TIFF '24 Day Zero
A few words about Real Cinema™
The Toronto International Film Festival is once again upon us—or me, really, since most of you reading this won’t be at the festival and probably don’t care don’t care about it all that much. Technically, the festival only begins today (Thursday, Sep 5), but last night (Wednesday, Sep 4), TIFF ‘24 officially unofficially kicked off with Midnight Madness programmer Peter Kuplowsky’s now annual tradition: Midnight Dankness.
Taking over the beloved Royal Cinema (which is only rarely used as a cinema these days, for shame… this city…), Kuplowsky went all out. Past years have seen him host raucous screenings of Barbarian, which due to timing couldn’t make it into the festival proper, and the incredible Hundreds of Beavers. This year, he programmed a triple-feature (plus, extras). There were Matt Farley’s Local Legends and the world premeire of its sequel, Local Legends: Bloodbath, along with the Canadian premiere of Conner O’Malley’s Rap World. It was a night of Real Cinema™.
For those uninitiated, Matt Farley has become something of a hot property in the online film world. Best known to the public as the guy who’s recorded literally tens of thousands of novelty songs about poop, celebrities and more in order to game the streaming music system and earn a steady living (he’s been on The Tonight Show!), Farley is also a filmmaker. Working under the aucpises of Motern Media, he and his friends have been making backyard movies for decades now. As Farley explains in Local Legends, a fictionalized biopic about himself, it’s the kind of thing kids do when they’re 13 and eventually grow out of, only he never did. Go watch Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You if you want a taste of the homespun hilarity produced by Farley’s Motern Method. His biopic builds a wider mythology around everything he does, and the sequel acts as a response, tearing his ego down a peg or five. The miraculous thing about Farley’s work how goofily pure it is, and that vibe extended to the screening itself.
In between the two Local Legends, Kuplowksy welcomed O’Malley to present Rap World, his unbelievably funny 2009-set mockumentary about a trio of overgrown idiot white guys in the suburbs trying to record a rap album. It was preceded by his short film Coreys, confronting me with that nightmarish hilarity on the big screen.
It was an electric night, and an amazing way to start the festival, even if only unofficially. In fact, the beauty of Kuplowsky’s Midnight Dankness screenings is that they’re not official. They feel like a response to the pretensions of TIFF itself, its heavily “curated” selection of The Best cinema has to offer. By comparison, Midnight Dankness is the best anarchy.