TIFF 2010

My friend is volunteering at this year's Toronto International Film Festival. She's been doing it for a few years now. All the volunteers get vouchers that they can trade in to see movies. My job in this little arrangement is to go down to the box office at King and Peter to pick up the tickets. I've gone three times so far.

The first movie I picked up tickets for was Aftershock. It's set in China and follows a family through their experience with the 1976 Tangshan earthquake. According to the TIFF website it's supposed to be the most successful Chinese movie of all time. We've yet to see it. We're going tomorrow (Friday) night.

The first movie we actually saw was a 4-for-1 deal called The Human Resources Manager. You get four tickets for one voucher. I guess they offer that promotion when a movie hasn't sold many tickets before it's showing.

Anyway, I thought the movie was so-so. For me I had a problem with the basic premise of the story. It's about a large, popular Jewish bakery that has a PR problem that they send the HR manager out to fix.

Personally I don't consider what they did (or in this case didn't do) to be their responsibility. They were getting bad press from one particular newspaper because one of their employees died. She had no relatives living in Israel and no one identified her body in the morgue for days until a reporter caught wind of this and the bakery was blamed for being insensitive or something or other because they didn't even know one of their employees was missing. I mean, it's not the bakery's responsibility to go searching for a missing employee.

Anyway, the movie was about how the HR manager went about trying to restore the bakery's image by doing the right thing and returning her body home. It follows his adventure filled road trip to that end. My rating: 3/5

The second movie we saw (tonight, Thursday) was called Pinoy Sunday. It was also a 4-for-1 deal. It's based in Taiwan. I'm going to copy and paste the brief description from the TIFF site here - Pinoy Sunday is the story of Manuel and Dado, two Filipino migrant workers, who discover a discarded sofa. This transforms their normal Sunday routine into a tale of adventure, perseverance and self-discovery.

I have to say I enjoyed this movie quite a bit. The first 2/3 of the movie was really funny. It had me as well as most of the audience laughing right out loud. It also had it's sweet moments too. The story, though simple was very good. The two lead actors did a brilliant job with their parts.

The movie slowed down in the latter stages though. I think it's hard to keep a story of two guys hauling a sofa around Taipei fresh and funny for that long. Still I think it was good enough to warrant a rating of 4/5.

There are a three more days left before the roll up the red carpet for the last time. Hopefully we'll see a few more good films before the end.