The Toronto International Film Fest has descended on the city once more, bringing with it pet causes, star fuckers, and sycophants of all sorts. It also brings with it the inevitable press conferences. After all, why travel to this backwater if not to do lots of press and promote your latest (most likely anti-American) film?
Mr. Right and I made the mistake of going downtown last night, rather desperate to eat at our favorite Indian restaurant, and not caring about the throngs. At least, not till we were in them. Mr. Right’s mood started to go downhill as we pushed through the Yorkville crowds (mostly Japanese tourists with Prada shoes and top-of-the-line digital cameras, crowded around the doors of the hotels, waiting for someone of interest to pop their heads out like cuckoo clocks), and he began to notice the stickers on the newspaper boxes, “9/11 was an inside job!” My own mood hit the dumpster when I saw the stage set up outside the ROM, all set for some type of glitzy SAVE DARFUR tragi-comedy. I knew that could only mean the George Clooney hadn’t flown out immediately after his premiere on Friday night. Dammit, why will that man not just go to Darfur and stay there??
We took a hard right down Bay Street, hoping to get out of the madding crowd. Instead we were treated to a veritable swarm of media types, all headed from a press conference, I can only assume at the Sutton Place where Sean Penn made the grave mistake of smoking a butt last year – that devil. Of all the things to malign Sean Penn for, I can’t believe the media focused on his smoking. Ugh. So there they all were, overdressed women and badly dressed men, with their press passes hanging around their necks on Starbucks lanyards. And then I was attacked. She came through the crowd, in an obvious hurry, tripod slung over her shoulder in its sheath. WHAM. The tripod nailing me hard in the wrist, my cry of pain, and she didn’t even stop. The mainstream media, folks. The media that cares about the pot-bellied war child of Darfur, but attacks the people of their own city. Suffice it to say I wasn’t surprised.
After a couple of cocktails in a very busy restaurant on the strip, and a lovely hot curry meal, we were a lot calmer and ready to head back out in search of dessert. Only to come face to face with a Truther. Up at the corner of Yonge and Dundas (I suppose we could count ourselves lucky that it was only a Truther, and not some homey with a gun), he stood there in his 9/11 truth.org t-shirt, handing out his pamphets of hate. I had to be restrained by Mr. Right and two tourists who happened to be walking by.
What has this city come to? Have we fallen through the looking glass? People come from all over the world to suck the collective dick of American filmmakers who loathe their own country, and find kinship in the loonies who believe the president of the free world murdered 3000 of his own countrymen on their way to work one morning and destroyed his own economy, just so he had an excuse to do what? Go to Iraq? Give Halliburton a war contract? What? Somebody tell me why?
