TIFF ’09 retrospective

Since my last post I’ve been a bit under the weather, falling victim to my usual film festival cold, but this time it came during TIFF, as opposed to after it. That left the end of the festival a bit of a downer, but I can’t help saying that this was still a fantastic year all the same.

I lived off a veritable buffet of bad food, including muffins, fries, and street food, fortified by two bottles of Vitamin Water a day, and only managed to eat two actual meals during the whole festival, but there were a lot of greats again this year. I had five stellar interviews, met the one and only Hugh Hefner, attended press conferences for Men Who Stare At Goats and Jennifer’s Body (that’s right, I was in a room with Megan Fox for something like 45 minutes), and I was on the red carpet for five great film, including Creation, Chloe, Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel, Jennifer’s Body, and of course, Precious.

Maybe the most important part to me though was the fact that I attended eight film screenings, for some of the best films I’ve seen in 2009. There was the Coen brother‘s A Serious Man, the sexploitation film Bitch Slap, Ruba Nadda‘s Cairo Time, the Charles Darwin film Creation, two Midnight Madness films – Daybreakers and Jennifer’s Body, Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel, and my favorite out of all of them, Up In The Air starring George Clooney.

Overall, I have to say thanks to the folks who organize TIFF, all of the myriad publicists who work so hard to arrange interviews, all of the other press who handle the event with dignity, and of course, all of the stars and filmmakers who come to Toronto to meet with fans and the media.