welcome home - thursday morning

Indisputable quote of the festival:
"Welcome home." - Baba Dez, Sex Magic.

It's Monday morning. I am TIRED. But last night was such a great night at Hot Docs that the blurry eyes and unkempt hair don't matter much. The evening did not start off as planned - I was thwarted by that armageddon of a rain storm, which beached my bike and forced me onto the TTC. (An aside: it sucks to pay $3 to get on the street car, but it's twice as easy to find two coins as it is to find four.)

I raced from my first night of classes at George Brown to the Royal for Blank City at 9:45. Great movie. When the programmer announced it, all she wanted to say was that the movie was really cool. That about summed it up. It's about the art and film scene in the Lower East Side in Manhattan during the 70s and 80s. Lydia Lunch, John Waters, Thurston Moore (mmm) and other strange and enticing characters painted a thorough picture of a time and place that I sometimes wish I had been born into. Go see this movie. It's playing again.

I was going to go home after that (no bike = walking = slow = lazy), but a little chickadee reminded me that Hot Docs happens only once a year, so I pulled myself together and went to the Bloor for Sex Magic: Long Subtitle. THIS IS WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT. It's like this:  I love music. But I love live music even more. Know what I'm saying? The midnight crowd was rowdy, energetic, loud and quite possibly drunk. We howled our way through this movie. The collective energy was so rambunctious in the theatre. After the movie Baba Dez himself was there, and got one of the warmest welcomes I've seen so far at the festival, notwithstanding the fact that the entire Bloor Cinema just spent that last two hours laughing at him. (Has anyone noticed that the q & a's are getting feistier? I noticed that after the first few days of the festival the audience has started to challenge the directors a little more, which makes for much more interesting sessions.) I would tell you to go see this movie but you missed it - that was the last screening.

Only four more days. Frown.