I'm finished my first week of work as a real person now and I think it went pretty well. I'm already right into real work with a whole bunch of bugs assigned to me to fix. It also sounds like I'll have some larger projects pretty soon so that is pretty cool too. I've bought my annual membership to the climbing gym as well, and I'm going to try to start going twice a week. I'm still sore from Wednesday though so I don't know if I can start the twice a week thing yet.
The Toronto International Film Festival is currently running here and I was lucky enough to get tickets to 3 movies! It's really exciting because the TIFF has become one of the world's most important film fests, along with events like Cannes and Sundance. I even read that it is the most important event for the Oscars because it has the largest North American attendance of all festivals. The three movies I'm seeing are Fido(IMDb),The Last Kiss(IMDb) and Infamous(IMDb). The Last Kiss is on Monday, and Infamous is on Thursday so I'll talk about those in a later post, but Fido was an opening night movie so I've already seen it and I'll discuss it here.
Fido is a Canadian film by Andrew Currie, a comedy about zombies. So you know it has to be good. I mean, c'mon, a Canadian Zombie Comedy? How can that be bad??? And as predicted, it completely rocked the house. If it ever comes to DVD (harder for small movies) I will definitely be buying it.
So the movie has a 1950s sort of feel to it, like Leave it to Beaver or something, with perfect families in perfect neighbourhoods in perfect little towns with lots of bright colours and lush scenery. Except that 20 years before the time of the movie aliens blasted our planet with radiation which left a coating of dust everywhere that causes the dead to come back to life and seek out the flesh of the living for sustenance (awesome!). So there was a big war where mankind eventually overcame the zombie menace by closing in their towns and cities with fences and inventing a collar that quenches the flesh-thirst of zombies who wear it. This leads to the idea of using collared zombies as workers for menial tasks and it becomes trendy to keep a zombie or two as servants in your house.
The movie centres around a family that just got its first zombie (played very well by the Scottish comedian Billy Connolly) and is adapting to life with a zombie. The father was a child during the zombie wars and is so damaged that he feels it is best to never form close relationships because the person is just going to become a zombie that tries to eat you when you die (the radiation dust lingers). The mother (Carrie-Anne Moss, Trinity in the Matrix), desires more from her relationship and the son (K'Sun Ray) questions everything about the whole "Zombie Menace" as only a child can. The child and the mother quickly befriend their new zombie, however the father remains terrified and resentful towards it. When the collar on the zombie malfunctions and it eats one of the family's neighbours (thus creating a new zombie), a zombie outbreak occurs in the town and the family must work to keep their beloved zombie safe and to avoid being eaten.
The movie explores lots of issues and probably has lots of deeper meaning, but I'm not very good at stuff like that. I feel like maybe the isolation of the characters from each other as a result of fear of future zombification maybe reflects the growing isolation of people in society today. But I don't really believe that people are more isolated today (as some other people do) so that doesn't feel like a valid analysis to me. Meh, whatever.
More importantly though, the movie was hilarious. I know my above description doesn't really show it, but the actors in the movie play the whole thing dead seriously, and the premise is way to ridiculous not to laugh at. Some of the funniest stuff is when a zombie safety expert visits a class of young children (maybe 8 or 9 years old). He asks how many have had to kill a zombie and several rais their hands. He also gets to see them do target practice while chanting "Not in the chest, head shots are best." Also amusing was the recurring mantra of, "You can't trust old people." Because you never know when they'll die, become a zombie and start trying to eat your flesh. The whole movie was full of crazy stuff like that and the audience was howling for the entire time. It was awesome.
This was the premiere of Fido, so a lot of the people involved in it came as well, including Carrie-Anne Moss, Billy Connolly, K'Sun Ray, Andrew Currie, and a whole bunch more. They even did a bit of Q\&A at the end and Billy Connolly was hilarious! I'm also impressed by seeing Carrie-Anne Moss, it's the first celebrity I've ever been close to (she sat about 10 rows in front of us).
I'm so glad that I got tickets to some of the movies this year and I feel very lucky because we got them online on the day general purchasing opened. Jen got up early in the morning and hammered at the server until she managed to get some tickets. I am definitely going to buy a coupon book or something next year because it's such an awesome experience to go to premieres and see really good movies.
