Back in the Good Old World

The Traveler's RewardIt took about 23 hours to get from the Vienna Hilton to my front door yesterday, but it was worth it — I’ve been away too long, and it’s good to be back home.

It would have been nice if my luggage had made it back with me, but I’m assured it’ll be delivered this afternoon. I can afford to be Zen about it; these things happen, there wasn’t anything in the bags that I desperately needed today (except possibly for contact-lens solution), and I’d brought my precious sachertorte back in my carry-on bag.

The only downside is that I now have to raid what’s left of my wardrobe for a decent shirt, because I’m apparently going on CTV Newsnet at around 12:15 this afternoon to talk about the week’s new movies. You know the drill: Rogers Cable 62, I’ll be the guy in the largish box on the upper left.

Incidentally, I know I’ve been lax in doing my weekly movie rundown — there just wasn’t the time to put it all together on the last couple of Thursday evenings/Friday mornings. Sorry for the deprivation; normal service will resume next week, just in time for us to start fighting over “Synecdoche, New York”.

Take the Long Way Home

Hang on ... is that a metanarrative in the distance?That’s that, then: The 2008 edition of the Viennale wrapped up last night with an awards presentation, a gala screening of Ari Folman’s animated documentary “Waltz with Bashir” — which, you may recall, I caught at Cannes — and a very nice closing party. The festival’s own wrapup is available here.

Our FIPRESCI jury gave its prize to Miguel Gomes’ “Our Beloved Month of August“, which seemed to go down pretty well with the audience. And now, very early in the morning, I am finishing the last of my packing and getting ready to head back to Toronto via London.

Anybody need anything? Tea? Jaffa cakes?

In Old Vienna

Visit our many confusing promenades!My latest Sympatico/MSN DVD column is up, featuring “Zombie Strippers!” because, what the hell, it’s Halloween.

(This does not constitute an endorsement.)

In other news, my jury duty is over, and I plan to spend the day wandering the streets of Vienna in search of sachertorte, sausage, chocolate and beer, and not necessarily in that order.

Can’t overdo it, of course; I have to be somewhat presentable at tonight’s gala. It’s all about moderation. And buying stuff to take home.

“Do You Even Exist?”

Click for contextSad news at the House Next Door today: Andrew Johnston, New York critic and author of the House’s excellent “Mad Men” reviews, has died after a long battle with cancer. He was 40 years old.

Andrew was my first Internet friend. We both posted to various Usenet groups in the mid-1990s — mostly alt.video.dvd and rec.arts.movies.current-films, if you feel like Googling for posts — and a resulting e-mail conversation about certain professional issues **cough Miramax cough** led to a casual but ongoing correspondence.

We never managed to actually meet, though — while he came to Toronto for the film festival several times, and I was in and out of New York, the timing never quite worked out. In either 1999 or 2000, it became a running gag, with handwritten messages in TIFF press boxes appearing five minutes after the other had left the room: “Missed you again.” “Sorry, can’t stay.” “Did you really expect to find me here?”

Not so funny now.

Art and Trash, Redux

I'd claw my eyes out to avoid seeing 'Saw V', tooIf you were puzzled by the first comment on yesterday’s post, here’s the Sympatico/MSN movies piece that inspired it — a list of the precise points at which the great horror franchises stopped working and started sucking.

Hey, “Saw V” opened this weekend — what else was I going to write about?

Oh, and here’s another Sympatico/MSN gallery, over at our “Quantum of Solace” minisite — the best James Bond villains, ranked in order. Finally, a little love for Telly Savalas’ daring interpretation of Ernst Stavro Blofeld as a total player.

And as long as I’m throwing out the links, here’s my piece on Cinematheque Ontario’s David Lean retrospective, which started up this weekend — if you’re reading this Sunday morning, there’s still time to get down to Jackman Hall for the 1 pm show of “In Which We Serve“, which is still unavailable on DVD in North America and gets screened here, like, never.

Tally ho!

Damit Geschehen Worden

Well, he did make 'The Rose King'I’m a pretty amiable person. I appreciate being invited to things. Which is how I ended up watching Ingrid Caven serenade Werner Schroeter at the Gartenbaukino last night. That was something.

Caven — who was Mrs. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, once upon a time, and appeared in several of his key films — is 70 years old now, though from where I was sitting she seemed at least twenty years younger. And her musical stylings were rather spectacular, in that Madeleine Kahn-in-“Blazing Saddles” kind of way.

(She’s doing a full performance tonight, of which the Viennale writes: “The concert promises to become a roller coaster ride of feelings and tones.” And yes, I imagine it does.)

Of course, before Caven could perform, Schroeter had to sit through over an hour of tributes from friends and colleagues — all in German — which he kept interrupting with muttered asides and the strangely formal compulsion to present every one of the speakers with a rose from a large vase set in the middle of the stage.

I don’t think the set designers had intended him to harvest the prop, exactly, but the audience seemed to enjoy it.

More screenings today — three, I think, with the possibility of squeezing in a fourth at the last minute. I’m also planning to catch Mark in conversation with Miguel Gomes this afternoon — I doubt anyone will be handing out roses, but it should be an interesting talk.

Full Circle

The artist expoundsYou may recall that my cousin Mark Peranson has been having a really good year, touring the world’s film festivals as both the co-star of Albert Serra’s cracked Nativity story “El Cant dels Ocells” and the director of “Waiting for Sancho“, the “kind of making-of” of that film.

(When he’s at home, Mark is the respected programmer at the Vancouver film festival as well as the editor and publisher of Cinema Scope magazine.)

Synchronicity being what it is, I’ve had the opportunity to follow Mark’s odyssey on the festival circuit — I was able to attend the Cannes premiere of “El Cant dels Ocells”, and of course there was its TIFF engagement just last month, which gave me the opportunity to interview Mark for a post on the NOW blog. (Link not working; I’ll get it up as soon as I can.)

And last night, at Vienna’s lovely Urania auditorium, I got to see “Waiting for Sancho” with an audience — and watch Mark’s subsequent Q&A with the crowd, featuring Serra as a special guest. (“El Cant dels Ocells” is here, too; I missed it in London last week by just one night.)

I know I can’t be critically objective here — and the obvious conflict of interest prevents me from ever reviewing either movie professionally — but I think “Waiting for Sancho” is pretty damn good. As promised, it’s an unconventional making-of that works very well as a tonal reflection of Serra’s film. “Sancho” is also quite striking, visually, which is even more impressive when one realizes it was shot with a tiny consumer-grade HD camcorder. It may also be that the locations, on Tenerife and the Canary Islands, are just so much more beautiful in color than they are in Serra’s monochrome vision.

It’s also dedicated to our grandparents, and seeing that dedication on the screen — shot on their kitchen table, which it turns out Mark took home with him to Vancouver — was a final grace note that proved especially emotional for me.

Tomorrow will mark the second anniversary of our grandmother’s death. Mark was in Vienna then, too — he suspended his duties as a FIPRESCI juror to fly back home. And this year, because I’m sitting on that same jury, I get to be here for this.

Everything comes around again, doesn’t it? And the connections never stop.

“I am Not an Internet Superstar”

Step off, you toaster bastardI am sitting in a hotel room in Vienna, starting into The Onion AV Club’s interview with John Hodgman, and I come across the following:

He’s also gained recognition as the PC in the “Get A Mac” commercial series with co-star Justin Long, contributed frequently to This American Life, and scored bit roles in the film Baby Mama and the upcoming season of Battlestar Galactica.

Now, I’m not asking for confirmation of Hodgman’s specific role in “BSG”, or whether he turns out to be the Final Cylon — though his serenity and faux pomposity would make him a perfect choice. I’m just trying to make sure I actually read those words in that order.

John Hodgman will be on “Battlestar Galactica” next season.

January can’t come soon enough …

Airport 2008

Shurely there wash a more flattering photographI’m at Heathrow. I’ve actually been at Heathrow for the last four hours, figuring that it was cheaper and simpler to take the underground directly to the airport, sit myself down and work through the night rather than try to grab a few hours’ sleep before getting up at 3:30 am and taking a cab out.

I think I made the right choice, though no one mentioned that while Heathrow claims to be “open 365 days a year, 24 hours a day”, that just refers to the check-in area — the counters themselves are closed from midnight to 4 am, which means anyone who arrives at 1:15 in the morning has nothing to do but sit on the stupid floor for three hours while the cleaning crew works gingerly around you. Still, I got a lot of stuff done.

And now I am off to Vienna, the land of sausages, beer and chocolate. If I can find a chocolate-sausage beer — or a beer-and-chocolate sausage — I will post a photo immediately.

In the meantime, here’s my latest Sympatico/MSN DVD column, considering the endurance of the James Bond movies in light of the new Blu-ray discs. I saw them on display here, and they are gorgeous. But must we wait another season for “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service”?

Celine Dion’s love theme from “Titanic” is warbling over the PA system. At least that shuts down overnight, too.