Tombrarian

Hard to beleive, but we leave for Monterey three weeks from today for a combined work/fun trip. The work part is Internet Librarian 2006; however, Information Today conferences tend to be a lot of fun as well. This will be my first time at IL and am looking forward to seeing a lot of the people I already know from Computers in Libraries as well as meeting some West Coast people.

The (other) fun part is that my wife and I are arriving early (Friday night and the conference starts on Monday), and we are also staying on the coast a few extra days and driving up to San Francisco.

I still need to update my presentation. I had given a similar presentation back in March at Computers in Libraries, but a lot has happened since March, so I have to revise.

I haven’t been paying all that much attention to the ongoing conversations about setting up library profiles in Facebook or MySpace, so this might be old news, but there has been some interesting talk on the ili-l listserv. Apparently, libraries have been suspended from Facebook because they violate the user aggreement. The aggreement has a regulation about not impersonating and entity.

You can find the thread here.

I finally uploaded my pictures from the Toronto International Film Festival. There aren’t many, but you can see them here.

It’s hard to believe I left Toronto a week ago today. Of course, I’ve been colossally busy catching up on things. And I still haven’t posted my pictures from the festival yet. I only have a few, but I still haven’t gotten around to them.

But my busy fall continues. I leave for Monterey for Internet Librarian 2006 in one month. My wife is coming with me and we’re extending the trip into a brief vacation. We’ve made most of our plans, but still have some details to attend to. And, of course, I have to update my presentation. I’m also hoping to take a closer look at the IL program and pick some of the sessions I want to go to and update my schedule on the IL2006 Wiki.

Tuesday evening:

Last film of the festival, for me, was Black Sheep about genetically altered sheep that raise havoc on a New Zealand farm.  It’s somewhat of a one joke movie.  Yes, it’s funny that sheep would turn into flesh eating killers.  Luckily,the filmmakers seem to understand that it’s a one joke movie and don’t belabor the point.  The film is blissfully short at under 90 minutes.  It follows a predictable path, but does so with a nice touch and good humor.

So, nothing great, but certainly enjoyable.

My last day at the festival began with Waiter, a dark comedy starring, directed by and written by Alex van Warmerdam.  Like Love and Other Disasters, Waiter tries a little too hard to be clever.  But unlike Love and Other Disasters, it succeeds more than not.

I did not see Stranger Than Fiction at the festival, but these two movies seem similar.  Waiter is about Edgar, the waiter of the title, who is living a rather frustratingly bland life.  As his situation gets worse, he confronts Herman, a screenwriter who is creating Edgar’s life.  Actually, Love and Other Disasters also has this kind of meta-narrative about a relationship between the events of the film and the screenwriter who creates it.

Edgar negotiates with Herman and his wife Suzie for a better fate, but things, of course, get out of hand as a power struggle evolves between Edgar and Herman.  Because the film gets too wrapped up in plot twists, I did not find the
film to be particularly engaging, but it is interesting and occassionally funny with a somewhat surprising ending.

Monday evening:

As I mentioned before, I’ve been a Hal Hartley fan since his first full length feature, The Unbelievable Truth, so being at the Premiere of Fay Grim where Harley and stars Parker Posey, Jeff Goldblum, Saffron Burrows, Liam Aiken, and Chuck Montgomery were present was quite a thrill.

Fay Grim is a sequel to 1997’s Henry Fool.  The new film focuses on Simon Grim’s sister who married Henry Fool at the end of the first film.  As is often the case with sequels, I was concerned that the new film would be a rehash of the first one.  But Hartley’s films are always surprising and Fay Grim is no exception.  Fay Grim is a quite different film than Henry Fool.  Unlike most of Hartley’s films which take place in New York and its suburbs, Fay Grim isinternational in scope.  Fay Grim is also, by far, Hartley’s most political film.

What is the same about Fay Grim is the interesting characters, the snappy dialog, and the adventurous cinematography.  Like Henry Fool, Fay Grim has an open-ending which we can only hope means a third part.  In the Q&A, Hartley was a bitevasive about whether there would be another film with these characters.

Monday morning:

OK, Love and Other Disasters is not a particularly good movie. But most of the films I had seen up to this point had been rather heavy and/or depressions depressing, so a light British romantic comedy early Monday morning felt about right.

The basic premise is that Emily Jackson (Brittany Murphy) thinks that Paolo (Santiago Cabrera) is gay and fixes him up with her gay roomate Peter (Matthew Rhys). Of course, Paolo is straight and supposed hilarity ensues. Love and Other Disasters tries too hard to be clever. In a few spots, this cleverness works, in some spots, not so much. There are
a few good laughs along the way.

So, not a great movie, but it’s harmlessly entertaining, especially after seeing movies about crippling poverty, conspiratorial governments, and meditations regarding the meaning of life.

Here’s some proff that people at the Toronto Film Festival take their movie going seriously.  Nine o’clock Sunday morning, the house was nearly packed for The Bet Collector, a low budget film from the Philippines.  The film is about the enormously popular but illegal numbers game jueteng.  The film focuses on Amy (Gina Pareño), a grandmother who wanders an impovrished neighborhood to get people to place bets.  Director Jeffrey Jeturian shows us a world where poor people place their hopes in a lottery while showing the corruption that will keep many of them from even having a chance.  Although The Bet Collector is a little slow in spots, overall, it is a moving portrait of the role chance plays in people’s lives.

Both Jeffrey Jeturian and Gina Pareño were present for a Q&A and, unfortunately, Jeturian had to entertain a rather condescending (”Why did you end it that way?”) question from someone in the audience.  In a few of the Q&A sessions I was at, people asked some basic plot-related questions like this.  Denis Dercourt, director of The Page Turner, answered one woman’s plot related question by saying that he likes to have some ambiguity in his films and allow the viewer to bring something of themselves to the experience.  Two questions later, someone asked a similar plot-related question.  Sorry, minor rant there.

Saturday night:

Prior to Saturday night, we hadn’t been to any of the big premieres.  That changed on Saturday night when we saw the U.S. vs. John Lennon at the Reyerson.  Not only were the directors, David Leaf and John Scheinfeld, present to answer questions, so was Yoko Ono.  And Michael Moore was in the audience.

The movie is fantastic and it certainly was exhilerating to be in the theater with such a large, enthusiastic crowd.

Being a long time Lennon fan, I knew a lot of the information that was presented, but I did not know a lot of the details about how the Nixon administration tried to deport Lennon.  Also, the new inteviews with Yoko Ono shed a lot of light on their relationship.

They announced that U.S. vs. John Lennon will be in wide release in a week or so.  Although I sometimes try to avoid seeing movies at a festival that I know will be released, I was certainly thrilled to see it in this venue with the directors and Yoko present!