Saturday at TIFF: The Fifth Estate and All About the Feathers

Saturday was cool and very, very wet. Diane and I still decided to do the rush line for The Fifth Estate at the Winter Garden theatre which was interesting – I’ll talk more about that in my next Global blog. However, we’re smiling because we got these.

As Phil said to me last week, there were people walking the line to sell their tickets. We bought ours from a woman who wanted $45 for the pair. Diane only had $40 on her so the woman kept walking but in the age of debit and credit cards, people didn’t have the cash so she came back and took the $40.

Before you think she lost money on the tickets, she probably didn’t. If she bought a package, she would have paid less than $20 per ticket so she recouped her costs. We hopped out of the rush line and into the ticket holders’ line where we wiled away the time chatting with our fellow attendees.

So, The Fifth Estate. I thought it was heavy handed. Lots of “See the metaphors! The metaphors are telling you about his state of mind!” Benedict Cumberbatch was good as Assange, capturing the snakiness, arrogance and self-belief that he was doing the right thing. Daniel Bruhl was also very good as were most of the supporting cast. The film wasn’t as good and I think a lot had to do with the director’s filming choices. I did feel slightly better about being a journalist, then torn about feeling slightly better.

After the film, we decided to head over to the Scotiabank Theatre for All About the Feathers, a Costa Rican comedy about the people who get involved in cock-fighting. We joined the rush line again but this time had a much better experience than at The Fifth Estate which I’ll write about on Globalnews.ca.

Neto Villalobos held a brief Q&A after the film, talking about the casting of his actors and his fundraising efforts on Indiegogo. There was great chemistry between him and the audience. Lovely little film. Go see it if you can.

I’ll end with one more picture of Benedict Cumberbatch taken at the red carpet for The Fifth Estate.