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Film Fridays: Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now (That They’re Closing the Royal)
Well, though he’s been away, this Torontoist certainly missed Toronto. And his feet are a size 11 Ron but nice try. But honestly folks, what has happened to our town since we’ve been gone? The Royal, the Revue, and the Kingsway closing down? Are you kidding us? This is a serious problem. Not only is it probably going to kill off (or at least make it difficult for) many of the small festivals that make this a continually interesting city to live in as a movie goer, it’s also going to basically make Kung Fu Friday, which was moved from the Royal to the Revue a while back and recently has been very well attended, completely unviable.
This is a tragedy. Can anything be done? Torontoist honestly doesn’t know, and we’re kind of hoping some kind of grassroots initiative springs up that we can latch on to (rather than have to, you know, start one of our own) but, we guess, we can at least go to the cinema, eh?
So, for example, just at the Royal this week you could go and see – Caché, Michael Haneke’s award winning French thriller, The Passenger, Michelangelo Antonioni’s long lost, Jack Nicholson starring classic, or L’Enfant, the Dardenne’s Palme D’or winner. These are all very good films that are not currently on in the big evil multiplexes owned by ViacomblockbusterMurdochTrump Industries!
Ahem.
The most column inches this week have gone to Inside Out, Toronto’s gay and lesbian film festival, for which there are excellent summaries on both NOW and Eye’s websites, but personally most interesting to Torontoist is Is It Really So Strange? (May 22, 12:15pm, ROM) William E. Jones’ look at a group of Latino teenagers in LA that are obsessed with Morrissey. Torontoist, also obsessed with Morrissey (we still love you, Mozza, even if you won’t come up here to play because we like to bludgeon seals to death on the streets of Toronto, or something) is somewhat looking forward to this odd sounding little film. Keeping the musical (kinda) theme is the ‘homos in hip-hop’ doc Pick Up the Mic (May 19, 7:30pm, ROM), previously shown at TIFF 2005. Finally, though it’s incredibly surprising, NOW’s Glenn Sumi really liked Another Gay Movie, Todd Stephen’s ‘Gay American Pie’, which sounds depressingly formulaic (if not to say forced) but apparently it’s good. So it might be worth a shot.
There’s also the Portuguese Film and Video Festival (website here) and the European Union Film Festival (here).
Oh, you wanted to know about the big films being released? The ones that you’d go and see at an evil multiplex? Like, say… The Da Vinci Code? We’re not going to talk about any of them. Go and see something at the Royal. We can at least save the Royal.
(We hope)