Blamblog - Brett Lamb's Blog

Monday, September 01, 2008

Toronto Stories at TIFF08

The Toronto International Film Festival starts Thursday and Toronto Stories is an official selection. Here's the promo poster I created for the film using the Toronto Subway font that everyone except the TTC seems to enjoy:

There's a website on the way at mytorontostories.com and it'll be live any second now. Or maybe in a couple of days.

On the subject of 'movies about Toronto' ... I've heard people say that Goin' Down the Road is the quintessential Toronto movie and you do get to see a lot of the city circa 1970. But the movie is really about the Maritimers and Toronto, as depicted in the flick, is just a hostile place.

For me, the film that best captures the tone of the city is Dead Ringers (Cronenberg's nephew, Aaron Woodley, directed one of the Toronto Stories). Part of the reason for that is because the film came out the first year I lived in Toronto and that winter I did volunteer ushering for the Genie Awards screenings and went to the Dead Ringers screening. I was just discovering the city at the time and much of the city's raw flavour was right there in the film.

The orginal title of Dead Ringers was Goth Yuppies on Smack but an Arnold Schwarzenegger/Danny Devito film swiped the name.

For me, the Toronto of my imagination is not the sunny, leafy place you see if you look out your window right now but the dark, Gothic mess of rails and wires that manifests from October to April and the interior social events we use to forget about the weather. Dead Ringers captures that better than any other movie.

The one thing I could never understand is how Jeremy Irons' characters grow up with English accents even though they were born and raised in Canada. Does that happen? I know it happened to Christopher Plummer ... but I always thought he faked it.

Anyhow, more about Toronto Stories coming up ...

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