Johnathan and I made the decision that we couldn’t afford our all-access passes this year, and we truly thought we wouldn’t even miss them. We weren’t able to take the whole week off, so I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal. Oh, I was so wrong. We bought tickets for 25 films this year, which locked us in for those films. There were a few that, if we had the ability, we would have skipped on the day. So, we came away having learned a lot this year. Instead of reviewing the movies (especially because I only remember the really good ones and the really bad ones, and that’s not very fair), I’m going to give a rundown of what I learned this year:

• We need passes. Next year, we’re going back to our director level passes. (Or the executive ones if we manage to win one of the drawings! Not holding my breath on that one, but it’s nice to dream.)
• Staggering the evening blocks made it difficult to plan our schedule but it made an incredible difference in traffic. I hope they do it for weekends and Fridays next year, because it was a madhouse the first Friday and on the weekends until the blocks started to stagger.
• I don’t think I will ever really understand Second Life.
• Even when people are prompted to agree that there is no talking during festival films, they will talk anyway. I’m contemplating a shirt for next year that gives a warning that I throw hard candy at talkers. I’ll bring a bag of peanut M&Ms and throw them with abandon if I must. I don’t like peanuts anyway.
• Good films can be made based on books. I thoroughly enjoyed The Hedgehog at the festival, only to learn that it’s based on a book. I purchased it for my nook and I’m in the process of reading it now. It’s a necessarily different experience, but so far just as enjoyable. If it weren’t for the film festival, I might never have heard of this book.
• Holocaust subject matter is always devastating for me, yet I continue to be drawn to it. I came away from The Roundup quite literally sobbing. I would see it over again, because I think sometimes I need to be reminded that there are people who extraordinarily bad and also those who are extraordinarily good.
• Our method for picking films worked well for us this year. We were able to minimize the number of films that ultimately disappointed (although I expect there will always be some). It needs improvement, though – next year subject matter needs to be taken into consideration. No more starting or ending the day on a heavy film. Too rough.
• I need to avoid anything that’s labeled “thriller.” Even if I think it’s different than horror, others may not. (I’m looking at you, True Nature blurb writer.)
• The CIFF staff is incredible, from the core staffers down to the volunteers. If my biggest complaint about the festival is the talkers, that means they did their job in spades.
• It’s okay to cheer and clap after realizing you never have to see the year’s trailer again.
  • Side-note: It was then that I discovered that I wasn’t the only one not so enamored with the whole theme. Clearly others agreed!
• The relief that the festival is over only lasts a little while, and then I’m back to wanting to watch tons of movies. Thank goodness for Netflix!

My top films:

1. The Hedgehog
2. Matchmaker
3. With Love, from the Age of Reason

Runners up (in order that we saw them): 2030 – Revolt of the Young, Here Comes Lola!, These Amazing Shadows, The Rowan Waltz and The Roundup. Okay, so I liked a lot of the films we saw.

I love the film festival, and I’m glad to be a part of it, even if some of the others who also attend the festival can be trying at times. Just like in past years, there were some hallmark films that I’ll continue to remember and think about for years to come. That’s a successful festival for me.

The theater was pretty full for a Wednesday night, probably owing to the celebrity draw and the well-known and loved show. The seats are still tiny, but I’m working on becoming tinier so that it’s not quite so much a squeeze. There was a family next to me, and thankfully they were willing to seat their small-ish son in the seat next to me so I didn’t have guilt for being fat and taking up a little more space than a normal sized person. He was too precious during, too, taking in so much of the show as well as the mechanics of it. At one point, he had a conversation with his dad about how it would be a nice place to take someone on a date. I just about melted after hearing that. Yes, little boy. Take someone to the theater on a date. That is a fantastic idea! I didn’t jump into the conversation, but it was very touching.

Harvey Fierstein is an interesting Tevye. He is not Topol, that’s for sure, and his voice… took a little getting used to. The actresses who played Tseitel, Hodel and Chava were very good. They had reasonably strong voices that blended very well together. The acting was pretty strong, which was nice. All in all, what is there to say about Fiddler on the Roof? I love it from start to finish. It’s long, emotional, and entertaining. Harvey Fierstein’s portrayal of Tevye is very interesting in that it is much more loose than I am accustomed to seeing. There was a certain… flair to it that is a bit hard to describe.

Johnathan says he was unable to get past Fierstein’s voice as far as the gravelly sound and really low pitch. That did make him hard to understand on occasion. At least I already knew what the lines were supposed to be! This could usually be a disadvantage, in that I could get bored, but he delivered the lines differently than Topol did in the movie, which made “old” jokes new again. It was, for me, a different version of the same thing, and I loved that. There have been other shows that I’ve seen twice or three times and it has been the same experience each time, because the roles are played in exactly the same way. I think it probably takes a truly good performer to take an established role and perform it in a different way, while still maintaining the core of the character.

I loved the show. It reminded me why I love Broadway and the theater to begin with. I had those thrills of the “curtain” going up, of the orchestra starting and just in general of enjoying a musical. I sometimes forget exactly how much I love going to see shows. It was a wonderful “gift” for my birthday.

As a side note: the spell check in Firefox really doesn’t like anything to do with this show! Lots of red.

Until the release date of Toy Story 3, it was at 100% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes according to the professional reviewers (T-Meter Critics). Enter a few contrarian jerks. On the release date of Toy Story 3, long after many of the reviews had already been posted, a couple of stray reviews were posted, stating that Toy Story 3 was rotten. This has ruined Toy Story’s perfect streak on the website, with both Toy Story and Toy Story 2 remaining at 100% fresh ratings, robbing it of the chance to be the only trilogy ever with a perfect 100% rating. Another negative review showed up on Sunday, making Toy Story 3′s rating a sadly imperfect 98%.

If the reviews were genuine, if they had real criticisms about the movie, I wouldn’t be so incensed by this. I admit, the Pixar fangirl inside of me would be annoyed, but if they were real reviews, that would certainly mitigate the fury that I feel right now at these three men, who can only really be characterized as assholes. Yeah, I said it.

One reviewer, Armond White, has a history of giving contrary reviews. If everyone loves it, inevitably, he hated it. He criticizes Toy Story 3 for having too much product placement, though he gives no explicit examples of how Toy Story 3 has any more product placement than either of the other Toy Story films. The blurb on Rotten Tomatoes reads: “Toy Story 3 is so besotted with brand names and product-placement that it stops being about the innocent pleasures of imagination — the usefulness of toys — and strictly celebrates consumerism.” In the full review, his main point seems to be that the movie is about toys, and that’s just not a good movie! Wow, how useful. He has gotten a lot of attention for his negative review, something I suspect was not on accident, and has managed to say absolutely nothing about why he has cursed the movie with the “rotten” rating. What is the point of a review if the reviewer cannot actually tell his readers why he did or didn’t like it? That’s left for us non-professional reviewers, who are allowed, by dint of not doing it professionally, to have an opinion of “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it.” We don’t have to ascertain whether the movie is good, merely whether we enjoyed it or not, and those are two vastly different things. He has cheated us all out of a real review by preferring to have a different opinion than everyone else on this and other popular films. (It’s not the first time he’s panned a fan and critic favorite.)

The second reviewer who posted his negative review on Friday is Cole Smithey. His blurb is this: “Once you get past paying the inflated price for an animated “3-D” movie where nothing floats in front of your eyes as with quality 3-D films, the story that unfolds is more sad than joyful.” I am amazed at how he has managed to say absolutely nothing critical about the movie itself other than the fact that it was sad. Really? A movie is sad? This makes it bad, apparently. His opinion of the 3D is equally ridiculous, since it seems like he wants the gimmicky 3D with things “flying” at his head. (That’s the first time I’ve seen anyone other than a kid want that experience.) Smithey’s website claims he’s the smartest film critic in the world. For a man that smart, one would think he’d be able to come up with more than a couple of short paragraphs about why he hated this otherwise universally loved film. “‘Toy Story 3′ is about neglect, betrayal, and the planned obsolescence of plastic toys that end up as so much toxic landfill.” And this is a bad message for the film, apparently, to have. Maybe if he spent his time focusing less on the fact that Andy had enough sentimental attachment to keep his childhood toys until he was 17 (I still have  my Holly bear, and I’m 25 in two days. What does that say about me, eh?) – Smithey implies that Andy can’t possibly be getting any dates as a result of his emotional attachment to toys that he’s had since he was a small kid) – he would have seen that the movie is less about the sad reality that eventually we all have to put away toys and do grown-up things for the majority of our lives. His review is forced at best, and he says nothing about what makes the film other than it includes themes like abandonment and the danger of planned obsolescence. Gee, definitely not things that people have to deal with in real life! And he totally ignores the ending, claiming that the film is sociopathic and promotes the wrong message to kids. Definitely don’t donate your toys to daycares or other smaller kids, folks! Definitely don’t do what you can to ensure that your old toys don’t end up in landfill, but instead go to other kids who will enjoy them as much as you did! Definitely don’t form emotional attachments to your toys that give you fond memories of your childhood, or you’ll never get any dates! Yep, I totally see it.

The third negative review that Toy Story 3 has been smacked with is by Jeremy Heilman. I’m not really sure what I can say about his review except that he totally pans Toy Story 3, calling the plot threadbare and accusing it of being a rehash of Toy Story 2. This man gave a more favorable review to a movie called The Human Centipede, in which people bite the butts of a person in front of them, forming a long line – in essence, a human centipede. What the hell? How can a movie like that garner more favor than Toy Story 3? He accuses:  “Toy Story 3 frequently indulges in the cheap brand of crass humor that has defined that series, with fart jokes, ethnic jokes, and gay jokes throughout its run time.” I’m not sure what movie he was watching, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Toy Story 3. This smacks of attention whoring to me – giving a negative review late, destined to be on the front page of Rotten Tomatoes, and scarring the reputation of an otherwise well-loved film.

These men do movie reviews at least semi-professionally. They are the ones that the rest of us look to (in theory) to help us decide whether a movie is worth our time and money. How are we supposed to trust any reviewer when there are those who are willing to give negative reviews simply for the sake of doing so, or for the attention that will inevitably follow for being in such a minority? There ought to be a level of integrity expected from those whose job it is to tell us whether something is good or bad. These reviewers should have some kind of check and balance to keep them from habitually panning fan and critic favorites for the sake of being contrary. You like a specific genre better than others, yet you review all genres? You are not a reviewer whose opinion should be broadcast to the general public, because what you are spreading is a false representation of the truth. Perhaps you don’t like this film (and that goes for any film), but if you have a history of disliking specific kinds of films, how is that a real review? It isn’t a criticism of the film itself, it is a criticism of the genre, disguised as a review for a specific film.

In the case of Toy Story 3, these reviewers have gamed the system and gotten away with it at the loss of something that Toy Story 3 and the Toy Story series deserve: a perfect record. The people at Pixar have poured their hearts and souls into this film, and it shows, just as it has with all of the ten films released previous to this. They strove to tell a good story, and they did. The only people in the world who disagree are these three assholes who can’t even manage to say anything real or valid about why they don’t agree that it was a cinematically well-told story.

Roger Ebert called Armond White a troll last summer for his inconsistent review history, and I’m going to go one further: Armond White, Cole Smithey and Jeremy Heilman: You are all trolls of the worst order. You don’t deserve to write reviews that other people are expected to take seriously. I hope Rotten Tomatoes yanks your T-Meter Critic status.

Disclaimer: I loved Toy Story 3. I am very incensed by what these men have written, but I think you should know that my bias in the other direction regarding this single film may affect your view of my thoughts here.

Fifteen years ago, the very first Toy Story film came out. I was ten years old, and I remember going to the theater to see it. I remember being amazed at how real everything looked, and loving the story. I thought Woody was the best toy ever, and Rex was one cool dude. I remember getting toys from Burger King, of all places, and playing with them a lot. (They were hand-puppets. Possibly the coolest kid’s meal toys that ever existed.)

In 1999, I was 14. Toy Story 2 came out and my mom again took us to see it. I remember being amazed that not only was it good (and sequels had a bad reputation by that time), but it was just as good if not better than the original! How could they manage such a feat? And then they released it with bloopers a couple of weeks later, and back to the theater I went, for the sole purpose of seeing it with the blooper reel at the end. It probably didn’t hurt that I loved the movie.

For the last eleven years, I’ve been enjoying both Toy Story and Toy Story 2, thinking that was all there was to the franchise, and thinking that was just fine. I was okay with Andy staying a kid in my imagination. And then I heard that there was going to be Toy Story 3. I was immediately skeptical. I mean, Pixar managed to capture lightning in a bottle twice with the Toy Story, erm, story. Could they really expect to do it a third time? Some of my fears were put to rest when we accidentally got to be part of a Q&A with Lee Unkrich, the director of Toy Story 3, at a screening of The Pixar Story at the Cleveland International Film Festival in March, 2008. He was so excited about Toy Story 3, about 3D, about all the things that both Disney and Pixar would be doing in the future, that it was impossible to decry the company as an imminent failure and the movie as dreck. (Not that I would ever, ever say such a thing! Perish the thought! Ahem.)

Since I now follow Lee Unkrich on Twitter, it was only natural to get excited as I heard him enthusing about the various stages of production over the last year or so. He posted countdowns, letting us know that Toy Story 3 was only months away, and then weeks, then days from release. How could I not get excited? Excitement, however, only leads to more worry, as it can often lead to the horrible feeling of anticipointment. (See: Ponyo.) I knew that we would have to see the movie on opening day, though. I couldn’t risk having the movie spoiled for me, and I definitely wanted to enjoy this movie without any expectations as to what the plot had in store (other than as seen in the trailer, of course).

On release day, we showed up at Crocker Park for our 9PM showing maybe a little early. We’re talking two hours early. Whoops. Radio Disney had a booth set up outside the theater where they were giving away prizes and encouraging all the kids to come and dance. I’m sure it was a major boon for the theaters those kids were in that they’d been dancing in the hot sun for a while and were likely to be slightly more subdued by the time they got in to the movie. Or maybe it just riled them up even more. Who knows? We hung out in the Borders next door for a while, and then about an hour ahead, walked over to the movie theater. We got a drink, and sat for a few, expecting to be let in probably forty to forty-five minutes early. We tried to go in, and the boy said that it would be about twenty minutes before he could let us in. Oh! Eventually a line formed for the Toy Story 3 showing in 3D, theater 6. We got let in at around 8:45, and some people ran to the theater as if all the seats would run out before they got there. We got seats in the back and settled in for the start of the movie.

First, I’d like to commend those who worked on the short. I loved it. Day & Night was charming and interesting, and while it’s obvious that it was Pixars traditional computer animation, it also had a feeling of some of the drawn cartoons that I watched as a kid. The combination was really neat. I loved the use of sound effects, too – it was clever and well-done.

We saw Toy Story 3 both in 2D and 3D. We saw the 3D first, so that factors more into my thoughts about the film at the moment. The opening Pixar logo in 3D was really fun. It had such depth, and the way that it was rendered wasn’t gimmicky at all. Really – one of the things that stood out to me was the opening logo. Weird? Maybe. But it was cool! Then, after waiting for three years (since hearing of the film at The Pixar Story), it was finally time to see Toy Story 3.

The movie starts with an action-adventure feeling, featuring all of Andy’s toys. It’s difficult to know why this is going on at first, but it was exciting to watch the toys in action sequences more fitting for the kinds of characters that they are. Wild west, anyone? We find out later that it’s Andy’s imagination as he’s playing with his toys, and then he gets interrupted by mom with her video camera. It’s a sweet opening sequence, reminding us of the Andy that the toys (and we, by proxy) loved in Toy Story and Toy Story 2. Then we come to real time. Andy is grown up. He has graduated from high school and is off to college in a matter of days. The toys make a last-ditch effort to draw his attention to the toy box in which they have languished for years, waiting for him to realize how important they are to him. And it doesn’t work.

Andy’s mom shows up and gives him an ultimatum: he needs to sort through his stuff before he leaves to college. College, attic and trash are the categories he has to choose from, and with a heavy sigh, he decides to make some hard decisions about his toys. They’re going into the attic, with the exception of Woody, who’s going to college with him. But then – disaster strikes! Of course it does, it’s a movie! Andy is silly enough to put the toys into a trash bag to put them into the attic, but he is distracted by Molly, who is taking a box of her own old toys downstairs to be donated to Sunnyside daycare. He helps her take the box downstairs and leaves his bag on the floor, right under the stairs to the attic. Mom finds them and assumes the bag is trash. Because … it’s a trash bag. And it’s on the floor. What else is she going to assume?

The toys are being thrown out! They start freaking out! They manage to use Rex’s tail and escape from the trash bag, just in time not to be picked up by the garbage man (cameo: Sid Phillips! I love how self-referential Pixar films are). They do their usual “hide under something and run” trick to get into the garage, where they get into Andy’s mom’s car and deposit themselves into the donation box. Woody tries to talk them out of it, assuring them that they were meant for the attic, not the dump, but nobody believes him (as usual!), and they all end up en route to Sunnyside.

Now we have the plot and the conflict, and I’ll leave you at that. I don’t want to summarize the whole movie because it feels much more clinical than actually watching it. No amount of summary could do justice to this movie.

Toy Story 3 is really a celebration of everything that Pixar is capable of, and of how far it has come in the fifteen years that they’ve been producing feature films. It’s amazing to me to watch and see that the screws on Buzz look so real that they could have been film instead of animation. The attention to detail is, as always, incredible. It’s a beautiful movie as far as the rendering is concerned. But the beauty doesn’t end there – it also has a beautiful story. Andy grows up and goes to college, but the toys are given new hope for the future; hope that they’ll be played with and enjoyed for years to come by a kid just as wonderful as Andy himself. (I know, I spoiled that bit. I gave a warning waaaaaay up at the top that I would!) It was so sweet to watch her, and also to think about the precious toys that I have had packed away since I grew too old to play with them and also too old to have them on display. (It’s maybe weird for a married alm0st-twenty-five-year-old to have her stuffed animals out for viewing.) I pulled Holly bear out of her box when I got home after seeing the movie on Friday night. I slept with her for the first time since probably high school, maybe longer. She smells the same as I remember – like whatever fabric softener my mom used to use when she’d wash the bear for the umpteenth time. I thought about Andy giving up his toys, and it made me emotional all over again. Could I do that with Holly? Not a chance.

Two days later, I can’t even adequately describe how the movie made me feel. I laughed, I cried (3D glasses are good for hiding the tears, but they do nothing for muffling the sniffles that accompany), I got nervous and excited. It was 103 minutes of movie bliss. We saw the movie again yesterday with Johnathan’s mom, and I’m going to suggest we go to see it at the drive-in next weekend (we did the same with both Wall-E and Up), so that we can talk during the film and nobody will get mad at us for it.

My favorite moment while watching the movie for the first time came not from the movie itself, but from the two or three year old girl who was sitting next to us. She really didn’t have a whisper voice, or even an inside voice, which was pretty annoying most of the time. She redeemed herself only by saying possibly the most funny thing I’ve ever heard a child say at just the right moment. In reference to a scene with Mr. Potato Head: “He looks more like Mr. PoTaco head!” I had to stifle my giggles because the moment onscreen was definitely not as funny as what I had heard. Yes, little girl, he did look like Mr. PoTaco head!

I loved Toy Story 3. So much. There’s really nothing else I can say in praise of this wonderful movie. Can you believe that Pixar has done it eleven times now? Eleven successes! Way to go, Pixar!

After we got home, I added the movie to our Netflix queue so that I could watch it again. Part of me wanted to ensure that I hadn’t just imagined how good it was, and that I wasn’t just in a particular mood to like it, which would mean that it wasn’t as likely to be repeatable. The rest of me just wanted to watch it again. (I do things like that.) I got it on DVD (because, sadly, it is not available on Netflix streaming), and verified that, yes, I had enjoyed it and it was a lasting enjoyment. The colors were vibrant and the dances were interesting. The usage of music was so unique to what I’m sued to in American cinema that I couldn’t help but be drawn to it.

Netflix, as it turns out, has a fairly healthy variety of Bollywood films available for streaming, which conveniently we can do right from our Playstation 3. I’ve been making my way through the ones that look interesting to me lately. So far, I’ve watched ten Bollywood films on Netflix Streaming. This doesn’t sound like a lot, but at an average of 2.5 hours long, I can, at best, watch two or two and a half films during my work-from-home day, which is when I use the streaming most. (As a matter of perspective, I can easily watch 4 American films, sometimes 5 in this same span of time.) They are long, but somehow they keep my attention through the end.

What I have seen so far:

• Chance Pe Dance: This has the same actor in it as My Heart Goes Hadippa – Shahid Kapoor. For this reason alone I put the movie into the streaming queue, and I don’t regret it. He is a very good dancer, and he seems to have less reservation when it comes to looking silly on film, which I find incredibly endearing. Chance Pe Dance was about a guy who was trying to make it in the film industry in Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay), and his struggles as relate to that goal. It is an endearing movie, and the dance and music sequences didn’t hurt its entertainment value.

• Kismat Konnection: I found this one very interesting. It also stars Shahid Kapoor, but it takes place not in India but in Toronto, Canada. This, I have learned, is not uncommon for Bollywood cinema. The films may be intended largely for Indian audiences, but they do not all take place in India, which differentiates the industry from Hollywood, where most American films take place in the United States. It, of course, centers around an Indian community, which makes sense. There’s a boy who was once very successful, but now seems to have nothing but bad luck. He’s told by an oracle that he needs to find his lucky charm and stick by her. He finds her, and they immediately don’t get along, but of course that changes through the course of the story. The conflict surrounds an Indian community center, which is going to be demolished to make way for a mall, and boy is an architect who finds his luck in being signed on to the project.

• Jab We Met: Shahid Kapoor again! Are we shocked? Boy is depressed because his mother ran off with another man and now his fiance has left him, and he has a business to run but doesn’t want to anymore because his mother is making crazy demands on her rights regarding the company. He gets on a train with the intention, it seems, of killing himself, and a well-meaning girl intervenes. She is chatty and interfering without, it seems, intending to be, and the movie centers around the things that happen to them as she tries to get home and he tries to figure out what it is that he really wants out of his life. Very sweet, very endearing.

• Pyaar Impossible: Nerdy boy sees popular girl and falls in love with her. She gets in trouble and he saves her, but as a result of her trouble, Daddy takes her out of college. She gets married, and boy doesn’t see girl again for a long time, but remains in love with her. Later, he has some software stolen and goes to Singapore to track down the evildoer who stole it, and happens to run into girl while he’s there. As it turns out, she is divorced and has a 6-year-old daughter, and he, through a series of misunderstandings, ends up as the nanny. Mayhem ensues. This is the first film I saw with Priyanka Chopra in it, and I was very impressed with her from the start. I found her very endearing, and I must say, she isn’t bad to look at, either. (She didn’t win Miss World for no reason, I suppose.)

• What’s Your Raashee?: Boy is away at college in Chicago, and his family calls him home under the pretext of father having a heart attack. (This seems commonly done in Bollywood films.) His family convinces him to get married within ten days so that he can get his inheritance from his grandfather to pay off his brother’s debts. He goes to a matchmaker of sorts, refusing a dowry, but insisting that he meet one girl of each Raashee (sun sign) to help his chances of finding someone with whom he will be compatible. Priyanka Chopra was also in this one, and played twelve different characters in the film – all twelve girls that he goes on a date with. His grandfather explains this similarity away by saying that he is searching for the face of his perfect mate in each of them, which is why they all look so similar. I think this has been one of my favorites so far, because of how well Priyanka Chopra played all of the different women, and how well executed it all was.

• Main aur Mrs. Khanna: Girl is an orphan and has no surname as a result. (God forgot to give her a last name, she explains.) Boy woos her and marries her, saying that she can share his name. Aww. They get married and move to Australia. Then his career tanks and he sort of unintentionally takes it out on her. He goes to Singapore for an opportunity, and instead of booking a ticket for her to go with him (as expected), he buys a ticket for her to fly to Dehli. She doesn’t go, and befriends two rather bumbling bartenders and gets a job at the airport. One of the bartenders calls her Mrs. Khanna all the time instead of her name, and this is a big deal throughout the film. It was a sweet film, although not as engaging as some of the others, I’d say.

• Bachna Ae Haseeno: Boy wants to be a playa. He befriends a girl on a vacation in Switzerland, and woos her. She falls in love with him, and he promises to save her from her arranged marriage. When they separate at the airport, he brags to his friends about all the “stuff” they did, none of which is true. She hears and her heart is broken. Later, he shacks up with another girl. He expects her to stay behind when he gets a job in Australia as a video game designer, but she decides it’s high time for them to get married. She goes so far as planning, well, everything, and then he ditches her on their wedding day without a single word of apology, and flies to Australia. While in Australia, he meets and messes around with a different girl each night, always managing to strike out with them eventually because he doesn’t actually care about them. He later meets a girl who is a taxi driver and she doesn’t believe in marriage, and he ends up falling for her, and she breaks his heart much in the same way as he broke the hearts of the other girls. Go figure! So he decides to go on a mission to apologize to the other two girls, learning a lot along the way. I won’t tell you how it ends, although I’m sure you can guess. It was very sweet, and I really liked the perspective of how Indian women are expected to live and behave, versus what I’m used to in the USA.

• Fashion: Priyanka Chopra again. Meghna (I love that name) wants to be a fashion model. The movie centers around her experiences in the fashion world, from beginner to top model and everything in between. It is dark and gritty, but also really shiny. It focuses less on music like other Bollywood films, but it definitely exposes a side of Indian culture that is different than American culture. The fashion industry there is much more… I want to say sheltered, but that is not the case. It has different standards and as a result, their scandals are not the same as our scandals. Interesting film.

• Chup Chup Ke: Boy is badly in debt after money-making scheme after money-making scheme failed. His creditors are on his case and want their repayment now, or else! He decides to throw himself into the ocean and drown himself so that his family will get the insurance money and will no longer be burdened by his debt. He… fails. And ends up playing a deaf mute in order to survive with his new companions. This one was long, and not my favorite as far as halfway through. I actually let it sit for over a month before finishing it. It turns out the end is better than the beginning! I really like Kareena Kapoor, and she was in this one (as well as others), and of course, Shahid Kapoor (no relation). I thought it was very sweet, and I might have cried a little.

So, ten films and counting (I recently popped a bunch more into our streaming queue for my work-from-home days). What have I learned? I don’t know a lot about Indian culture and norms. The movies help me learn a little bit, but I think it is distorted knowledge, because of course they’re movies, not accurate representations of life. I need to learn a lot more about the culture if I want to truly understand these movies. It probably wouldn’t hurt to learn a bit of Hindi, either. I’ve also learned that while the characters might say things like “shit” or “damn” or “bastard,” the translation will never, ever say that. It makes me laugh, actually, how much the subtitles are censored.

I feel like I have discovered a whole new genre of movies, and in a way, I have. It’s not exactly new, but it’s new to me, and it is, I think, braver than American cinema. American filmgoers are not happy to accept singing and dancing characters unless the movie is advertised as a musical. Some of these films have singing and dancing but would not, I feel, qualify as musicals because often the musical numbers have little or nothing to do with the actual story. It’s like a shiny, modern version of the 1930s and 40s Hollywood musical era. The music might not relate to the story, but who cares? We love those movies anyway. I love these Bollywood movies more than I ever expected I would. And I am all for expanding my horizons!

Since Ponyo was released in American theaters last summer, I’ve been hearing good things about it. Johnathan is a Miyazaki fan, so we’d intended to see it while it was in theaters. Then suddenly it wasn’t in theaters anymore, and we hadn’t managed to see it. Somehow it has fallen off of our radar consistently for almost an entire year! We got it on blu-ray the other day from Netflix, and finally got around to watching it (rather than letting our Netflix discs sit for months on end, as I have managed to do on more than one occasion).

Ponyo is very, very beautiful. The colors are wonderful and the characters are whimsical which makes it a treat to watch, at least from a visual standpoint. The film is hand-drawn on paper rather than cels, digital rendering or even digital drawing. The texture that results creates a depth that I’m not sure could quite be replicated any other way.

To my dismay, however, I did not find the plot as engaging as the art. I felt that it was a little bit lacking in overall plot depth. Little fishy wants to get away from her father/father figure and swims out into the open ocean, then ends up right near land, where Sosuke finds and saves her. Because she tastes human blood, she is able to morph herself into a human, albeit a socially inept one (since she’s not a human – she’s a fish). There’s talk about how when a fish with a human face comes to land, there’s a tsunami, and sure enough there’s a tsunami. Sosuke’s mom Lisa is a bit reckless and kind of stupid at times when it comes to handling the weather, and ends up abandoning the two small children in the house on the hill instead of evacuating as they were warned to do, and then in the end, some magical spirit lady shows up and says that if Sosuke really loves Ponyo then she can stay on land, and if not she has to become a fish again and live in the ocean. Sosuke promises that he does and everyone promises to be very good to each other, the end.

Nothing felt like it delved very far down below the surface, and I ended up bored enough that I just looked for the artistic details instead of paying much attention to the story. It was simple enough to comprehend that it did not require even half of my attention. I’ve watched only one other Miyazaki film to date, and of the two, this one was the less weird, but also less engaging. The other was much longer, but had a more complicated storyline which kept me interested through the end of the movie.  It was much darker, in art and in plot, but I think that was fitting for the story. Ponyo was light in color for the most part, but also fairly light in plot, with the majorest of events being the conflict of whether Ponyo will be able to live with Sosuke on land or whether she will have to return to the sea with the other “ponyos” and her parents.

While I view animation as a medium, not a genre (and certainly not a children’s genre), I felt that Ponyo was a movie aimed at children. It didn’t seem to have enough depth to keep me engaged, and in fact, I really liked The Princess and The Frog better than I liked Ponyo, which was totally unexpected. Ponyo was certainly a beautiful film, but I found it lacking in story development. I really wanted to like it, and maybe I would have if I had been watching with younger kids, who would likely have been enraptured by Sosuke’s adventures. I was really just disappointed by it, maybe because my expectations were so high. As Johnathan likes to put it, it was anticipointment.

I remember hearing that Disney was bringing back their 2D animation studio, and was pretty happy about that until I heard that the first thing out of the gates was going to be another princess movie. It was to feature a black princess, which excited people for about ten seconds before they started complaining. Why is her prince not black? Her name isn’t black enough! Etc, etc, etc. Drama. Walt Disney World was laden with banners and advertisements for the upcoming release of the film, and I really wasn’t all that excited about it. Usually I’m on board with seeing films in the theater (there’s nothing quite like a dark, quiet movie theater for immersing yourself in a film – emphasis on the quiet), but I really didn’t want to see The Princess and the Frog.

After the movie was released, I was expecting to either hear an ecstatic response, or a multitude of groans about how horrible it was. I heard neither. Maybe it’s because all of my media sources hadn’t seen the film in theaters, but then I didn’t hear about it after it came out on DVD, either. I figured, though, since Tiana was clearly a new Disney Princess and a mainstay, at least for a while, at the parks, I should at least see the movie so I would know what it was about. Into the Netflix queue it went. (On Blu-Ray,of course!)

Johnathan and I sat down to watch it with much reluctance, expecting that we would not at all appreciate it for what it was. We popped in the blu-ray disc and navigated through the approximately eighty previews to get to the menu, only to have it sit on that lightning bug for something like eight minutes before we gave up. It occurred to Johnathan that maybe the disc was prompting our system (Playstation 3) to look for a network connection before allowing us to go to the menu, so he went to unplug our router (which was currently just plugged in, but lacking in internet connection as Time Warner had disconnected us before our requested date, and we had not yet gotten our DSL modem for our new AT&T service), and poof! It worked! We had a bit of a facepalm about that, then proceeded in starting the movie.

I loved the style from the beginning, though Johnathan wasn’t as fond of it. I thought it pulled really well from the popular art style of the time. The story was pretty cute from the start, and we had a moment of amusement when we recognized John Goodman’s voice (it was akin to our “Patrick!” recognitions). It was cute. Princessy white girl and the black girl and her mother – mom’s telling a fairytale and sewing another princess-y dress for the white girl while the black girl enjoys the story, too. Appropriately, the story told is The Frog Prince. What else would it be? Then we see how Tiana lives – in a poor tenement with parents who clearly work very hard for what little they have but dream of having a better life. Then we are introduced to the moral: hard work and love will get you everything you need. Aww.

Tiana and her friend (whose name escapes me right now, but is definitely a spoiled princess by nature if not by title, but she’s at least not mean-hearted) grow up and Tiana works hard at two jobs trying to save up for her dream restaurant while the other girl is a rich daddy’s girl who is trying to woo a prince who is coming into town that very day. Plot point! Blah blah blah, Prince is arrogant, Tiana is prejudiced toward him and they both end up getting turned into frogs by an evil witch doctor who wants Big Daddy’s money, even if it means tricking the poor little rich girl into marrying a man who looks strangely like a monkey (the prince’s henchman). Through a series of wacky hi-jinks, Tiana and the Prince start to get along and fall in luuuuurve, and then there’s drama and a little creepiness and everyone lives happily ever after. That’s a seriously simplified version of how things went, but the ultimate sentiment is true.

The moral of the story is hard work and love. That stays consistent throughout. Tiana has her eyes fixed hard on her prize (her dream restaurant), and Prince Naveen wants some money so that he can continue living high on the hog and having fun without any responsibility. Big Daddy’s Princess wants to marry a prince and really doesn’t seem to have any goals at all outside of becoming a wife. Big Daddy’s Princess seems worst off out of everyone because she doesn’t really learn anything through the end of the movie, although she is a refreshing take on that type of character. She is not mean-hearted, even if she is spoiled, and ultimately she refuses to let Prince Naveen “sacrifice” himself by marrying her, but agrees to help Tiana and Naveen anyway. The others grow in their own way – Tiana learning that maybe hard work isn’t all there is to life (love) and Naveen learning that love of fun and money isn’t all there is, either (hard work and love). Aww. They get married and then, through hard work and a little help from Big Daddy’s Money, fix up the restaurant that Tiana had almost been blocked from buying because she’s a poor black woman (three strikes, you’re out).

There was a lot of humor in this movie, which I think helped it along, but there was a prevalence of dark elements which surprised me. The villain was a voodoo witch doctor who called on evil spirits to help him do his dirty work. He had a real motive, which is not something I have been able to say of all villains in animated films. He wanted Big Daddy’s money. (I’m sure that character has a name, but frankly I’m too lazy to look it up.)  He saw that Prince Naveen and his henchman had something that they wanted and used those wants to draw them into his evil plot. I’m not entirely certain why Prince Naveen had to be turned into a frog, but without his frogginess, we wouldn’t have had a Frog Prince story, would we? The evil spirits were actually pretty frightening in their ability to move about, and I was impressed with how unabashed the evil-ness was. As a small child, it would have terrified me. I remember being frightened by Sleeping Beauty and Alice in Wonderland as a child, though, so it wouldn’t have been out of line with some of the other Disney films. I actually quite liked the dark elements. It gave a real sense of danger and of conflict that propelled the movie along.

The Princess and the Frog also dealt more openly, I felt, with things like World War I, racism and sexism. Tiana’s father, it is implied, has died in the war, which I found to be an interesting element. It is never explicitly stated, but anyone with a knowledge of history should be able to glean that from the brief shot of his photograph in uniform on her desk. It might go over the heads of some smaller children, but they’ll figure out soon enough that he died, without having to go into great detail as to why. The racism and sexism come later when Tiana has finally worked hard enough and earned enough money to purchase the old sugar mill which she and her father had dreamed about turning into a restaurant. She gives the money to the realtors, and asks them to bring the contract to sign as soon as possible (smart girl) so that they can seal the deal. They agree, but later “regretfully” inform her that she has been outbid, and unless she can come up with the difference within a few days, the other bidder will own the property. The realtors comment that it was probably a bit much to take on for someone from “her background.” They are, not so subtly, referring to the fact that she is a poor black woman. I thought this bit was quite bold of Disney to address, considering it would have been the exact kind of opposition that any woman, but especially a black woman with no means other than what she creates for herself, would have experienced. Obviously she could have purchased another place, but she wanted that one, and what’s to say that she wouldn’t have run into the same kind of opposition for any property that she tried to buy? She was blocked from buying that which she had the means to purchase, simply because those selling viewed her as inferior. There are sexist overtones to the statement, too, but the racism is the strongest part. I really admire that the people involved with the film were willing to leave that element in.

Ultimately, she does get her building, and she buys it with her cans of money, but she has a little help from the alligator that she and Naveen befriend in their adventures in the swamp (grrrooowwwl!). It’s a little bit of a cheap way of her getting what she wants, but I’m glad that she didn’t have Big Daddy’s Princess sweep in and do it for her. This way, ultimately, she was getting what she wanted, largely on her own terms. And then she and Naveen do it the old fashioned way: by hand. I’m sure there was a little assistance from Big Daddy and Big Daddy’s Princess, and perhaps even Naveen’s parents, but I feel like Disney is showing that they ultimately did the work.

By the end of the film, it did start to smack us over the head a little bit, I liked the message. Magic didn’t get them what they wanted in the end, their love and hard work did. That’s not a bad thing to tell kids, especially with all of the other Disney films using such an emphasis on magical intervention and Happily Ever Afters. It’s the most realistic Happily Ever After I’ve seen in a Disney film. I really, ultimately, enjoyed the movie. Is it a perfect film? Not by a long shot. But I liked the story and the humor, and even the music was interesting. The art style was attractive and appropriate, and different than other Disney films, which makes it a unique creation. I’m sure Johnathan won’t be totally thrilled about this, but I’d like to own the movie, to put it on the shelf with the rest of my Disney fairytales that I go to when I need a dose of the unrealistic and magical. It was a pleasant way to spend an hour and a half. I just hope they’re not already planning a sequel. (No more sequels, Disney! John Lasseter, I’m looking at you!)

Day 7 started with The Baby Formula, a Canadian “mockumentary”-style saga about a lesbian couple’s journey into dual-motherhood as they both become pregnant through ground-breaking technology which allows sperm to be created from their stem cells, thereby allowing their children to truly be of their own flesh and blood. The concept of the birth was very interesting – especially that the two could only have female children. It wasn’t something that would have occurred to me. I liked the film a lot. It gave me a bit of baby mania, but that went away, as it always does. I thought the film was very interesting, and it certainly got me thinking.

Once we got out of that one, we headed to the food court where Johnathan’s mom was waiting for us. As far as I know, she’d never gone to anything at the film festival before, so it was a new experience for her. We got something to eat, then walked her to the ticket holder lines. Johnathan stayed with her while I staked out some seats in the theater for Three Days with the Family. As far as a first experience goes, I don’t think it was the best one. The film seemed to lack plot and any driving force behind it. There was a lot that went unsaid and unexplained, and maybe I was too dense to get it, but I felt like if this was Maria’s only experience with the festival, it would not have been positive. I think that was what bothered me the most.  The characters were undeveloped and too much was left unstated for it to be a satisfying film experience.

We were seeing Chameleon next, and there wasn’t a lot of time to dawdle. We walked Johnathan’s mom to the line, and then repeated the process from the previous film. I found seats, and Johnathan joined me not long after since the ticket-holder line was getting pretty long. The film was pretty good! It was a little bit suspenseful, a little funny, a little thrilling and overall pretty entertaining. It was a film about a con-man’s latest swindle. It was interesting to watch his plan progress and see what truly can happen when someone very good at what he does loses sight of his goal and gets distracted by something else. (In this case: love.) I think it redeemed the film festival for Johnathan’s mom, so even though she didn’t see any more at the 34th CIFF, maybe she’ll come back and see some next year.

We had a reasonable break after that one, so we sauntered up to Hospitality Headquarters for a while and enjoyed some snacks. The next film we saw was The Girl on the Train, which was… disappointing. I could see how it had the potential to be very interesting, but the main character had a very low affect and very little range of emotion. That made it hard to identify with her or even develop any level of feeling for her. By the end of the film, I really just wanted to smack her. It wasn’t a very good way to end our day at the festival. We had originally planned to stay for Small Crime, but had opted against it, owing to our bad experience with last year’s Greek film, and given that we’d seen two not-so-great movies already, we just went home.

The next day started with Best of Times – a change from our original schedule. We stayed home and slept in instead of getting up at 8AM and going in to see the 11AM round of films. It threw off the whole day, but I don’t regret not going to the first film. It didn’t really interest me. Best of Times was charming and sweet with a hint of bittersweet. It was from Thailand and the way the story unfolded was paced well, and the characters were developed enough for the audience to want them to succeed. The ending was realistic – not like many romantic dramas tend to be in American cinema. I quite enjoyed it and felt it was an excellent start to our film day.

The next originally was to have been The Last Days of Emma Blank, but we swapped it for another showing on Saturday and instead saw Small Crime after hearing that it was pretty good. I don’t regret making that move, either. Small Crime turned out to be interesting and engaging, if a bit slow to develop. The story was interesting and didn’t unfold too quickly. I was afraid it would end up being too predictable, but as more and more elements were added to the story of small-town drama, the possible endings changed and the story did not end at all as I had expected. I was glad we re-arranged our schedule to fit that back in.

We had originally planned to see Mrs. Moscowitz and the Cats, but after talking with some folks before Small Crime who hadn’t heard good things about it, we changed to The Last Train Home, which had also been on one of our lists. I kind of wish we hadn’t changed. It was a documentary about the mass migration in China for the new year. It focused on one family throughout, and while it was interesting from a familial standpoint, I thought it would address the trials and hardships involved with parents having to go to big cities to work and leaving their families behind a little bit more. Instead, it really seemed to focus on the unique hardships of one specific family, and it didn’t do anything to analyze it or even tell the audience exactly how it impacted their lives. It was just shots of the family talking, traveling, things they were doing. I wasn’t overly impressed with it. I was just expecting more from it, I think.

Afterward, we had some downtime in the Hospitality Headquarters, where I had to admit that I hadn’t loved The Last Train Home to the lady who we had been talking to (who had also seen it at the same time). The last film of the day was a Slovenian film called A Call Girl. It was about a college student in Slovenia who starts to work as a call girl so that she can afford the “finer” things in life, while simultaneously avoiding her other financial responsibilities and letting her schoolwork suffer. She runs into a number of difficulties – some pimps who want to “protect” her, an ex-boyfriend hell-bent on exposing her, and pursuit from the government and the press after her peripheral involvement with a German diplomat’s death. It was an interesting story and interesting to see how her life spiraled out of her control largely because of her own decisions. I thought the film was interesting. Once again – very slow to develop. I’m sure my patience for slow development got shorter as the week wore on, but I think a lot of the films rely too much on filler shots of walking instead of engaging story developments. Then it was time to go home. Day 8 began and ended on a high note.

The first film of day 9 was Protektor, a film set during WWII in Czechoslovakia. It was interesting stylistically, but I found the characters lacking. I’m not sure if I was missing something, but it seemed to lack some cohesion. I still found the style to be very interesting, and the muted colors helped to set the tone for the film, even if the plot didn’t do much to sustain it. Overall, I wasn’t terribly impressed with it.

Next was Father and Guns. This was a French Canadian comedy about a father and son who both work for the police force and have to go undercover as, well, father and son. This was probably our most interesting film festival experience. First, they had trouble with the screen – the curtains wouldn’t widen out. We all noticed that the start of the film was most certainly not in either French or English. It was in Russian. It didn’t take very long for people to figure out that they were trying to show us Hipsters! But it seems they didn’t notice, because when the snafu with the curtains was fixed, they started it again. We got partway into the first scene before the film was stopped. I mean, I really liked Hipsters, but that wasn’t what we were there to see! After another delay while they rewound the film and threaded the right one, we got started on Father and Guns. Not five minutes into it, the film melted. It melted! At that point, we were a solid half an hour delayed, so I was already suspecting we’d miss the next round. No matter, though. Father and Guns was Johnathan’s pick, but I ended up really enjoying it. It was subtitled well so that I forgot they were speaking French and not English because it was so smooth. The film had a humor in the same spirit as Hot Fuzz but with less of the gory violence. From start to finish, I really enjoyed it. It would be one I could see owning on DVD.

Sure enough, when we got out of Father and Guns, we had about one minute to get to the other side of the cinemas into the theater for Convention. We ended up having to skip it, because we were hungry and needed a bathroom break. So we went upstairs to the Hospitality Headquarters and sat for a while. While we were up there, we encountered someone that Johnathan compares to a certain group of roller coaster fanatics. He was going on about films and how he “knows” people and can put him (the gentleman he was accosting) in touch with all the right people to get his film promoted well. He probably went on for fifteen to twenty minutes while we discreetly watched with amusement. He finally left to catch the film that was starting last in the round, and the gentleman moved to the table on the other side of us, nearer to an outlet to plug in his laptop. It was then that we found out that he was the executive producer of Ivory, which we had scheduled for our last round that day. He talked to us about the film festival and how many films we’d seen, then talked a little about his film. We had been discussing skipping it earlier in the day, but after talking to him, I sort of felt obligated to see it. He kind of struck me like a lost puppy. He didn’t totally seem to know what was going on around him, but he was very friendly! We spent the break between films redoing our weekend schedule to oust some films that we weren’t sure why they made it on the list and to add some films that we hadn’t even planned on seeing to begin with. Then it was time to go down for another film.

I Am Love looked interesting on paper. It was another film where the plot seemed meant to focus on relationships, and unfortunately, it wasn’t very well developed. Tilda Swinton was beautiful, as usual, but her character was bland. The only character that seemed to have any depth at all died near the end of the film. Well, that sucked! It wasn’t a horrible movie, but I think Johnathan might have fallen asleep during, and I know I had a few moments where I drifted a bit. It just wasn’t as good as I expected it to be. Once again, I expected more.

Since we promised the executive producer that we would, we went to see Ivory. I figured I’d be interested in it – I’ve been in music basically my whole life, and I’m aspiring to be a classical musician professionally (someday). It seemed right up my alley. Johnathan also understands, having also been in music for much of his life. The film started, and not a full ten minutes into it, I was sick of hearing about how famous and amazing the main character’s grandfather had been. Who cares, man? You’re you and he’s him. You can’t ride his coattails to success. Then his “friend”, who really seemed more like he was meant to be one of those “frenemy” things, was a really flat character, and really only came across as a jerk. The girl was, meh, okay, but boring. And the other characters were just… there. Not even worth mentioning. After 45 minutes of wankery, we walked out. I couldn’t take it anymore, particularly after the main character, a pianist aspiring for big fame, dismissed Mozart as insignificant. Oh no you didn’t. Mozart is one of my favorite composers, and while I get that Brahms was his, it seemed like a crutch, and honestly – who would do that? It seemed to be a means of showing how much he knew about classical music, but it really only showed a lack of understanding. I wanted to scream. I was offended by the portrayal of all the musicians and by the implication of the movie that unless you’re pursuing the big dreams, the big fame, you’re not a true musician. My big goals in life revolve around a position in a city opera – and not even the Met! Does that make me less of a musician? I don’t fucking think so. Then, of course, the statements about music teachers, which I suspect is the “conflict” that the main character is meant to get over by the end of the film. Unfortunately, I couldn’t stand to sit there for another long, painful hour to find out exactly how the prick with no personality fared at the Liszt competition. Sorry, guys. I don’t think anyone in the process of the film actually went to Oberlin for music. If they did, I’d like to know who the fuck they were in classes with, because that’s not a wide cross-section of musicians in my experience! As you can see, I’m still steaming about the film a little bit. The older folks, apparently, really loved the film, though the executive producer said that we were its target audience. You’re way off the mark here, I think. Sorry guy. After fuming our way home, we sat together and tuned Johnathan’s guitar. Then it was time to go to bed and call an end to day 9.

After totally rearranging our schedule for the weekend, I honestly went through the day not knowing what the heck we were seeing next, with the exception of a few films. The first on Saturday (day 10) was Will Not Stop There. It was a film from Croatia and Serbia. I know very little about that area and its politics, which made some of the understanding of the film a little bit difficult. It wasn’t a big enough part of the film to stunt the understanding completely, though. I thought the film was a little bit quirky and kind of sweet. It wasn’t amazing or life-changing, but it was pretty good. It wasn’t a total waste of time, which by that point in the festival I viewed as a major plus.

The next film was Serbian and Albanian. The correlation of the two films was totally unintended. Honeymoons seemed like a good idea on paper, but Johnathan most definitely fell asleep during, and frankly, I don’t blame him. The film didn’t have a lot to drive it, and it spent a long time working up to the conflict and climax, which then happened and “resolved” in about ten minutes total, it seemed like. That, in combination with some folks talking created a not-so-pleasant situation. We left the film feeling disappointed at another “dud”.

Afterward, we had just enough time to get a refill on our pop and take a pit stop, then we were on our way to see Storage, which Johnathan had picked up. The film was a definite thriller dealing with murder and crime. It was a very interesting experience for me. I don’t do very well with graphic violence in film, and this one had it in spades. About halfway through, I started feeling a little sick to my stomach and thought that maybe I should leave the theater. I wanted to see how it ended, though, and I thought that it might be good for me to try and tough it out rather than run away from it. Well, afterward, I realized that I should have left the theater. It didn’t get any better and I certainly didn’t feel any better by the end. It was an exciting move and had quite a few unexpected plot twists to keep the audience on edge. There was even a scream from an audience member at an unexpected moment. Johnathan came out of the film raving about it. I think it took me a full five minutes to calm down enough that I could say anything about it. Despite the horrible feelings I was experiencing, I still gave the film a 3 out of 4 rating. It seems really odd in retrospect to do that, given how badly I was feeling, but I still think it was a good movie, even if I don’t handle films like that very well. We went up to the hospitality headquarters after that, and I downed a beer in near record time while I tried to calm down from the nausea I was still experiencing. I know Johnathan felt bad about choosing that film, but I still maintain that any of my discomfort was based solely on my own willingness to stay in the theater rather than leave. I’m glad he liked it, and I think I learned something from it: LEAVE if you’re made that uncomfortable! I’ll remember that for the next time I might happen to end up in the theater for a terrifying film.

Next was My Year Without Sex. I couldn’t honestly remember what the film was about, except that it was about, well, someone’s year without sex. It was an Australian film, which brought our coincidences that day to two (Storage was also out of Australia). The film was sweet and funny and a little bit heartbreaking. In many ways, it was just like any other family comedy, but in others, it got me thinking. Mostly, it got me thinking about faith (or lack thereof) and about what would happen if I died now. It reminded me that we have to create wills and living wills. I enjoyed the film – and I think I enjoyed it even more because it helped bring me back from the desolation and horror I felt after Storage.

The last film of the day was The Last Days of Emma Blank, which we had moved to Saturday in order to accommodate Small Crime. The only word I can really use to describe it is… weird. It was really weird. It was funny, but incredibly, indescribably weird. It was puzzling for a while, because we, as the audience, didn’t know why the family was acquiescing to Emma’s demands without much complaint or resistance until close to the end of the film. Really, the film was very interesting and it had a few unexpected twists and turns of plot that kept me engaged and interesting through the end, in addition to the delightful weirdness which I thoroughly enjoyed. I know others in the theater probably didn’t like it as much as I did, but oh – did I love it. I was pleased that the night didn’t end with a whimper.

Sunday, the last day of the festival, started out kind of slowly. We were both very tired, but I wanted to see some of the films we had scheduled for the day (well, all of them, really). The first was Mid-August Lunch, about a man caring for his elderly mother, when he is put upon to care for the elderly mothers of others in his acquaintance. The weekend for them moves forward sometimes painfully slowly as the group of ladies adjust to one another and to the new environment. It was a sweet film, but not overly engaging for its length. I felt like it needed more conflict to drive it. Perhaps I was becoming blase about the films at this point, but I did enjoy it. I just didn’t love it.

The next was another almost immediate turn-around to get in to the film on time. It was The Enemy, out of Venezuela. The subtitling on this film was a bit annoying because not everything was translated, in particular the text at the very end of the film. I have no idea what they were trying to tell me because nobody bothered to put it into English for those of us not able to speak Spanish. I found The Enemy to be quite engaging and interesting. It explored the idea of good versus evil and how easily those lines can blur, even where one might think they were very clear. Johnathan didn’t like it as much, but I thought it was an interesting concept. It was about twenty minutes longer than it absolutely needed to be, though, and that contributed to my increasing boredom by the end of the film. I’m sensing a trend with myself that I would rather have a shorter film than artistic shots. Oh well.

Splinters was our next film. It was not on either of our lists, but in trying to find a film for that block so that we wouldn’t end up sitting around for a couple of hours while waiting for our closing film, I checked out what was available. This one seemed very interesting on paper. It was from Poland, and I was interested to hear how much the language sounded similar to German in spots. The film was divided into three parts, which seemed like it might work in theory, but it seemed to stop the film where it might have flowed seamlessly from one part to the next with clever editing. I wasn’t thrilled with the film, but I was even less thrilled by the talking going on around us. The woman two seats down from me was a chatterbox, and then there was the couple in the row behind us, and the large group at the other end of our row, and then the elderly couples in the row in front of us. Seriously, one would think that by day 11 of the film festival, people would have known not to talk! It can totally ruin the experience for everyone else. Thankfully, that was the worst talking experience we had for the whole festival.

The next (and final) film we saw was Paper Man. After a final sojourn in the Hospitality Headquarters, we headed in and got seats near the back. I forgot about the bucket for change, and I never have any cash on me anyway, so we had nothing to contribute to the final push for the challenge match. The film was interesting. The concept of imaginary friends is interesting to me, since I never had one myself. (I think my brother was a pretty good playmate, so there was no need for an imaginary friend!) It was interesting to see the concept explored of a relationship with a man and a teenage girl that didn’t have to be lewd or inappropriate, but more like a father-daughter relationship, which clearly both of them craved. It was sweet and a little bit sad. I’m pretty sure when it gets wide release, it will get an R rating. It’s probably merited. I wouldn’t have dealt with it very well as a kid, that’s for sure. It’s not a “kid” movie.

We ended up not staying for the closing reception because, as previously mentioned, we were both quite tired, and considering ours was the last film to get out in that final round of films, we never would have been able to see anything. We chose, instead, to leave and get some dinner. We stopped at Applebee’s and rather than standing around straining to see and possibly to hear, we sat in the comfort of the restaurant, enjoyed tall beers and watched the twitter feed for the award winners and the final numbers.

With 71,500 people visiting the festival this year, we could feel that it was more crowded on some days, particularly in the evenings, than last year. Since we had passes, we didn’t have to worry about getting into any films, only about whether we would be able to get decent seats that weren’t in the very front of the theater. We got free beer several times, and enjoyed free food for most of the festival in addition to what the food court had to offer. We weren’t the best when it came to eating (and I can feel the water retention because of all the sodium we ate this last week), but I feel like we had a good week nevertheless. Now it’s time to get back to real life – work, cleaning the apartment, exercise and errands. CIFF is over for another year. I’m already looking forward to next year.

I was really underwhelmed by Forgetting Dad. It felt like something was missing. Obviously there’s not a lot he could do to get his father on camera at the end, since he didn’t want to be on camera, but I feel like this was more good for him and not so interesting as a film otherwise. Just “eh.” I could have lived without seeing it.

After a break in the headquarters, we headed down to see The Happiest Girl in the World. The promo shot was much higher quality than the film itself. The film was dingy and grainy – not at all what I was led to expect from the picture. The story had promise, but was mostly driven by the fact that the main character was a teenager who was on her period and therefore even more emotional and less likely to be acquiescent than usual. I was underwhelmed by that one as well. It just didn’t live up to expectations.

We had a fairly brief break after that one, so we sat at a table in the food court for a little while and had a snack. Then we headed in to see Hipsters. Hipsters was amazing. I loved it. It was exactly like the description said it would be, and better. I had forgotten it was a musical, but I adored that aspect of it. I am glad we saw Disco & Atomic War before seeing this, because it assisted with our understanding of the film. I think I would recommend the film to anyone, even those who aren’t necessarily into foreign films. It was far and away the best film we saw yesterday.

Before the next film, we had another short break and used it to grab something to eat at the food court. Johnathan called his mom and we ended up inviting her to see a couple of films with us today. Then we headed in to see the German Shorts Program. After about three, we realized that short films perhaps aren’t for us. There were two animated ones that we saw that we just didn’t get, and then the others were a bit puzzling. We have two more shorts programs scheduled, and I think we’re going to go ahead and go see something else. They’re just not for us.

Instead of staying for the last film, we headed home. (We had planned to see Fire Keeper, but Johnathan wasn’t feeling it.) We stopped at Target and picked up the Toy Story blu-ray/DVD combo pack. They didn’t have Toy Story 2 so we went across the street to Wal-Mart to get that. Turns out that 2 is in a blu-ray case and 1 is in a DVD case. That’s going to bother the crap out of me. But we wanted to get both, and we’d already opened them both before we noticed. Oh well. So we came home early instead of watching movies in order to… watch a movie. I ended up getting very sleepy before we finished with it, though, so I went to bed. Got more sleep last night than I’ve gotten any other night this week! It was beautiful. Now I’m looking forward to another day of films that may or may not be great. Hopefully today won’t be a disaster since Johnathan’s mom is seeing some films with us.

Our first film of the day was Adrift, out of Vietnam. The description made it sound like it was an interesting story of infidelity and unrequited love. What it turned out to be was a very slow, very long story of infidelity that was mostly implied and unrequited love that was barely established. If I hadn’t known that was what it was supposed to be, I wouldn’t have caught it. It was really only okay. Nothing very impressive.

After that we had planned to see Fire in the Heartland, but owing to the fact that we missed Disco and Atomic War due to last-minute changes, we went to see that instead. It was totally worth the change. It was a documentary, but it was an interesting style which kept things interesting through the end. I also learned a lot. I was born during the cold war, but it ended a few years later, so I know really very little about it. (I also know little about the Vietnam war – apparently my generation was not meant to learn about it except from movies.) Now, I know… well, something about it. From an Estonian perspective. That’s something!

We had a long-ish break between the two movies, so we headed up to Hospitality Headquarters for a while. Then it was time to see Black Sheep. This one was on Johnathan’s list so I wasn’t super stoked about it. It was about a guy who worked on a sheep farm. He is at odds with the owner’s son, who is spoiled and vindictive, and in love with Maria, a girl who pretty much has the world at her fingertips and could have whoever she wanted. The story moved fairly slowly at first, but it seemed to pick up by the end. I liked the story and its plot twists. It was funny and kind of exciting at the right points. I really enjoyed it. Interestingly, Johnathan was a bit underwhelmed. Go figure, right?

Then we had another long break, so back to Hospitality Headquarters. My biggest “shock” was to see how empty the headquarters were during the day versus on the weekends or even in the evening. It was nice to walk in and know we could easily find somewhere to sit, and that the sandwiches wouldn’t be voraciously devoured before we even had a chance to get over to them. Our next film was Inside Hana’s Suitcase, which was a documentary about a little girl whose suitcase survived the Holocaust even though she didn’t. It was mostly a bunch of kids telling her story which was both charming and aggravating, at times. I had heard someone say that she cried her way through the film, and I thought that she was just prone to crying. Well, I… kind of did the same thing. It was a very interesting and emotionally-charged documentary. It was quite good.

Our next film was Japanese: The Bare Essence of Life. I knew it would be a little bit weird from the description, but I believe the description grossly understated the movie’s bizarreness. It was… too much. Too weird, too slow, too… too. We ended up walking out after about an hour of the two-hour film. At that point, we still hadn’t hit the crux of the story or even established what the central plot was supposed to be. So we left. First film we’ve walked out of – though not the first we wanted to leave. I hear it got a little less weird, but there doesn’t appear to have been anyone who was blown away by it.

After that, we went home. It was worth it to get home a little earlier than we had been in days. Didn’t go to bed earlier than usual, really, but it was nice to be at home for a little bit before we needed to be asleep. Also nice to have some milk again. I feel like as far as day 5 goes, it was kind of a “meh” day. Nothing really catastrophically bad, but nothing outstanding, either.

After that, we had another documentary, which I had high hopes for. Turtle is pretty popular; popular enough that they added another showing on the second Saturday. And that’s great! I thought, cool, a documentary about sea turtles! Yeah, uh. Well. It was really slow. Lots of downtime just watching the turtles, I dunno. Swim. I think if it had been cut down to about half an hour instead of an hour and a half, the film would have been much more engaging. Both Johnathan and I felt like it would be right at home at The Living Seas at Epcot. But we also both almost fell asleep during it at its current length. I’ll be totally honest: I’m not sure I get the hype over it. But it wasn’t bad. I guess you could call it anticipointment.

Then we had a bit of a break and headed to see Accident, a Chinese thriller film about orchestrated “accidents” for pay. Essentially, hits designed to look like freak accidents. It was slow in spots, but kept me feeling engaged throughout. There were some things that went unexplained that I think I got a handle on, but I’m uncertain. Maybe that’s the point. I liked it – would definitely recommend it, though I wouldn’t say it’s a “must-see”.

Our next film was supposed to be Divided We Fall, but after seeing Cosy Dens and realizing that there was a level of knowledge that we were missing in order to fully understand it, we decided to skip it. It was by the same director and while I’m sure it was good (Cosy Dens didn’t suck, after all), I didn’t want to go into a film that we weren’t positive we’d like. So at the last second, we ran to get in line for My Heart Goes Hadippa. Everyone I’ve overheard talking about it has called it a Bollywood Extravaganza, and it totally lives up to the title. It was entertaining and silly – and I think it knew it was a little bit ridiculous and that made it all okay. Johnathan has said it’s the shortest 2.5 hour film he’s ever seen. It was meant to be shown with an intermission, but they skipped it so that it would fit into the film block. I don’t regret making that last-minute change of plans. I loved the film.

Because we changed plans, we ended up missing our original pick of Disco & Atomic War by about 10 minutes. (It started at 9PM, but even though we booked it out of the theater before the credits even started rolling, we didn’t get out until 9:10.) So, rather than rudely go into a theater with a film already in progress, we decided to catch another one. We went to see Will You Marry Us?. It’s a Swiss film, and they spoke German (mostly) throughout, which we both found interesting. Not because they were speaking German, but because of how different it sounded from the German I’m used to hearing, which is primarily the northern German accent from, well, Germany. The film itself was really nice. It really was a fairly typical romantic comedy where things build and build until the crux of the film, then there’s that moment where you think things are done for good, and then it all works itself out. It was a feel-good movie. It was a nice way to end the night.

All in all, I’d say Sunday was a good day. I managed to misplace my Powell’s literature water bottle that Allison gave to me, and the hospitality headquarters (and everywhere else) were insanely crowded, but it was not at all a bad day. Onward to day 5!

TiMER was an interesting film. The concept is that every person can get a device – a timer – implanted into their wrist, and it will count down the days and hours until that person will meet their soulmate for the first time. If the person meant to be your soulmate hasn’t had a timer implanted yet, yours is blank. The main character has this very predicament. The movie explores the concepts of true love. Does it only happen once? Can a little device really determine whether you’re meant to spend the rest of your life with this one person? And if it can, do you wait around for that one person, or pursue other relationships in the meantime? Essentially, if you know you’re meant to be with one person for the rest of your life and your timer says you haven’t met them yet, how do you then go about living the rest of your life?

I really enjoyed the film. It was quirky and funny, with a touch of surreality and sci-fi. It got me thinking, too. (I love it when a movie makes me think.) After the film was over, I asked Johnathan, “Would you?” He wasn’t sure. I know at this point we both feel it’s moot. If this relationship isn’t the forever one and we’re not meant to last, would I want to know? Would I have wanted to know a few years ago? I don’t know. How would it change your relationship to know that you’re supposed to be in love with this one person? What’s to stop a person from bucking their one “true” path and going down a different one? There are so many questions inspired by this movie. I love it.

The opening gala was nice. There were a lot of people in a very little space, but there was good music and made some great people watching time. I had the first beer that I’ve had since we started this process – so my first beer in 2.5 months. It was very good! But then, Great Lakes usually is.

A few anecdotes:

• The man behind us kept ruining the moments in the film by stating what everyone KNEW was going to happen just seconds before it did. Dude, you’re totally killing the anticipation when you do that. And you’re doing it at full volume! Don’t be a jerk. Don’t talk during movies!
• The lady next to us seemed like she was maaaaaybe a little drunk. She couldn’t find her pop and instead of verifying that the one in between her and Johnathan was hers, she just drank from it. It was not hers. I gave mine to Johnathan and he kept it on the other side after that. (Then they left their cups in the theater! I hate it when people do that! We took them to the trash with ours.)
• A lady tried to walk off with our beers. It was pretty funny. She had ordered two Eliot Ness and we ordered to Dortmunders. He put up the Dortmunders first, and then grabbed the others – but hadn’t removed the caps from any – and she started walking away. It was kind of an amusing madcap moment.
• We got egg timers as our parting gifts! So cute. Now we have two egg timers. I guess one can never have too many timers?

Today is the second day – the first full day. We’re seeing six films today. See you tomorrow!

What we’re planning to see:

TiMER 3/18 7:00PM [Opening Night Gala @ 9:00PM]

Twenty 3/19 11:45AM
The Big Gay Musical 3/19 2:20PM
Cosy Dens 3/19 4:15PM
Dear Lemon Lima 3/19 7:10PM
Applause 3/19 9:50PM
Midnight Shorts Program #1 3/19 11:30PM

Love Hurts 3/20 11:45AM
Trailerpark 3/20 1:45PM
In the Heat of the Night 3/20 5:00PM
Bomber 3/20 7:20PM
The House of Branching Love 3/20 9:20PM
Down Terrace 3/20 11:40PM

Ingredients 3/21 11:45AM
Turtle 3/21 2:10PM
Accident 3/21 4:30PM
Divided We Fall 3/21 6:50PM
Disco & Atomic War 3/21 9:00PM

Adrift 3/22 11:45AM
Fire in the Heartland 3/22 2:00PM
Black Sheep 3/22 4:50PM
Inside Hana’s Suitcase 3/22 7:30PM
Bare Essentials of Life 3/22 9:30PM

Forgetting Dad 3/23 11:50AM
The Happiest Girl in the World 3/23 2:10PM
Hipsters 3/23 4:25PM
German Shorts Program 3/23 7:20PM
Fire Keeper 3/23 9:25PM

The Baby Formula 3/24 11:50AM
Three Days with the Family 3/24 2:15PM
Chameleon 3/24 4:30PM
The Girl on the Train 3/24 7:10PM
Small Crime 3/24 9:40PM

If I Knew What You Said 3/25 11:45AM
Best of Times 3/25 2:00PM
The Last Days of Emma Blank 3/25 4:45PM
Mrs. Moscowitz and the Cats 3/25 7:20PM
A Call Girl 3/25 9:45PM

Protektor 3/26 11:30AM
Father and Guns 3/26 1:50PM
Convention 3/26 4:05PM
I Am Love 3/26 6:50PM
Ivory 3/26 9:50PM
Storage 3/26 11:45PM

Independent Shorts Program #11 3/27 11:20AM
Bananas!* 3/27 2:15PM
French Shorts Program 3/27 4:10PM
Mid-August Lunch 3/27 7:30PM
The Taqwacores 3/27 10:00PM
Midnight Shorts Program #4 3/27 11:45PM

Honeymoons 3/28 11:45AM
The Enemy 3/28 2:10PM
My Year Without Sex 3/28 4:50PM
Paper Man 3/28 7:10PM [Closing Night Reception following]

We’re both pretty excited for the festival to start tonight. There were a lot of films that we picked out that didn’t make the cut due to time constraints and our disinterest in staying until midnight then turning around and coming back for the 9AM. Some of the ones that didn’t make it are: Will You Marry Us?, A Shine of Rainbows, Together, Please, Please Me!, Quest for Honor, Saviors in the Night, Nora’s Will, My Heart Goes to Hadippa, Cow, Beyond Gay: The Politics of Pride, The Girl, Harvest,  and still yet others. I think 25 or more from my list didn’t make it, and Johnathan had about 12 or 13 that didn’t make the list. One that we did pick and fit into our schedule but won’t be seeing is 8: The Mormon Proposition. We were even going to do the film forum. It ended up getting canceled, and we found out that it’s because the film got a distribution deal. Good for them! I hope it will get a wide release so that we can still see it.

Planning this many films was no easy task, I can tell you now! We each got a program in the mail since we’re members of The Cleveland Film Society, so our game plan was this: we each went through and highlighted the films we were interested in seeing. I went through both of our guides when we were done and made a list for each of us. With our lists, I made a combined list of films that we both wanted to see. Then I picked out showings of each one of those so that we would be able to see all of them. That, in itself, took some juggling. Then I went through and filled in all the remaining time blocks with films from each of our lists, alternating so as to try to be fair. More of my films ended up on the list simply because there were more on my list and more of them that fit into our open spots. It probably took a couple of hours of planning, all-told, but it means no guesswork when we get to Tower City this week. We can just check out our Google calendar and cross-reference with the program to ensure that we’re not missing anything that we had planned.

Since we started eating better in January and losing weight, we wanted to make sure that we had a solid plan for what to eat while we’re there. Last night, we made two pasta salads that should give us quite a bit of food. We’re going to supplement with sandwiches, yogurt, fruit and veggies and other snacks as well as a couple of times eating in the food court (with pre-planning so we can still fit it in our plans). I’ve got all of the food that I “plan” to eat from Friday to Tuesday (the farthest SparkPeople would let me track when I started – I may add Wednesday and Thursday today) so that I know everything will be balanced and that I should have plenty of food. I’m looking forward to this. It will be a true test of our new lifestyle to see whether we can maintain it in some semblance of normalcy while our lives are turned totally upside down for eleven days.

The planning is done. My hair is “styled” and my makeup is on. We have our tickets and director-level passes in hand and we are ready for the film festival to start.

Let’s go.

January and February were uneventful for me. I was working for the Evil Cable Empire, not really loving it but managing nevertheless. There was snow, it was cold, and generally the status quo stayed the same. Our year in snippets:

• We bought a new couch (which is pretty great).
• We saw Spring Awakening (which I loved).
• I joined my very first D&D campaign.
• We saw The Drowsy Chaperone again (to much less satisfaction than the first time).
• The Cleveland International Film Festival started again (and we loved it from start to finish).
• We saw Spamalot (and it was only okay).
• We saw The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee again (and it was exactly as expected).
• We went to Knoebel’s opening weekend.
• We saw Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin live in concert (it was pretty great).
• I lost my job at the Evil Cable Empire.
• I started knitting again.
• Johnathan started working for the hospital again.
• I finally got my wisdom teeth out.
• We went to Walt Disney World for two long, long weeks (it was really, really hot! but fun).
• We saw They Might Be Giants in concert (it was a Flood show – pretty fun!).
• We saw Jonathan Coulton and Paul and Storm in concert again (last year’s concert was better).
• I got the flu twice – the “regular” flu and H1N1. It was a “fun” month.
• I got a job at the hospital working at the new help desk.
• We saw Mamma Mia! (it was enjoyable).
• We saw Wicked (still a great show).
• We quit our D&D campaign.
• We visited Allison in Bloomington for a few days. (She visited us in Cleveland a few times, too.)

In other news, I watched 361 movies this year. It’s not quite one movie per day on average, but just about. I’ve seen a lot of good ones, a lot of bad ones, and a lot of mediocre, unmemorable movies this year. I really loved doing this, though. It was nice to have something to work toward this year, particularly after I became unexpectedly unemployed.

In addition to my 361 movies, I read 26 books. I seemed to let my “50 Book Challenge” fall by the wayside this year in favor of films, and that is okay with me. I completed 24 projects: 4 scarves (none for me), 10 hats (about half of them for me), 3 headbands, 2 coffee cozies, 1 pair of mittens, 2 market bag (very stretchy and wonderful), and 1 tank top (not my favorite project). I partially completed one set of fingerless gloves for myself, I made one flip-top mitten for Johnathan (the other is still in queue), one more market bag, two hats for me, half of a sock, part of a scarf for my brother (for which I have once again changed patterns), half of a second tank top (which I loved, but didn’t have the patience to finish), and another try at flip-top mittens for Johnathan which ended up not working as well as planned. Not to mention, one of those 10 hats had to be ripped out and started over again because I made it far too big for a normal-sized woman’s head.

As far as “big things” go, this year has been nothing compared to last year. I’m okay with that. A job loss was bad enough, I think!

2009 hasn’t been bad to us. I hope that 2010 will be better.

The first film we saw was on day 2 of the festival: La Belle Personne. As a starting film, we found it was a let-down. The characters were on the whole uninteresting and undeveloped, and there was a lack of emotion that seemed to ruin many of the potentially poignant moments in the film. We left the film feeling decidedly disappointed.

We started out fairly early the next morning to get to the first film of our second day, Welcome to Farewell-Gutmann.  I really enjoyed this one. It was kind of intense in spots, but it had some good laughs and an intriguing plot. The characters were well-established without excess information being shoved in our faces, and the plot propelled itself without needing to be forced. After the movie was over, we had planned to take a block off for lunch, not thinking about the fact that we would be able to eat fairly quickly. We then had three hours to kill. (I think I nearly killed my phone by using it for normal internet browsing during that downtime.)

After that, we lined up for Children of Invention. The film was so charming. I really became emotionally involved in the life of each of the family members, even while the mother was struggling with her own “addiction” to get rich quick/pyramid schemes. The children were so adorable and winning.

After the film was over, we turned around and got in line for the next one, which was Night and Day. The line for this one wasn’t long at all, as compared to the line for Children of Invention. We got fairly good seats – actually in the middle section, too! (We tended to stay to the right side of the house and sit all the way against the wall; more guaranteed seats that way, and that way nobody had to climb over us if they wanted seats farther in.) I have to say, this is one of the longest movies I’ve seen without much plot to show for it. The main character started out interesting, but as the movie progressed, I was unimpressed with his demeanor. The surrounding characters were mostly flat. The story moved too slowly to hold much attention, and while there were some amusing moments, the movie just felt bland. The inclusion of a random dream sequence that accomplished nothing did little to improve my opinion of the film. This one was our second disappointment.

Fresh off of one of the longer movies that we saw at the festival, we turned around and got straight back in line again to see Tokyo!. It was… strange. Bizarre. I will say that it was the perfect midnight movie. I didn’t dislike it, but I don’t think I would have liked it at all had I seen it the next day at the 2PM showing instead of at midnight after having seen three other movies, slight lack of sleep, hopped up on caffeine and jittery. I’m honestly still on the fence about this one. I can’t decide whether I liked or disliked it. I think it was just middling for me, and it was certainly weird.

Some poor planning on my part meant that after getting out of the movie the previous evening at about 2AM, we had to get back downtown to see Cherry Blossoms at 11:20AM the next morning. Whoops. Thankfully, the movie was good and successfully captured my attention. This was the runaway hit of the festival; people couldn’t stop talking about it to the point that there was another showing added on top of the two that had already gone, and all three sold out two theaters. I thought the movie was good. It may have even qualified for very good. (I believe Johnathan thought it was excellent.) It was poignant, emotionally charged and interesting. The landscapes were well-captured and the characters sufficiently established in their lives so that the audience became invested in their lives.

Once again, we scheduled downtime for ourselves that we didn’t actually need, so again, I found myself playing on my phone and draining the battery for several hours. (Needless to say – we learned our lesson. Don’t skip movie blocks if you can help it! Or else, bring a book.) Our next film was Eldorado. I will be the first to admit that I really didn’t understand what the plot was meant to be. The movie seemed to go on in its fun and games vein without really establishing anything by way of plot, and then suddenly it was over. There were some entertaining moments, but that’s about all that could be said of this one. It was just not great.

Thankfully, we had another one that we were pretty certain would be good following right after so there wasn’t really much time to dwell on the disappointment. Prom Night in Mississippi was next on our itinerary, which we were both pretty excited to see. It was a documentary about a town which, until 2008, had always held segregated proms. I liked seeing the various students express their sentiments about how the felt regarding the separated proms and how they felt about the possibility of finally having an integrated one. I really enjoyed the story and the way it was shared. It was a little slow in spots, but I really enjoyed it otherwise.

Monday, it was back to work (with my groggy, sleep-deprived self!) and looking forward to seeing Crude after work. I thought that one was good, but not great. It was slightly preachy, which I thought was probably natural given the subject matter (the damage that Big Name Oil Companies have caused in South America by unethical and reckless drilling habits). It was good, but I couldn’t go so far to say it was great.

Tuesday night, we saw Forgotten Transports: To Estonia, which was a documentary about a group of women who had gone from camp to camp together during the Holocaust. I enjoyed it because instead of focusing on the travesty and making a point of giving out the numbers to further illustrate the tragedy, this focused on the relationships between the women. There was laughter, and they shared some happy memories in addition to the sad ones. It was a more emotional story in that it more humanized both those who had been in the camps and the Nazi soldiers who were purpetrating the crimes against them in the camps. I was really glad that we saw this one.

I had Wednesday off, and since Johnathan has an earlier work schedule, we were able to see three movies on Wednesday instead of the one that we were seeing during the rest of the work week. The first one we saw was Correction. We got settled into our seats easily because the line wasn’t long for this one. An older couple sat down in front of us, which isn’t an issue ordinarily – seats are for sitting. The problem was with the woman’s perfume. (Or maybe her hairspray – it was hard to tell; it was overwhelming.) I tried to tough it out, but any time I’d move or readjust, her perfume would come at me again and I’d have a wave of nausea. Coming off of food poisoning, that feeling is twice as bad as it’s ever been, so I definitely didn’t want to cope with that for the whole film. We moved down a few rows, behind a single movie-goer which seemed promising. He wasn’t emitting the foul perfume. Much to my dismay, his female counterpart, who joined him just moments before the lights went down for the movie to begin, was wearing the very same perfume as the lady two rows back. Needless to say, I was not impressed. I was also unimpressed with the audible talking and the singing that went on at one point. The movie itself was nothing worth talking about. It could have used some dialog to maybe establish a semblance of plot, and perhaps a steadicam so that the audience wasn’t prone to motion sickness. It was bar none the worst movie that we saw at the festival. I think it’s the only one that I gave a rating of “poor.”

After Correction, we saw Dunya & Desie, which I thought was really great. The characters were endearing, and their journey had a purpose. The turn of events was interesting and there were enough comical moments to keep the mood of the film light. Johnathan classified it as a “chick flick,” and I suppose he could be right. It was definitely focused on relationships and the journey of said relationships rather than anything… I dunno, exploding. I thought it was poignant and emotionally interesting.

Straight after this was over, it was back in line for yet another film: An Alternative to Slitting Your Wrist, which I was pretty excited to see. It was filmed by a guy who grew up in Cleveland, and it was just an interesting premise. He had ended up in the hospital after a breakdown, and while he was there, he wrote a list of 52 things he would do in the next year instead of committing suicide. The documentary was basically an account of what that year of things. It was very emotional, but also amusing as he showed clips of some of the sillier things on his list (squirrel fishing, for instance). There was a Q&A with him afterward and I was really glad that we had both seen the movie and gotten to see the documentary. I’m thinking we might have to buy it on DVD; I think it’d be worth having around.

The next day it was back to work, then yet another trip downtown immediately afterward for a movie. Parking was absolutely horrible that day, and people were being crazy in the garage, so after work, I was grumpy enough that the parking situation made it worse. No matter – we got in line for Between the Folds with plenty of time to spare and headed in. Our seats were about midway down, as we liked them, and the theater filled up completely.  Preceeding the movie was a short film called Sing Opera! which was very cute. We should have realized at this point that we had inconsiderate neighbors, because they kept talking during the short. I thought that it was maybe because the short film wasn’t what they were there to see (despite it being advertised in the program guide with Between the Folds). I was getting increasingly annoyed as the movie began because the woman began saying “Oooh!” and “Ahh!” at every interesting piece of origami that was shown on the screen. They were all neat and intricate, but I didn’t think it merited the volume that she was using. She and her husband continued to talk throughout the film, discussing the different techniques, the different pieces and making comments to each other about it. Johnathan shushed them twice. Someone from across the aisle shushed them. Someone from behind us shushed them. Nothing kept them from talking – it didn’t even slow them down. I was livid. If that wasn’t bad enough, there was someone in the front row who kept having strange sneezes about every two minutes or so, which just added to my anger at the situation. I couldn’t even now tell you how the film was. Much of my time was spent trying not to lean over and hit the man or his wife for their inconsideration to those around them. This was the by far the worst audience experience that we had throughout the festival.  I left in a rotten mood and if I’d had the guts to do it, I would have asked the couple next to us to give us $20 to pay for the movie that the had just ruined entirely for us. Unfortunately, I wasn’t brave enough to confront them about it.

The next day, I worked again, and I was hopeful that perhaps we would be seeing a better movie with a better audience. First off, though, we were heading down for a “Tweetup” at Houlihan’s at Tower City. We had been planning it since about day two of the festival, and we’d had a total of seven people from Twitter RSVP for it, including us. One of the people who was planning it with us got sick, so he couldn’t make it, and we assumed his female counterpart wouldn’t make it since he wasn’t going to. One of the people who had RSVPed was working at the festival and I’m pretty sure he just got tied up and couldn’t make it up there. The other two who were supposed to come? We have no idea. Johnathan and I were there, and there was one other lady from Twitter who did make it, so the three of us sat and ate dinner, then we headed down to see our next film.

Alexander the Last had looked interesting in the guide and I was hopeful. The audience for the film, we discovered, was a younger crowd. I was a bit worried to see that, but figured that wouldn’t hopefully affect our audience experience. I was also maybe over-sensitive to the noise that they were making in the queue because I had developed a headache over the course of the day and by that point, my head was throbbing. I took something for it, and by the time the movie started, it subsided, so I’m confident that my feelings about the movie weren’t influenced by that. I guess it goes without saying that I didn’t really enjoy it. Actually, the guy at the end of our row summed it up perfectly after the film: “I don’t get it.” I felt like there was little by way of plot, and if I hadn’t read the summary in the guide, I probably wouldn’t have had any clue what the point was supposed to be. What’s even stranger to me is that others seem to have absolutely loved this film, so I’m wondering if maybe I missed some incredibly important moment that made the whole thing make sense. The chemistry that was supposed to be there was one-sided, and I found it difficult to care much about the characters because they weren’t very well established. It was disappointing because this was one of the ones I was looking most forward to.

The next day, I worked from 8:45 to 1:45, then came home, only to head right back out. We went to Red Robin for lunch and had the worst experience that I’ve ever had there. We were taken to a table that didn’t look like it had been wiped down yet. The manager was a bit surprised at that and quickly got someone over to sweep the floor, though nobody came by to wipe down the still-sticky table. Strike one. Our waitress showed up just seconds after we arrived at the table and started basically demanding our drink order before we’d even had a chance to sit down at the table. I said I didn’t know what I wanted and she just stood there expectantly, forcing me to make a quick decision about what I wanted to drink. Strike two, and we hadn’t even sat down yet. Strikes three through whatever happened when we had to deal with a smug waitress who did very little by way of service. She took our order but asking questions made her surly toward us, which was unpleasant. We had no silverware, no napkins, had to ask for refills. I was totally disgusted with the whole experience. If we hadn’t been in a hurry, we’d have stopped to tell the manager how the experience went.

Our first film on the second Saturday was White on Rice, which was a late addition for us. The theater filled up quite a bit, so I was hopeful that it would be a good one. The film itself was quite entertaining. I thought it would be uncomfortably awkward, but the main character was endearing enough that it took the edge off of it some. It had a lot of funny spots, and I liked the way that it ended. It was one of those endings that isn’t quite clean, but in a way that is still satisfying. The only aggravating thing about the movie was the people behind us. The girl behind us had no concept of what it was to be quiet in a movie theater, and her laugh was loud and shrill – and she laughed often, sometimes in places that weren’t actually that funny to the rest of the audience. Her friend next to her was what we called a leaky tire. He put his finger on one side of his now then slowly and loudly breathed out through the other nostril. It was quite loud and we weren’t sure what he was trying to accomplish by doing that. They also talked a bit during the movie, but it only took turning around once or twice for them to get the hint about that. Thankfully they weren’t near as bad as the sneezer and the talkers during Between the Folds.

Next up was  Shall We Kiss?. After a little something to eat, we headed to the queue for that film and got into line. We were there quite early, but that worked out well. We got in line behind someone who was really nice. She and her boyfriend were seeing 39 films this year, and we’d seen many of the same films and also quite a few different, so we had a lot to talk about. It was great finding someone willing to chat in the line. It made the time before the film pass so much faster. Next thing we knew, it was time to go in. If the audience for this one was bad, we didn’t notice. The film was engaging and well-paced. I never felt like things were moving too slowly, though it wasn’t moving quickly. This one ranked up among my favorites in the festival. It was very good.

After that, it was time to get back into line again for Sparrow. I wasn’t as taken with this one. It was okay. Not great, but not bad. The pacing was off, and there were things that went unsaid that I think needed to be established to actually fuel interest in the characters. It felt like it was trying to be a Chinese Ocean’s 11, and it failed at that.

It was sad to go home that night, knowing that there was only one day of the festival left. We still had two movies left to see, though. Lemon Tree, which we decided to get on stand by since we weren’t able to get tickets earlier in the week, was the first one. We arrived at Tower City early, thinking we’d be able to avoid the crowds at the parking garage for the Cavs game, knowing there was one that day. What we didn’t realize was that it was actually a midday game so we’d arrived after the garage was filled. It took us a little while, but we did eventually find a spot to park and headed inside. We got down to the cinema and Johnathan asked where we should line up for Lemon Tree stand by. They told us that they thought there were still tickets being sold. … Oh. Apparently more tickets had been released, but the film had still been listed as stand by on the website, as well as still being shown on stand by in The Daily. We bought our tickets then found ourselves with an hour and a half to kill before we needed to actually get into line. I settled in to read my book, and Johnathan wandered around taking pictures. About forty-five minutes before the movie was set to start, we got into line. The theater filled up quite a bit, but I think everyone who was on stand by got into it. This one was excellent. It was emotional and I liked that it gave a more personal look into the conflict in the area. The characters were rich, and even without fully understanding the culture of the area, I felt like I understood what was going on and the motivations behind the reactions of the various characters. This one was up among my favorites for the festival, too.

After Lemon Tree, we did our last turn around and got in line for The Brothers Bloom. I had heard good things about it. The theater was completely filled (as, I think, was the second theater that this film was showing in). I was not disappointed. The pacing was good, the characters were interesting and the plot never got too heavy on us without something to break it up. I know I’ve said this before, but this is among my favorites of the films during the festival. It was really very good.

Afterward was the closing night reception. Everyone who was in a film during that final block was invited to attend, and we figured we would go. They were serving champagne and coffee as well as cookies and brownies. I snagged a brownie and Johnathan got a couple of cookies and we staked out space toward the front to watch the ceremony. They announced the winners for the various categories (we’d only seen one of them – the one that won the audience choice award: Cherry Blossoms), as well as the final attendance numbers. From the first Friday of the festival on through the last day, every single day exceeded previous attendance records. The overall attendance for the festival exceeded last year’s by 27%, coming to almost 66,500 people. It was amazing to have been a part of all of that record breaking, as well as to have helped out with the challenge match which also far exceeded the goal. They hit $52,000 which was almost $20k more than the goal of $33,000. The ceremony was emotional because of how emotional the CIFF staffers were and also because it was really punctuating that it was over for this year.

I can’t accurately put into words how amazing this festival was. Thanks to the involvement of the marketing director on Twitter and the other people at the festival (for the most part) being so wonderful and friendly, I really felt like a part of a community. I actually felt like I was a part of Cleveland, and that’s a new feeling for me – I’ve been here a year and a half now and never felt like I was a part of Cleveland. I’ve felt like a transplanted Portlander. I’m still a Portlander at my core, but now at least part of me is invested in what goes on here, which means I’m not just coasting through my time here.

We’re already looking forward to the 34th Annual Cleveland International Film Festival. We’ve decided that we’re going to take the week off and also become passholders so that we can just walk into films without having to worry about work or schedule obsessively. We won’t have to wait inline as much and we’ll have the advantage of the Hospitality Headquarters where we can get a snack if we need to. This was such a great experience; I can’t wait until next year so that we can do it again – plus some.

The CIFF account on twitter did some trivia during the week before the festival started on Thursday night, and while I missed a few days due to the timing of my lunch hour, on Monday and Tuesday, I made it a point to stick around for the trivia. I managed to win a set of vouchers on Monday by answering correctly the question, “What was the first film to walk away with the Greg Gund Memorial Standing Up Film Competition Award?” (The answer was ‘American Blackout’.) The next day, I was fortunate enough to win another set of vouchers by answering the question, “What CIFF Closing Night film starred Eric Stoltz?” (The answer was ‘The Water Dance’, which I actually found out through an e-bay listing!) Between those two sets of vouchers plus a set that I was able to claim through work as my “Christmas” gift, that brought us to a whopping eighteen movies.

The ones we picked out are:

• La Belle Personne: 3/20 9:40PM
• Welcome to Farewell-Gutmann: 3/21 1:50PM
• Children of Invention: 3/21 7:30PM
• Night and Day: 3/21 9:20PM
• Tokyo!: 3/21 Midnight
• Cherry Blossoms – Hanami: 3/22 11:20AM
• Eldorado: 3/22 4:45PM
• Prom Night in Mississippi: 3/22 7:20PM
• Crude: 3/23 6:45PM
• Forgotten Transports: To Estonia: 3/24 7PM
• Correction: 3/25 5PM
• Dunya & Desie: 3/25 7:05PM
• An Alternative to Slitting Your Wrist: 3/25 9:50PM
• Between the Folds: 3/26 7:15PM
• Alexander the Last: 3/27 9:30PM
• Shall We Kiss?: 3/28 7:30PM
• Sparrow: 3/28 10PM
• The Brothers Bloom: 3/29 7PM

The only one that we wanted to see and couldn’t get was Lemon Tree (3/29 4:35PM), which went on Stand-By just before we went to exchange our vouchers. (We picked up Forgotten Transports instead.) We may still try for it on stand-by – we haven’t decided yet.

We’re incredibly busy every day, which is fun because we’re usually such homebodies that we might not have any committments for weeks on end. Of course, to go from doing very little to having something every single day for eleven days is very intense. I’m having a blast, though! I think I’m going to try to actually write up “reviews” (for all that I’m qualified to offer my opinions on the subject) for the films we’ve seen soon, although between work and trying to keep up at home, I’m not sure when I’ll have time. I’m having a great time, though, and I so recommend that everyone check out their local festivals if they can!

Thinking about it in the abstract, it seems like lately things have been pretty much the same as they have been for several months. In the specific, though, we’ve been doing quite a bit.

So far this theater season, I have been to or have tickets for ten musicals or shows. In the fall, I traveled to Indiana to visit Allison and see Hairspray with her at Indiana University. I drove back and that night saw a local production of Into the Woods. The night after that, we saw A Chorus Line at the Palace theater. Later we saw Legally Blonde with “Smart Seat” tickets (the nosebleeds for really cheap, basically). In January, we saw RENT. Not a month later, we went to see a high school production of RENT (which wasn’t quite as bad as I thought it might be, but certainly not the best production, either). Allison came up to visit last weekend and we went downtown to see Cinematic Titanic, which is essentially Mystery Science Theater 3000 done live. I’ve enjoyed all of the things that we’ve seen so far, and I had, at one point, intended to write about each of them individually. Procrastination reared its ugly head and I just don’t think I could do them the justice that they deserve.

Coming up, we’re seeing Spring Awakening from the stage next week. The week after that we’ll be at a Lake Erie Monsters (hockey) game, which should prove to be entertaining. At the end of that week, the film festival starts and we’ll be seeing fifteen movies over the course of two weeks. We went to the film festival last year and I’m really hoping that we’ll enjoy this one even more than we did the last one.

Johnathan and I may not be writing much but we’re keeping busy enough to write tonnes of entries. If only we would motivate ourselves to actually do it!

That’s it, I’m resolved. I’m bringing my mishmash journal (as opposed to my book journal) to work with me from now on and I’m going to try to write out some entries while I’m sitting on my lunches in the coming weeks. Perhaps I can retrieve memories about the various shows I’ve gone to see, and maybe I can manage to rekindle my love of blogging and of writing and breathe new life into this poor, neglected blog of ours. We’ll see, right?

It’s so sad to watch old movies like Singin’ in the Rain and think about the actors and actresses who were in them.

Gene Kelly was in so many good movies (and not-so-good movies) and has an undenyable talent as well as a great deal of charm. He died in 1996 from complications from two strokes. He was 84.

Donald O’Connor was also a fixture of the 40′s and 50′s musicals. He died in 2003 from heart failure at the age of 78.

Jean Hagen, who is most well-known for playing Lina Lamont in Singin’ in the Rain, died in 1977 from throat cancer. She was 54.

Millard Mitchell, who played R.F. Simpson, died in 1953 from lung cancer. He was 50 years old.

Douglas Fowley, who played the over-exuberant director in the movie, died in 1998 at the age of 87.

Cyd Charisse, whose legs are not only gorgeous but iconic, died on June 17 at the age of 81 from complications from a heart attack.

From this one movie, four of the actors playing main (and memorable) roles have since died. It feels like we’re losing legends of the screen, and our only way to keep remembering them is to keep watching the movies and seeing the interviews that they gave.

I, for one, was sad to find out that Cyd Charisse died this year, but was even more sad when I decided to investigate the health and well-being of her former co-stars for the first time. The only two who remain alive and well whose credits are significant are Debbie Reynolds and Rita Moreno (who played Zelda Zanders). It was a sad thing to realize that most of the cast of one of my favorite movies have died. I know this is the way that life goes, but it’s still a hard realization.

I guess all there is left to be said is: May they all rest in peace.

My first encounter with Anne “with an E” Shirley was when I was about ten years old. My mom owned the two TV movies with Megan Follows and Jonathan Crombie on VHS. At the time, I was a bit young to take in all of the depth of the stories, but I fell in love with Anne (and Gilbert, of course) nonetheless.

When I was twelve, I got the whole set of eight books as a gift for Christmas in 1997 from a family friend who continued the encouragement of reading by giving me books for my birthday and for Christmas for every year that I lived with my parents. I didn’t start on the books immediately, but by the end of January of 1998, I had devoured at least two of the books. It didn’t take me long to fall in love with Anne all over again, this time as she was originally written.

I’ve been thinking about the centennial since around November of last year and unfortunately I’ve been unable to come up with any kind of unique and extrodinary way to commemorate such a historic event. Instead of doing something ground-breaking, I’ll be reading one book a week, starting this Sunday, for the next eight weeks. Essentially, I’m going to take a series that I already know inside, outside and upside down and make it last for eight weeks. Something must be done to celebrate 100 years of Anne, and this is the only way I know how.

If you’re interested in having discussions or simply squeeing with me as I read through the books, find me over at livejournal. I’ll have to friend you, but then we can frolick in the literary White Way of Delight together for eight glorious weeks.

Anyway: Anne of Green Gables has been around for 100 years and I hope people still enjoy it for 1000 more.

Given that this is my first real experience with snow in any significant quantity, I was fascinated all day yesterday just looking at it. It seemed to me that I was a child, discovering something for the first time. I even went so far as to demand that we go out and walk in it a little bit, just so that I could see what snow that high felt like. It wasn’t terribly high in some places, but where the snow had drifted, it came up to my hips. I will admit that it was a lot of fun wading through the snow, even though it meant bundling up with extra layers first, then stripping down almost completely when we got back in. (After all, I did, in fact, wade in up to my hips.) I tromped around in it just because I felt like it. It was wonderful except for the burning sensation that developed in my chest before we got back inside. As I understand it, if I were to be out in this kind of weather more often, I would grow accustom to it. It took a while for that sensation to go away, actually. No matter: it was fun, and despite knowing that we were snowed in (because no way are any of our maintenance people ever bothered to clear sidewalks on normal days so on a day with winter storm conditions I couldn’t expect them to come out and clear sidewalks or plow), I enjoyed seeing all that snow. I wouldn’t want it to be a normal occurrence, but I quite enjoyed it for the time being.

It brought to light, however, the fact that I am completely unprepared for this weather. In Portland, I could get by with a warm coat and some tennis shoes. It snows maybe once a year in Portland, and when it does, it’s equivalent to what here would be considered a light dusting. It’s rarely more than a couple of inches. So, while Johnathan was putting on his ski pants and boots, I was putting on two pairs of socks, my jeans and my tennis shoes because I just don’t have anything else to keep me warm enough. I’m sure we’ll rectify that for next year, but for the time being, I remain completely unprepared for winter weather. Thankfully, winter should soon be on its way out. Springtime, here we come!

Something that the winter storm did foul up was our plans to go see a movie this weekend at the Cleveland International Film Festival. I was really excited for that, since we’d picked out a few movies that looked interesting. Unfortunately, the one that I wanted to see only had showings on Friday and Saturday, so I’m out of luck for that one. Hopefully we’ll be able to pick out one or two for later in the week when the snow (hopefully) won’t prevent us.

All in all, however, yesterday was a good day. We may have missed the chance to see those movies, but we did watch a few of the ones we own, start a new video game and cook good food. (The best burgers we’ve made yet, some chopped zucchini and yellow squash, sautéed, and coconut shortbread!) It wasn’t our original plan, but it’s certainly not a bad way to spend a Saturday.