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Welcome to the latest Friday newsletter. It’s Sunday, but Sunday is better than Friday anyway, so let’s roll with it. It’s been a busy few weeks, and now the busyness is about to ramp up as I head into TIFF. I’ve got a few assignments already, and I’m hoping to nab a few more, but I’m still constructing my schedule—by which I mean I looked at it for five minutes, my head started to hurt, and I walked away—and figuring out what to prioritize.
I’ve been thinking through how I want to do TIFF coverage for the newsletter this year. I already know I won’t be going as nuts as last year, when I saw something north of 40 screenings over nine days, writing about all of them. I still plan to write about everything, but few things. A bit more focused. So I’ll be less tired. Though I’m sure I’ll still be plenty tired. So it goes at a film festival.
For a bit there, I toyed with the idea of making my TIFF dispatches for paid subscribers only, but I’ve decided not to do that. I’d like the festival blogs to be open and accessible to all. I may look for extra content to include, perhaps, as a locked-off section at the bottom of posts, you know, to incentivize all you beautiful moochers to spring for a paid sub. We shall see.
In the meantime, you can look forward to following along with all my TIFF updates when the festival kicks off later this week. My first dispatch will be up Thursday morning with a report from Peter Kuplowsky’s annual pre-festival starter screening, Midnight Dankness. Expect a new update every morning throughout the festival, with a nice little wrap-up at the end.
In case you missed it the other day, I wrote a new post for the newsletter inspired by videos I watched by the YouTuber The Elephant Graveyard, who has developed a compelling theoretical framework for understanding the state of comedy and the world. It’s a theory about guys who want to be new guys.
I ran with the theory, linking it to Alex Russell’s great new movie Lurker, as well as Adam Friedland’s difficult and emotional interview with US congressman Ritchie Torres.
Reading, Watching, Listening
So here’s what I’ve been consuming recently.