TIFF 2013 Awards
Last Sunday on the last day of the Toronto International Film Festival, awards were handed out in categories like Best Film, Best Canadian Film, and Best Documentary. We at Scene Creek feel that these categories are not enough. There are many more categories that we feel must be recognized. So, without further ado, here are the unofficial TIFF 2013 awards:
Best Film: The Great Beauty
This was one of the first films I had seen at the festival, and it stuck with me much longer than the rest. It was the second of 53 films I saw, and it is still as fresh in my head as the day I first watched it.
Runner up: Blue is the Warmest Color
Best Actor: Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years a Slave
Ejiofor gives an astounding performance as Solomon Northup, a free man kidnapped and sold into slavery. Chiwetel Ejiofor also wins the award for hardest name to pronounce.
Best Actress: Meryl Streep in August: Osage County
Meryl is at her Streepiest in August: Osage County, in which she stars as Violet, the pill-popping matriarch of the Weston family.
Runner up: Paulina Garcia in Gloria
Best Canadian Film: Enemy
Denis Villeneuve paints Toronto with a post-apocalyptic feel, in his haunting, and often confusing, doppelganger film.
Runners up: The Animal Project and Tom at the Farm
Best Performance by a Senior: Judi Dench in Philomena
Dench wins this award for her pronunciation of the word “condoms” alone.
Best Use of Oysters as a Metaphor for Female Genitalia: Blue is the Warmest Colour
Almost all food eaten by Adele and Emma in Blue is the Warmest Colour symbolized male or female genitalia. But none was as obvious, or as funny, as the oysters.
Best Castration: Moebius
Sure, Moebius may have been the only film I watched at the festival that actually featured castration, but I’m sure that if any others had shown it, it wouldn’t have been as fun as it was in Kim Ki-Duk’s sadomasochistic sex romp.
Best Cook: Josh Brolin in Labor Day
The scene of Brolin’s Frank showing Adele (Kate Winslet) and Henry (Gattin Griffith) how to make peach pie. That is all.
Worst Film: Story of My Death
This film featured a five minute close-up of Casanova’s face as he sits on the toilet, constipated, trying to defecate. At my public screening more than ¾ of the theatre walked out. I’d love a pretentious critic to explain to me why this is a good film.
Runner up: Devil’s Knot
Worst Use of Slow Motion: The Love Punch
Old people walk slow to begin with, so they really didn’t need to film scenes of Emma Thompson and Pierce Brosnan strutting their stuff in slow-mo.
Most Blinking by an Actor: Jake Gyllenhaal in Prisoners
Count how many times Gyllenhaal blinks in this film. I dare you.
Most Yelling in a Movie: Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts in August: Osage County
Streep and Roberts yell at each other so much in this film that audience members will be tempted to join in and start yelling at the screen.