Sept 11th BUNOHAN (TIFF, AMC #5, Young and Dundas 24)

Since today was the tenth anniversary of the Terrorist attack of the World Trade Center in New York City, TIFF decided to run a short film before each feature today. Luckily I was only seeing one movie today because I was disgusted by this short film. It takes about the emotions and feelings the people who run TIFF had at the time of the attacks. and about the decision of whether or not to cancel the festival or continue. This and several newspaper articles I have read over the last few days is a blatant attempt to use such a tragic event such as 9/11 in order to get publicity for the film festival. The Toronto International Film Festival is not linked in any way to what happened in New York City, except for the fact that there were Americans attending the festival at the time. It saddens me that this organization would do something so terrible as this.

BUNOHAN is a Malaysia film about a small town which very name means "murder". The story is actually a good one, and trying to keep Malaysia stories alive in a global media linked society is a good endeavour, however, the flaws of the movie take away from all this. The beginning of the movie is plagued with bad camera work. Moving to fast and with too many close ups. Then there is the problem of the jumbled story that leaves the watcher spending more time trying to figure out whats going on then enjoying the story. The main problem I found was that there was too many characters for this simple story. Some characters became so irrelevant that you did not care what happened to them at all. It is also interesting to note that all the female characters are either voices off screen or turned into creatures.


STAR SPOTTING.
While waiting in line for my movie, because we all know you need to go early, I happened to notice an actor standing by the entrance to one of the auditoriums. Although I had seen this actor in a lot of movies, I could not remember his name, but I did take his picture. After a little searching online, I found out he was Udo Kier, who has been in 200 movies during his career. There were also a lot of people standing around HAZELTON LANES HOTEL, in Yorkville (Toronto's only 5 star Hotel) waiting to get a glimpse of the stars as they come out to their vehicles.