Reading, Watching, Listening 8/16/2024
A few words about scheduling
TIFF season is almost upon us, and I’ll be back at the festival this year in full force to check out films and write coverage (including for paid subscribers of this newsletter). The line-up this year is very, very good, which also presents a problem: scheduling will be a nightmare.
Attending a huge festival like TIFF, particularly as press, is a wild experience when it comes to time management. Fitting in multiple movies per day, writing in between, conducting interviews, rushing between theatres, standing in lines, hanging out with friends from out of town. It all becomes a mad rush, regardless how well you’ve planned it out. That’s because even if you think you’ll be taking it easy, and you’ve got your schedule arranged, things shift. Turns out some movies are stinkers best avoided, or you hear about something that wasn’t quite on your radar that now needs to get added in. Interviews get scheduled last-minute, and sometimes so do reviews. Everything bounces around, emails are flying all over the place. Chaos.
Right now I’m at that stage of planning where I’m looking at my schedule, seeing all the different screenings that overlap, crying to myself about the impossibility of getting to it all, and trying to remind myself that a) I can’t, and b) everything’s going to be in flux anyway, so why worry? Easier said than done, of course. The stress is real.
Granted, a lot of this is my own doing. I know some who fly in to Toronto and only see two, maybe three movies a day. Me? Despite always telling myself that I’ll go easy, I end up with several five-movie days, sometimes six movies! I’ll tell myself I shouldn’t go to that Midnight Madness screening because I’ve got a press screening at 9 am the next day, but then I’ll say fuck it and do that two or three days in a row. It’s my diseases, but I do love it, and I’m excited.
Because my head’s been a bit deep into thinking about the festival (and exciting family events), I haven’t been watching, reading, or listening to as much as I’d like. But I’ve got a few things to recommend:
Industry is an HBO series that finally seems to be catching buzz as it starts its third season. I watched the first episode back when it aired, and wasn’t quite on its wavelength. But seeing actor Ken Leung in a string of episodes of Person of Interest inspired me to keep the Leung train going by getting into Industry. It’s an odd show. Kind of a Gen Z soap set in the world of London finance. It’s not the bracing, dramatic satire of the rich that Succession was, and that gives it a strange feeling. Like you’re immersing yourself in a really shitty world, and for what? To watch characters struggle? But I hate them all??? Yet the show coalesces into something more subtle. Not necessarily social commentary as such, Industry nonetheless exposes something of modern social alienation at the hands of late-stage capitalism. Less an indictment of finance than a picture of working life in an age where people have forgotten how to connect with each other. The funny thing is that the work in the show, involving foreign exchange sales, demands interpersonal contact to really make things run well, and yet it’s all transactional, all gross, and nobody has anything real or human to anchor them other than ambition for its own sake. Well, I guess there’s the money, too. Either way, a show worth checking out, and Leung, who’s a supporting player in the series, is outstanding as usual.
Over at Liberties, Robert Rubsam has written a meditation on Janet Planet, a film I’ve already expressed my love for here, but it’s more than just an essay about a movie. Rubsam reflects on his own summers spent in New York’s Hudson Valley, connects that to the film’s Massachusetts setting, and then branches out to talk about the specificity of location in art, from the work itself, to the production side, tax credits and all the rest. That all leads to astute comments on the future as envisioned by A.I. boosters. “It is a vision of reality without texture, creation without socialization, art without humanity,” he writes.
See you all Sunday for the next update in my five-star three-star cinema journey!