I’m second-guessing myself a bit about the film festival this year. We have our schedule-selecting procedure down to a fine art in this our seventh year of attendance, but it’s a two-day process, and this year my FedEx package arrived a day later than expected on a night when we were both tired and cranky, so the schedule wound up being a one-night extravaganza put together by two sleepy, cranky people. In addition, there aren’t as many of my must-see directors or actors as usual, and of those that are there, a couple are completely out of the question because they were scheduled only at the beginning or ending of the festival and we’re going for a slightly shorter stay than usual.

Nonetheless, I have never seen a bad film at the festival (with the possible exception of A Hole In My Heart, which I am trying to block out altogether), and often my favorite movies wind up being the ones we wander into because we just happen to have a spare few hours in the schedule or are amused by the title or whatever, so I am hoping for good things. 6 full days, 2 half days, and 31-ish film tickets later (though we will doubtless skip some and wind up adding others), this year’s festival schedule will look something like this, posted mostly for Len’s reference:

Saturday - arrive somewhere 12:30-ish, check in at hotel, wait in endless line for ticket pick-up. If tickets are picked up early enough, and we feel like plunging right in with something on the bizarre-and-wacky side, start off with Fido, a zombie comedy, break for dinner, and then switch gears for a Norwegian film, Reprise.

Sunday - up bright and early for the long trudge to the evil theater, for some Kafkaesque Polish noir with Palimpsest. (I think all mornings should start with Kafkaesque Polish noir.) Then a break, probably either at the Storm watch store or the nearby pub since we are terrible creatures of habit, and then Heath Ledger doing drugs in Candy. (All mornings should also have Heath Ledger.) We’ll round out the day with a Swedish coming-of-age film, Falkenberg Farewell, and a quirky Canadian comedy written by Douglas Coupland, Everything’s Gone Green. Energy permitting, we might also do a midnight showing of a New Zealand horror-comedy about carnivorous sheep, Black Sheep. Don’t know how likely that is - usually I am pretty wiped out by midnight. We did make a couple of midnight showings last year, but I distinctly recall that after one of them, because the subway had stopped running, we had to walk all the way back to the hotel, and decided to amuse ourselves along the way by adding the phrase “if you’re a whore” to every store window slogan we passed. I should perhaps not be allowed outdoors after a certain stage of tiredness is reached.

Monday - A light day - only four movies. We might have to squeeze an extra one in here somewhere. But for now, the schedule starts off with an Israeli movie, Sweet Mud. I suspect this one got high ratings from both of us for including the phase “psychologically unstable” in the description. We are so bloody predictable. Next up, the German Winter Journey, which again wins the Stacey-and-Len’s-keywords contest for including “manic depression.” Then we move onto a French movie, Transylvania, about a pregnant Gypsy. And then we’ll round out the evening with a program of experimental short films, which doesn’t have a link. Whew. Next year I might have to make a “one English-language movie per day” rule. One weird glitch is that we apparently have one (and only one) ticket for the new Hal Hartley movie, Fay Grim, on this day. I can’t figure out whether I messed up in filling out the forms, or the box office messed up, or there was just one ticket left and only one of us got it. I guess if we’re tired of each other at this point and one of us wants to see it more than the other, we can do that. Or we can try to get a second ticket. Or we can say fuck it and go have a nice dinner somewhere instead.

Tuesday - Starts off with a short film program (non-experimental), but I have a sneaking suspicion that one or both of us will just sleep in because that invariably happens whenh the first movie is a short film set. Then we’ll do a documentary I’m really looking forward to, The Killer Within. Murder, Swarthmore, and the Kronos Quartet - this one seems like it can’t possibly go wrong. In the afternoon we have a French-Canadian drama, Dans les villes, and then finish up the day with an American black comedy, The Half Life of Timofey Berezin. Points for Steven Soderbergh as a producer and for Radha Mitchell, and I always like a good black comedy. But I’m anxious about only doing three movies, if we skip the short films in the morning - this might be another good day to squeeze in an extra movie. Or to spend some time wandering Queen Street or relaxing, I suppose.

Wednesday - More short films in the morning, then another New Zealand drama, Out of the Blue. Then more murder documentaries, Dutch this time, because apparently that’s a theme - My Life as a Terrorist. Then an Australian drama, Jindabyne. Being based on a Raymond Carver story is usually a good thing, and it’s got a good cast, so I’m loooking forward to that one. That might be it for the day, or we might do a midnight movie again - just in case, we’ve got tickets for S&Man, a documentary about the people who make horror films.

Thursday - Starts off with a British black-comedy-slash-drama, This is England, and then Darren Aronofsky’s new movie, The Fountain. I am a squealing Darren Aronofsky fan-girl, and a bit of a Hugh Jackman fan-girl as well although squealing is not usually involved, so I’m pretty excited about that. Then we’ll do an Iranian drug movie, Mainline, simply because how could we possibly pass up an Iranian drug movie? In the evening we’ve got John Waters doing stand-up in This Filthy World, and I will be desperately hoping that John decides to show up, and then if we are not too tired there’s another midnight horror-comedy, Severance.

Friday’s a little slow - only three movies. I’ll have to see if I can dig up my original schedule, but I think there must have been a couple here for which neither or first nor second choices were available, because I can’t imagine I would have possibly have submitted a ticket request with only three movies per day. Maybe we’ll try to add one or two when we get to Toronto. But for now, we’ll start off with another Iranian drama, A Few Days Later, and then do some Icelandic drama in Thicker Than Water. In the evening we’ve got a somewhat unclassifiable Belgian film, Khadak.

Saturday we head home, but if we feel like squeezing in a last-minute movie or two, we have some short films in the morning and then a Canadian drama about the Vancouver prostitute killings, Unnatural and Accidental.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with it. I’m bummed that neither the Almodovar nor the new Christopher Guest movie fit into the days we would be there, and that we didn’t get tickets for Little Children, but all of them will wind up in Pittsburgh eventually, and I guess I can wait. I would have liked to see The Pleasure of Your Company if only to be in the same room with Michael Ian Black as the fulfilment of my high school crush, but the movie itself doesn’t actually sound all that exciting. So the only thing I’m really bummed about not getting tickets for is D.O.A.P., a fictional documentary about George Bush being assassinated. Not surprised it sold out, but I would have liked to see it. I’m half pondering trying to get rush tickets - we haven’t done that in years, it might be kind of fun to camp out in the rush line again.

Of course, I’m sure there are all sorts of other movies I would be bummed about missing too if I could remember the descriptions, but reading 200-plus movie descriptions in one evening causes them to blur together a bit. I’m mostly resigned at this point to the fact that there’s just no way to see all the TIFF movies one would like to see, until someone develops time-traveling and/or cloning technology. All of the movies we did get look good, and we have some spaces to do some relaxation or pick out some additional movies, and I’m pleased overall.

Up bright and early watching the sun rise over Pittsburgh, too excited to sleep.  I love love love the Toronto film festival.  I look forward to it all year.  And today we go!

So far this morning I have had not enough sleep, and too many doughnuts.  This seems like a good way to start a vacation - sugared-up and sleep-deprived.  I am packed, my iPod is loaded with the first season of Weeds so I will be able to stay entertained at the airport if we get delayed, and now I just have to wait out the long long hour and a half until the taxi comes.

Every year I have good intentions of writing all about the movies I see and then I never do, but once again I am setting off with good intentions to come back full of movie reviews.  We’ll see how that works out.

Ahh, Toronto. We checked into the hotel about half an hour ago, and then I headed off to the drugstore to look for an ankle brace, since Len did something very very bad to his ankle on the way to the airport. I was out wandering around Toronto for maybe 15 minutes total, between the drugstore and a mini-quest to find an ATM.

In those 15 minutes, I came across:

• A Scientology guy taking e-meter readings outside the Dianetics center
• The annual Jesus in the City parade, with hundreds of people dressed up like various Biblical entities wandering through the streets shouting about Jesus
• A group of college-age men in bikinis and hula skirts raising money for cystic fibrosis
• A street corner where the bikini men had met up with the Jesus parade and were shouting at the people on the Noah’s Ark float to give them money for the sick children
• Some police officers, clearly having a hard time keeping a straight face, attempting to keep the peace between Noah and the hula men.

I really do love this city.

Now to try to figure out whether Len’s ankle is up for the walk to the box office, or whether I should go off on my own to procure our ticket package for the week.

Day 1 of the festival, done. Final tally:

Movies: 1 (Reprise)
Proper meals eaten in actual sit-down restaurants as opposed to running from movie to movie: 1 (Mmm, Living Well Cafe.)
Weird Canadian potato chip flavors tried: 2 (ketchup, and dill pickle)

Ankles twisted: 1

Ankle braces bought: 2

Canes bought: 1

Number of times I referred to Len as “Old Man Witherspoon” while he hobbled around trying to get used to the cane: At least a dozen. I am easily amused.

Time spent waiting in line at the wrong box office: 45 minutes

Norwegian curse words learned: 1

All in all, not a bad first day since most of it was spent travelling. Len’s ankle is putting a damper on things, but once I found a better brace and the cane, things improved. We’re now able to travel about, albeit slowly, and fortunately our movies today are pretty well spaced out so we shouldn’t have to rush. (Which is good, because I am a very bad girlfriend who will abandon Len if necessary to get to the Heath Ledger movie on time after lunch.)

So, last night’s movie, Reprise. Short version: I really enjoyed it, but I’m not sure it’s worth writing up much of a review because it didn’t strike me as the type of movie that’s ever likely to break out of the foreign-language-film ghetto and make it to American distribution. If it ever by some chance does, though, it’s worth seeing. I like a movie that can mix melancholy, love, and longing with absolutely hysterical humor, while also managing to be truly unpredictable. In several places I found myself holding my breath and leaning forward, anxious about what would happen next. That so rarely happens to me anymore.

I think the way the director put it was that it was a film about ambition and identity, and what you do when your identity is entirely tied up in your ambitions and suddenly those ambitions are no longer possible and you’re set adrift. That’s true. It’s also about male friendships, and about art, and about being disappointed by your role models, and about growing up, about mental illness, and about trying to recapture lost love, and…a whole lot of things. More than any one movie should really be able to fit in, but it worked. Really it was just lovely. I didn’t love it, but I liked it a lot, and I’d definitely recommend it if by some chance someone has a thing for Norwegian art films. Although it’s possible that I like it more retroactively because the director was utterly charming and funny in his Q&A afterward. And taught us that “TIFF,” the acronym for the festival, apparently means “the type of person you would only sleep with if you were really, really drunk” in his language. I will never look at the festival posters the same way again.

Yesterday was more of a proper TIFF day; four movies - not the ideal 5-6, but not half bad either. We’re getting an early start today so I don’t have time for proper reviews/stories, but in brief:

Day 2 tally:

Movies: 4

Proper meals: 1 (Mmm, torikatsu).
Number of additional ankle twists: 1

Number of truly stupid audience questions at the Q&A: Dozens, probably

Number of really awesomely bad subtitling errors: 1

We started off with http://www.e.bell.ca/filmfest/2006/films_schedules/films_description.asp?id=220″>Palimpsest, which was billed as “Kafka-esque Polish noir.” I’m not really so sure about the Kafkaesque, but it was certainly noir. And Polish. This was, to an extent, a gimmick film with a trick ending. That often annoys me, but I thought in this case the director made it work pretty well and I didn’t feel cheated when the trick ending rolled around as I so often do. It was well acted and well photographed, but the scoring drove me crazy. “La la la , I am an incredibly stereotypical noir soundtrack. Listen as I tell you when to be nervous! Something important is about to happen, so I’m going to get REALLY LOUD RIGHT NOW!” I prefer my scores unobtrusive.

Film #2: Candy, a.k.a. “Heath Ledger’s heroin movie.” I liked it quite a bit, except at one point where both the writing and acting seemed to go a bit overwrought in depicting detox. But overall it was good, moving, funny, well-acted, well-written, and Heath Ledger remains very pretty. Also, Geoffrey Rush was in it and I always like how much fun he seems to be having with his movies.

Film #3: Falkenberg Farewell - a meandering, elegiac sort of story about small town Swedish life, and a group of friends hitting the point in their life where they start to go their separate ways, some getting out and some…not, so much. It was very slow-paced and my attention wandered a couple of times, but it felt very true and personal, so I wasn’t surprised later to find out that it was basically a true story, with many of the people playing themselves, largely improvised. Didn’t love it, but liked it.

Grr. And now I am out of time, which sucks because the last movie we saw was Douglas Coupland’s first screenplay, and he was funny and it was awesome. But we have to take off for the first movie of the day, so I’ll come back and write about Coupland’s movie later. Suffice it to say that it was very Coupland — not too subtle, and sort of trailing off at the end, but worth it for the humor along the way.

Whew. Bit of a break before our last movie, so we’re back at the hotel for a few minutes to get off our feet for a while. (And to scarf some spicy thai potato chips, because apparently I am determined to try a new weird potato chip flavor every day. God damn, these things are good.)

I think I left off just before the last of last night’s movies, Everything’s Gone Green, a Douglas Coupland-penned comedy about Vancouver. Well, technically it’s about the cynicism of life in the corporate workforce, but really it’s about Vancouver. Len was a bit annoyed at the heavy-handed “follow your dream” message, and I rolled my eyes a little when the movie just sort of stopped out of nowhere because Coupland doesn’t quite know how to write a message, but nonetheless I thoroughly enjoyed myself while I was watching it and sometimes that’s good enough for me. I’d like to see this one again, if only because the backgrounds of the sets were filled with funny little Coupland-esque touches and I’m sure I missed a lot of them. I laughed a hell of a lot at this one. Also at the Q&A, where the poor actors and directors hardly got a word in edgewise because really all anyone wanted to do was ask Coupland questions. Good thing he’s articulate and funny in Q&As.

So, that was that - we had a Midnight Madness screening scheduled and I’d been looking forward to it, but we were pretty beat and Len’s ankle was really killing him, so we called it a night.

Probably just as well, since we had a 9 a.m. movie this morning and it turned out to be really wonderful, so I’d have hated to sleep through it. It was Sweet Mud, an Israeli film about life on a kibbutz in what I think was intended to be the 70s or thereabouts. The whole thing was shot on three kibbutzim and was just breathtakingly gorgeous - the lighting, the cinematography, everything. It was extremely funny and, by the end, totally gutwrenching, managing to be the first film of this year’s festival to have me in tears. The director apparently grew up on a kibbutz himself, and I think that lent a lot of authenticity to the film - not that I’d know if it weren’t realistic, but it certainly felt extremely real. This is one I’ll highly recommend to pretty much everyone I know, if it gets distribution.

The other two we’ve seen so far today have been slightly disappointing, though they had their strong points too. First was a German film about manic depression, Winter’s Journey. The good thing about this one is that the lead actor’s performance was completely involving, courageous, and just generally amazing. The downside was the film that the performance was stuck in - the director’s Q&A pretty much confirmed my impression that he more or less had his ending in mind, wrote the film around it, and in the process came up with a plot that required so much suspension of disbelief that it took me out of the movie in several places. I’ve got a high threshold for suspension of disbelief, but this was just…silly. I loved the actor’s performance, I enjoyed the first half hour or so of the movie, I loved some moments throughout, but overall I was let down. A great ending is a good thing, but not if you mangle your movie to get it to the final shot you want.

Plus, I’m not sure whether the director was having a language barrier during the Q&A or just had some deeply weird ideas about women, but either way it was rather uncomfortable. He went on this whole bizarre ramble about how feminists in Germany claimed his women characters were too passive, and then started babbling about how it’s important to work with female directors of photography because their special mystical viewpoint as women inspires his male creative energy. It was truly weird — I didn’t know that being a woman gave me a special mystical viewpoint.
Afterwards I commented to Len that our movies so far have felt a bit like a boys’ club (at one Q&A, someone asked “Did you ever consider putting any women in your movie?” and the answer was just “No”), and I hope we get at least a couple of strong, interesting women characters, if not women-centered movies, soon. I know we have some sometime this week, but making the schedule in one night meant it was all I could do to get the movies we wanted to see, and make sure there was enough time between to travel between theaters. I didn’t pay any attention to spreading out different types of movies evenly during the week.

I think with the last movie, I got my wish with a vengeance. The female lead character in Transylvania is certainly not passive. Unfortunately, while the movie description claims the character is “bold and independent,” I think I’d just say “psychotic.” It wasn’t just her, really — the whole movie felt completely disjointed. It jumped from scene to scene and in between there wasn’t just no continuity of plot — there was no continuity of character. I couldn’t follow the motivations or emotions from scene to scene. There were a few places where the dialogue felt like a parody of foreign art films, but I’m pretty sure they were unintentional. That said, a few of the isolated moments were really lovely. And the scenery, and the Roma music used heavily throughout, were really wonderful. I’m just not sure that a few lovely moments and a great soundtrack are enough to call something a good movie. I’d see this over the latest Will Ferrell whatever any day of the week, but so far it’s at the bottom of my TIFF list.

Tonight we’re off to a program of experimental short films. Possibly we’ll squeeze in a midnight showing tonight, but I’m not sure I’ll have the energy, and the subway stops running by the time those shows are over so we’d have to take a cab back to spare Len’s still-wobbly ankle.

A last quick update for the night… We had some lovely Thai food and then rounded out the evening with the Wavelengths 5 program of experimental short films. I don’t have a lot to say about them - some of them were really lovely, but as usual with experimental film I feel as if there was something going on that I missed while I was just sitting there thinking “Hey, pretty!”

But I did want to note that one of them was this short film, a montage of quick-cut scenes of New York.

I carry New York with me. I suspect that everyone has one place in the world that is the place all others are measured against, whether it’s a city they grew up in, or visited as a child, or maybe just saw in a photograph. New York is that place for me. I have so many beautiful memories and so many heartbreaking ones tied up in New York. However long I stay in Pittsburgh and however much I love Toronto, New York is the city of my heart.

I haven’t written about the date and don’t intend to say much. But that’s not to say I haven’t thought about it.
I’m glad we saw that film tonight. It seemed right to see my city tonight, even from so far away.

The four-movies-a-day thing is starting to catch up with me, and I am too sleepy for a full-on set of reviews tonight. But briefly:

We started off the day with another set of short films, non-experimental this time, which I quite enjoyed but can’t say much about.

Then we did a documentary, The Killer Within — I’m going to have a lot to say about this at some point, but not tonight. It was very good, but it felt like three different movies crammed into one, so each of them got slightly shorter shrift than I’d have liked. Nonetheless, it was intriguing and moving and well-rounded and generally quite fascinating. Plus, good for conversation - we went for lunch afterwards and spent most of the meal discussing the goals and tactics of the criminal justice system, which is not our usual lunchtime fare, but was interesting nonetheless. One weird personal note in watching this film was that there was a fair amount of time spent on and around the Swarthmore campus, which was totally weird for me because my sister goes there, yet I have only been on the campus for about five minutes total. So most of me was watching the movie and then a bit in the back of my mind was thinking “Hey, pretty campus!” and “I wonder if my sister knows about this.” Odd.

Afterward Len’s ankle was hurting and we had a bit of a break anyway, so we headed back to the hotel for a bit of rest. Len fell asleep and couldn’t be roused in time for our first evening movie, so I went off to see it without him — Dans les villes, a French Canadian movie about isolation and connection among a small group of Quebecois city-dwellers. It was beautifully shot, but it felt very distanced - I wasn’t able to make a real connection with the characters or the story. On the other hand, I think that was to some extent intentional. I’d like to see some of Catherine Martin’s other work to see if it’s always like that.

Met up with Len afterwards - or rather, raced at top speed back to the hotel once I found out that I had his ankle splint in my bag and thus he was not going to be able to meet me at the theater for the next film as I’d thought he would - only to find that in my absence, since I’d run off with his splint, book, and notebook, he’d been stuck in the hotel room with nothing better to do than drink and watch bad TV. When I arrived, he’d just discovered Celebrity Fear Factor, where G. Gordon Liddy was sitting in some kind of isolation pod, wearing swim trunks, with a bunch of maggots, while Leif Garrett was stuck in another pod with some soap opera starlet. Thank god I arrived when I did - who knows how much worse TV he might have found, left alone much longer?

I reunited him with his splint, and talked him down from Celebrity Fear Factor, and we headed off to The Half Life of Timofey Berezin. This was one of the movies that was originally a second choice for us — a lot of our movies this year are the second-string ones, since apparently our luck in the random box office draw was bad this year. In some cases that’s been kind of a let-down, but I was mostly pleased with this one. It’s definitely not a perfect film; the mix of comedy and drama was rather clumsily done, and the message is a bit heavy-handed. (Then again, as I was saying on the walk back to the hotel, I’m not sure exactly how you make a movie about radiation poisoning and the Russian Mafia in post-Soviet Russia with a delicate touch.) But it was enjoyable to watch, well-written and well-acted, and the Q&A was pretty good too. I was hoping Radha Mitchell would be there, but no such luck. Such is life.

Tomorrow could be a six-movie day if we are feeling energetic, but I am considering skipping the morning short films to sleep in late, thereby storing up energy to take in the midnight movie since we haven’t managed one of those so far. We shall see.

Damn. I am falling behind, rapidly. We did our first six-movie day yesterday and it is hard to keep up with posting when you get home at 2 a.m. But let’s see if I can at least do the quick reviews again, and hopefully do proper ones later.

Wednesday started off with Out of the Blue, a New Zealand movie about a rampage killing that happened there in 1990. In retrospect, given what happened in Montreal that day, that’s a little weird. It was well done, but not exactly fun to watch.

Then we caught the new Hal Hartley movie, Fay Grim, a sequel of sorts to Henry Fool. I have no idea how to describe this one - it’s completely ridiculous and very funny, bears very little relation to the first movie, and I’m not sure who in the world I could recommend it to. I’m not sure I’d say it was a good piece of art, but it was entertaining to watch and I adore Parker Posey, so that was all well and good.

At that point, Len wasn’t feeling well, so we wound up missing the next movie. Such is life. Later on we caught a Bosnian movie, Grbavica, about the situation of single mothers in post-war Sarajevo. I liked this one; it was well-written, well-acted, had interesting subject matter I didn’t know much about, and is being used to help improve the social and political situation of women in Sarajevo. What’s not to like?

Afterwards we did our first midnight movie of the festival, S&Man, an exploration of why people make and watch horror movies. I’m not actually interested in horror movies themselves, but I’m very interested in what their existence says about our culture. And I like a good meta-movie in general. This one’s a little tricky to describe, because to some extent the full experience relies on not knowing too much about it going in. It winds up being not quite what it started out to be. But while that often annoys me, in this case it worked really well and I liked it much more for what it ended up being.

Then yesterday - our first-ever six-movie day. Started off with This is England, a basically autobiographical story about the director’s time as part of a skinhead gang in the 80s in England. Tough to watch in places, but very good. (Plus, it started with a sort of montage to establish the time and place, which included a shot of K.I.T.T., which is a sure way to win my heart.)

Afterward we decided to pick up an extra movie at the last minute to see if we could make it to six, so we wound up going a bit more mainstream and catching the latest Anthony Minghella film, Breaking and Entering. The movie was very good despite rampant Apple product placement, and I adore Robin Wright Penn who was fantastic here as always, but I think I hate the crowd that goes to Jude Law movies at the festival. Much louder, ruder, and less respectful of the moviegoing experience than your typical festival crowd. Grrr.

After that we saw The Fountain, the newest movie by Darren Aronofsky. I was nervous; everything I’ve seen about this movie either says it’s a genre-redefining masterpiece, or an utter piece of crap. I really love Aronofsky’s previous work, so I didn’t know what to expect. And now that I’ve seen it, I still don’t know what to expect. Len was bored and thought it was deeply cheesy. I’m less certain of that - I found it emotionally moving, and visually beautiful, but I haven’t decided what I think of it on an intellectual or artistic level. I’m still trying to decide. Which I guess isn’t such a bad thing - it’s good to still be thinking about a movie the next day. On the other hand, with Requiem for a Dream, I didn’t have to think about it for an extra day - I just knew right away that it was an astounding piece of film.

In the early evening we caught Mainline, an Iranian film about middle-class heroin addiction. I’m into Iranian film, Len loves a good heroin movie, and neither of us had ever even begun to conceive of an Iranian drug movie, so this was obviously one we were going to see. I liked the movie a lot, especially the really unusual coloring choices, but the Q&A was really painful. The programmer leading it had such a thick Russian accent that I could barely understand him, the director’s translater was difficult to hear, and people kept asking really dumb questions. Grrr, again.

Later in the evening we saw This Filthy World, a filming of John Waters’ lecture/stand-up routine. I don’t have much to say about it as art; it’s just John Waters, standing on stage, talking. But it was hysterically funny; I laughed for pretty much 90 minutes straight, so hard I was crying a couple of times, and I was hoarse afterwards. John Waters came for the Q&A, which was awesome and also ridiculously funny, and all in all it was an excellent time. Weird for the TIFF, though - the programmer’s introduction was a sheepish acknowledgement that they sort of hate filmed theatre and usually shun it, but when John Waters does something, you pretty much go with it no matter what it is.

Finally, we caught another midnight movie, the horror-comedy Severance. Not the kind of thing I’d ever bother to see outside of the Midnight Madness crowd, but in that group, a lot of fun. Plus I love Laura Harris, so that was a good thing.

This morning we were too sleepy from yesterday’s extravaganza to catch our first movie. After I type this I’ll either go back to sleep or go in search of breakfast - not sure which yet. Then off to another round of movies.

I’m having a blast, but it’s starting to catch up with me; I think when we get home I will cuddle with the cats and then sleep for about 24 hours straight. And eat real food that is not from a food court or street vendor.

I just spent two hours finishing up the prep work on my bulb bed and planting about 50 tulip bulbs, half of my total planned bulbs for that bed. I am now filthy and my legs hurt, but I’m pleased with myself and will hopefully finish the rest of the tulips tomorrow. (My lilies are not here yet. Grr.)

The really entertaining part of the whole experience was that on the other side of the fence, the guys who live across the street were doing their usual Saturday tinkering-with-their-car routine, but with more gusto than usual. I know jack about cars so I’m not quite clear on what the problem is, but it involved a lot of yelling “Fuck! Fuck! Motherfucking fuck! I hate this car!”

This went on for about an hour before they realized I was there. The bulb bed is under and around a giant forsythia bush which, while I made a good start at cutting out the old dead wood in the spring, is still badly overgrown. So I was somewhat hidden under the overgrown branches, quietly doing my own gardening thing, and they apparently didn’t notice me until I stood up to go get some more bone meal. At which point they both kind of goggled and then fell all over themselves apologizing for the language. I reassured them that it takes a fair amount of foul language to offend me, but they were pretty chagrined. It was quite amusing.

Perhaps tomorrow I will spend some time yelling “Cocksucker!” at the forsythia to reassure them.

For now I think I had better go take a shower and change before I track mud all over the motherfucking house.

I have a really horrific head cold and had to work today, and then made what was probably the dumb mistake of bussing home in the rain.  I feel like I’m going to die, and probably this would have been a good day to suck it up and either call Len for a ride home, or call a cab.

However, if I had called a cab, I would have missed this lovely little Pittsburgh public transit moment.

I was sitting at the bus stop and a guy walked up and asked if I had a cell phone he could borrow.  Every once in a while I like to take a chance on being nice to someone who may or may not be trying to steal my cell phone, so I went ahead and lent it to him.  He thanked me profusely, then sat down next to me and called his friend and launched into a ten-minute tale of woe.  Long story short, he’d come with a friend on a road trip from Baltimore to somewhere nearby here so his friend could sleep with some girl from the internet, and then they’d decided to check out Pittsburgh before they headed back.  They went into a bar and got into a fight and got kicked out of the bar, so his friend got mad at him and drove off without him.  So now poor forlorn bus-stop-guy was calling another friend in Baltimore to beg him to drive five hours to pick him up.

The part that cracked me up:  “So, I was like, fuck you.  I am not hanging out with you when we get back home.  You are not a good friend.  Every time we hang out, I wind up in either jail or fucking Pittsburgh, and I don’t know which is worse!”

Ahhh, Pittsburgh.