Even with unemployment, life goes on, especially life you planned before you became unemployed.  As a result, I spent most of the last week in Toronto. Besides a television appearance and a speaking engagement at a conference I didn’t go out of my way to mention, I also attended the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), a great collection of movies and called by some the opener to the Oscar season.

I saw 10 movies during this time: Kamui, Cleanflix, Whip It, Symbol, Like You Know It All, Mr. Nobody, Hugh Hefner: Playboy Activist Rebel, Good Hair, Perrier’s Bounty, Waking Sleeping Beauty.

In terms of movie reviews, I’ll just give you two-liners.

• Kamui: Ambitious and uneven – adapted from a Manga, it suffers from being close to that form, with parts of it done rather hamfistedly next to much better scenes.
• Cleanflix: Great documentary on a neat subject (companies re-editing movies to remove “immoral” parts), and with a great “plot” moving throughout it.
• Whip It: The perfect movie for teenage girls to see themselves in and feel great coming out of, and a great film for everyone else as well.
• Symbol: Nobody will ever see this film again in North America, and that’s a shame.
• Like You Know It all: Nobody will ever see this film again in North America, and that is fucking awesome.
• Good Hair: Brilliantly done documentary on the subject of hair in black culture, with Chris Rock making it a roller coaster.
• Perrier’s Bounty: Let’s make Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels over and over and never get tired of it – I sure won’t. Fun.
• Hugh Hefner: Over two hours long, should have been 2-3 episodes. Even nudity can’t save the length.
• Mr. Nobody: A graduate of the class of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – if you loved that you will love this.
• Waking Sleeping Beauty: If you’re into disney history, this documentary is a glittering gold mine of the behind-the-scenes of Disney’s second golden age of 1984-1994.

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