10. From Up on Poppy Hill

There’s nothing too groundbreaking about this story. Girl meets boy, but something keeps them apart, until it doesn’t anymore. It wraps up a little too neatly, but I don’t mind a happy ending. The best thing about it was the backdrop of the high school clubhouse. It’s a visually interesting setting, filled with some entertaining secondary characters.

9. Take This Waltz

I liked the Toronto-ness of the movie, and the colourful cinematography. It has some funny moments, but ultimately, a story about relationship stuff is not my cup of tea. It was the best Q & A session of the festival for me, with Seth Rogen and Sarah Silverman in attendance. They’re very funny. For example, and I paraphrase:

Question: “How do you comedic actors adjust to more dramatic roles?”

Sarah Silverman: “Well, I am capable of just saying words…”

8. The Awakening

This ghost movie has some good scares, especially one creepy scene involving a doll house. The supporting characters are a little one-dimensional, and for some reason, they each have a weird physical quirk; one guy is constantly coughing, one guy wears fake glasses, one guy has a limp and a stutter (Dominic “McNulty” West (man crush?)). I liked the lead character and performance by Rebecca Hall; she’s like a 1920’s version of Scully from The X-Files.

7. Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale

In some ways, it’s a typical war movie, with some spectacular big battle scenes, usually preceded by a dramatic speech. On the other hand, it inverts a common cliché: normally, we’re used to seeing WWII Japanese as fierce and brutal; here, they’re depicted as cold and strategic, and they’re the ones calling their Seediq opponents “savages.”

This was a rare occasion where I wanted a movie to be longer. I had trouble distinguishing between different characters because they’re not given much time to establish their personalities. As it turns out, the film was released in two parts in Taiwan, with a total runtime of four and half hours. They edited it down for the North American release, and I assume they kept more of the action scenes. I think it will be worth re-watching in its entirety.

6. Tahrir 2011: The Good, the Bad, and the Politician

Coincidentally, both documentaries I saw have a variation of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” as the subtitle. It makes more sense for this film than it does for I’m Carolyn Parker, because it’s actually divided into three segments, made by three directors. My favourite part was the second. “The Bad” refers to the officers who were responsible for policing the crowd during the protests in Egypt. Calling them “bad” is almost ironic, because it doesn’t pass judgement, and the segment ends on a morally ambiguous note.

The middle section is sandwiched by two parts which are polar opposites of each other, stylistically and emotionally. The first part uses raw footage and just shows what happened in the protests. It felt like being there, and it was quite stressful to watch. In contrast, the third part is a satirical portrait of Mubarak, played for laughs. It ends the film on a more “fun” note, and relieves the tension built up by the first two parts.