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• Toronto Film Festival etc.

  Wednesday, Oct 3, 2007 9:33PM / Standard Entry / Members only
  7 comments

  I've been back in London for about two weeks now. I feel pretty exhausted having been away in Australia, Hong Kong, back to Australia, back to Hong Kong and then off to Toronto for the film festival. The last three months have been full on. I've transferred the negative from the 24 Herbs shoot, that all looks really good, and I've started editing. I should have that finished really soon. Feels like we shot that a few months ago.
  
  The Toronto film festival was a lot of fun. I saw the new George Romero zombie film, "Diary of the Dead". We had to queue up at midnight for tickets, and we very nearly didn't get in. George Romero was there, with Dario Argento. George was really enthusiastic about the film, saying he thought it was much more personal, and seemed much more pleased with it than "Land of the Dead". He kind of went off on a mini-tirade against zombie films where the zombies moved fast ("How can they move so fast? they're dead, they'd snap their ankles!"), and made a point of saying that a good zombie film has a sub-text that reflects on contemporary life. I guess that's a fair enough point. The film was pretty good, but I did keep falling asleep with jet lag. There were hundreds of celebrities partying all over the place, I wasn't very good at recognising people, I thought Harvey Weinstein was Jessica Alba's bodyguard. He is a big man though, easy mistake to make.
  There was a fantastic French horror film called "Frontiere" that was a lot of fun. Some really great horrific situations, some very claustrophobic, and refreshingly different to most of the horror films that Hollywood seems to be churning out at the moment. I can't say I saw that much that really blew me away, but my brain was pretty fried with being so busy for the last few months, I didn't get to see as many films as I would've liked to.
  One of the things I love about film festivals is seeing movies I know I'll probably never get the chance to see anywhere else. This time the film was "Mid Road Gang", a Thai film about a gang of six stray dogs that get fed up of being chased by dog catchers and generally having to steal food and sleep rough. After the leader of the gang gets injured in a car accident, they decide to make the journey to the mythical "Dogtopia" where dogs are fed, treated with kindness, and sleep in proper beds! The whole film was made with real stray dogs, which they adopted and trained. Rather than use CGI to make their mouths move, they use voice overs. It works well, but it is a strange film, it made me laugh a bit too much perhaps. Check out the poster with the dog in a cart! What you can't tell from the poster is that the Poodle is wearing a bikini...