
Who’s Harry Crumb? Real TIFF 2025 opens with the Colin Hanks documentary “John Candy: I Like Me,” a tribute to the late Canadian hero, so Not-at-TIFF 2025 will open with a John Candy movie. The first 100 guests will receive free philodendrons, the legend Shawnee Smith will appear, as will Bonnie Tyler for a special post-screening performance.
Report to the Commissioner. 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of Real TIFF, and good for them, but rather than screen some old 1975 warhorse like “Dog Day Afternoon” to commemorate 50 years, let’s screen this down and dirty crime thriller. Because the way New York City looks in “Report to the Commissioner” is basically the way the President of the United States imagines every (blue) American city still looks today. Not that he would know, of course, because like Jack Donaghy refusing to leave his office after being mugged on The Tuxedo Begins episode of “30 Rock,” I imagine that His Imbecility hasn’t gone outside except to play golf since the Central Park Five.
King of Marvin Gardens. Speaking of the President, I just finished Mark Kriegel’s incisive book Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson and was reminded of the outsized role His Imbecility played in the boxer’s ascension, including hosting the mammoth 1988 Michael Spinks fight at the Atlantic City Convention Hall which was attached to T*ump Plaza Hotel and Casino. In fact, Kriegel wrote, T*ump built a walkway between the two so that “high rollers” would not have to see the riff raff and “dilapidated boardwalk” of Atlantic City like the one presented in Bob Rafelson’s 1972 New Hollywood classic “King of Marvin Gardens.” I was reminded of the Tyson/Spinks showdown during the recent P*tin/T*ump summit in Alaska. After all, His Imbecility essentially turned this meeting with an alleged war criminal into a sporting event, including a flyover and a slogan, Pursuing Peace a la Tyson v Spinks being billed as Once and For All. And so, it was only appropriate that just as Tyson KO’d Spinks in 91 seconds, the Russian President essentially laid the American political tomato can out flat in what was tantamount to a minute and a half.
Reality. I would think Sydney Sweeney was a S1M0NE invented purely to feed the discourse if I had not already seen her immense talent on display elsewhere, like this exhilarating 2023 take on the Reality Winner story that was one of the best movies of 2023 and deserves to be seen far and wide. Sweeney spends most of the movie in cut-off jeans rather than regular jeans, so I hope that’s good enough for the pundits and thinkers.
Brain Donors. And because I’m doing it again, by which I mean making Not-at-TIFF too big a downer, here’s a palate cleanser. As “The Naked Gun” reboot has shown, audiences are starving for otherwise extinct 80s, 90s-style rapid fire comedies, and so here’s a deep cut, a 1992 Zucker Brothers-produced Marx Brothers homage with John Turturro riffing on Groucho. Rotten Tomatoes is a little suspicious of it, but I remember watching this on HBO at my best friend’s house and laughing my keister off.
Strange Brew. John Candy is not in this 1983 Canadian American cult classic, but Rick Moranis is, and when My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I were in Portland, Maine last month we encountered a mailbox with a Rick Moranis sticker plastered to it (see above). And I liked thinking of a whole host of Maine mailboxes with these same stickers. Be the change you want to see in the world, and this person wanted to manifest Rick Moranis back into the movies. And hey, it worked!
Nowhere to Hide. While I was not a fan of “Weapons,” I was a fan of “Weapons” providing a prominent role for Amy Madigan. More of that, Hollywood, please. It got me perusing Madigan’s filmography and in doing so, I discovered this action-thriller in which Madigan plays an ex-marine fending off evil military industrialists and Michael Ironside plays her survivalist brother and why was this not the biggest movie of 1987?
On the 8th day we rest, of course, and just watch some YouTube videos, like this one, which really brings back memories. This was the first George Strait song I ever knew because they played this commercial about a thousand times during college football games that year. And this occurs to me because the King of Country is receiving a Kennedy Center Honor, and why wouldn’t he be, described in that sharp-witted syntax of the Kennedy Center’s cockamamie chairman as “believed to be by millions of people to be just as good as you can get.” And though in this track Strait tells us that “you’ve got to have an ace in the hole, a secret that nobody knows,” the irony is that everybody knows Strait’s secret is remaining politically neutral. Mensch Mel Brooks nobly declined a Kennedy Center Honor that would have been presented by Dubya because he opposed the War on Terror, and though Strait could take the same tack and tell our burgeoning authoritarian to take a hike, as only an artist who would agree to be sponsored by Anheuser-Busch would know, you don’t get rich by sticking your neck out.
Small Town Santa. I’m sorry, but upon forcibly reviewing the Not-at-TIFF schedule, the T*ump administration’s special envoys to Hollywood demanded to include one movie and this title, starring America’s favorite I*E agent, is what they gave me. After all, The War on Christmas continues apace. (Don’t hold it against the blog. You don’t have to attend, that’s fine, because no matter what, we are required to report that all seats for this screening were filled.)
Gypsy 83. I have been dealing with living in America in 2025 by listening intensively to music of my old favorites. Bruce Springsteen, yes, but also my #1 favorite childless cat dog lady, Stevie Nicks, her solo stuff as well as her work in Fleetwood Mac but especially her contributions to “Tusk.” (This was only enhanced by reading, and loving, Andrew Porter’s SoCo-set new novel The Imagined Life in which Nicks’s music is essentially a supporting character.) And so, I felt so much shame and embarrassment that I only learned this year about the existence of this 2001 movie in which two Midwestern goths road trip to New York for an event called Night of a Thousand Stevies. Did I greenlight this in a dream?
Stay strong, friends and faux festivalgoers.
