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I first started going to Toronto a dozen years ago, and this visit didn’t stack up to a number of previous trips. That’s not a knock on TIFF’s programmers: they pick movies only from what’s available and ready by Toronto’s deadline (and not claimed by another festival insisting on exclusivity). If it’s a so-so year at Cannes, you can’t expect Toronto to pull rabbits out of a hat four months later. The key to maximizing your TIFF experience is choosing films in advance, making a schedule, and sticking to it. The 249 features on offer unspooled in venues scattered across the city, which requires, in the space of concentrated 12- to 15-hour working days, factoring in enough travel time so as not to get shut out of full houses. Miss one screening, and you may not find another that doesn’t cause a conflict elsewhere down the line. For most journalists, that leaves little room for selections based on personal preference. Yet, thanks to the city’s efficient, frequent, and easily navigable subway, I still saw much to admire.
Kim Jee-woon’s South Korean box office hit The Good, the Bad, the Weird was one of two westerns I saw, and its tongue-in-cheek homage to spaghetti westerns got the drop on Ed Harris’s muted Appaloosa. Kim brings together three top Korean stars—Song Kang-ho as a bumbling train robber, Lee Byun-hung as a stylish assassin, and Jung Woo-sung as a laconic bounty hunter—in a rousing adventure set in 1930s Manchuria, where the occupying Japanese army joins the chase for a stolen treasure map. Of all the movies I saw in Toronto, this was the most fun.
