{"id":121591,"date":"2025-09-05T10:42:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-05T10:42:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/121591\/"},"modified":"2025-09-05T10:42:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T10:42:07","slug":"tiffs-opening-night-delights-with-some-patriotic-surprises","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/121591\/","title":{"rendered":"TIFF\u2019s opening night delights with some patriotic surprises"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Ryan Reynolds (left) and director Colin Hanks at the Toronto International Film Festival premiere of John Candy: I Like Me on Thursday.Sammy Kogan\/The Canadian Press<\/p>\n

It has been too long since the opening night of the Toronto International Film Festival<\/a> had anything to do with Canada. <\/p>\n

Back when the event was known as the Festival of Festivals, organizers tended to take special care to ensure that the very first movie that audiences saw each year came courtesy of homegrown artists, with 24 Canadian films filling the opening-night slot over TIFF\u2019s first three decades. Yet in the past 15 years, just two Canadian films \u2013 one a documentary about Robbie Robertson and The Band, the other a musical about, well, hockey \u2013 have kicked off the city\u2019s annual celebration of cinema and celebrity. <\/p>\n

But TIFF\u2019s curious indifference to Canadiana was flipped on its head (its tuque?) on Thursday night for the festival\u2019s 50th edition, with a triple hit of homegrown heroes taking centre stage, one after the other, in a veritable blast of elbows-up-era patriotism. What\u2019s more: each of the films was genuinely good, as opposed to merely good-for-you. <\/p>\n

The evening started off with some decently earned sentimentality and flag-waving as TIFF played host to the world premiere of John Candy: I Like Me, a new documentary<\/a> about the life and legacy of one of Canada\u2019s comedy heroes.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

John Candy at the Academy Awards in 1988.The Associated Press<\/p>\n

While the project isn\u2019t exactly Canadian in nature \u2013 it was funded by MGM Prime Video out of Hollywood, and directed by Colin Hanks, son of the definitely-not-Canadian Tom \u2013 it arrived in Toronto all but draped in the Maple Leaf. <\/p>\n

The doc\u2019s producer and B.C. native Ryan Reynolds introduced the film during its Princess of Wales premiere while sporting a \u201cCanada\u201d T-shirt, while Hanks proclaimed on stage that the filmmaking team had chosen Toronto for the premiere because it reflected the lyrics of Candy\u2019s favourite song: \u201cO Canada.\u201d (The room was so full of patriotic love that few seemed to notice the brief protest that occurred in the orchestra section, when demonstrators unfurled a banner decrying RBC\u2019s sponsorship of the festival, saying the bank funds \u201cwildfires, bombs and stolen land.\u201d)<\/p>\n

If that show of domestic pride weren\u2019t enough, though, then the film\u2019s second gala screening, at the larger Roy Thomson Hall across the street, was, prefaced by a semi-surprise appearance from Prime Minister Mark Carney, who immediately secured the room\u2019s stand-on-guard-for-thee attention. <\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Prime Minister Mark Carney makes a surprise appearance.Arlyn McAdorey\/The Canadian Press<\/p>\n

\u201cIn many of his movies, there would have been a scene where John would pivot, having been pushed too far,\u201d Carney said onstage, before taking a not-so-subtle dig at Canada\u2019s own bully-in-chief down south. \u201cDon\u2019t push a Canadian too far, someone richer, someone more powerful, someone more arrogant, I don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n

While the Candy doc received a warm and polite response from TIFF\u2019s audience \u2013 even if it frequently dipped into unfettered reverence, as if a family home-movie project was underwritten by one of the biggest studios in Hollywood \u2013 the onscreen Canadiana went into artistic overdrive as the evening carried on. <\/p>\n

If you ran quickly enough from the final few seconds of the 6 p.m. Candy doc screening, for instance, you would have made it just in time for the 8:30 p.m. world premiere of Mile End Kicks<\/a> a few doors east at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, where Toronto filmmaker (and one-time Globe and Mail contributor) Chandler Levack brought the house down with her tale of a clueless Anglophone music critic trying to make a go of it in Montreal. <\/p>\n

The follow-up to her 2022 hit comedy I Like Movies, Levack\u2019s new film had the sold-out crowd caught in a sweaty, sexy, witty, and sometimes painfully (and intentionally) awkward vortex of emotions, all backgrounded by gorgeous, sun-dappled shots of Montreal\u2019s Mile End neighbourhood (and a few corners of Toronto and Burlington, Ont., too). <\/p>\n

Unlike so many movies that are shot in Canadian cities but attempt to disguise those locales as Anywhere, USA, Levack\u2019s latest film finds deep, sincere pleasures in regional nuance, from the Montreal and Toronto streets that her characters barrel down to the music that soundtracks their lives (Alanis Morissette is practically a supporting character). Even the CN Tower gets an innovative nod, or, more accurately a clever flip of the bird. <\/p>\n

But nothing could have prepared TIFF\u2019s audiences for the hardcore CanCon \u2013 complete with a whole new level of CN Tower chaos \u2013 that is Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie<\/a>. <\/p>\n

After making its world premiere at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Tex., earlier this spring, Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol\u2019s time-travel buddy comedy<\/a> struck the sold-out, primed-for-anything crowd at the Royal Alex just after midnight like a lightning bolt. <\/p>\n

Easily the most Toronto-centric movie ever made, the riotous farce about two wannabe rock stars not only portrays the city in such a brash and unapologetic new light, it does so by remixing and reconfiguring the city\u2019s geographical and even psychological reality in truly incomprehensible ways. The visual gags are unparalleled, and frequently, lines of dialogue were drowned out by the room\u2019s enormous bursts of laughter \u2013 especially when Johnson and McCarrol delivered deep-cut Toronto Easter eggs, be it sly references to the travails of Drake or posters featuring a certain public-radio pariah. <\/p>\n

As the film\u2019s relentless momentum pushed the energy of the room forward \u2013 and as the experience unwittingly built upon the accumulated layers of homegrown cinema witnessed earlier in the evening \u2013 TIFF\u2019s opening night reached something of a generational high. <\/p>\n

For all of the other criticisms and missteps that you can label at the film festival<\/a>, the evening felt like a genuine metropolitan touchstone. Which is perhaps why Mayor Olivia Chow presciently decided to attend the Nirvanna screening, even if it meant wiping clean her next-day agenda, given that the show didn\u2019t let out until well past 2:30 a.m.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe regionality of something like this, although to us seems so pathetic, like oh why are you showing our city, it\u2019s so ugly and disgusting. Other countries, they don\u2019t think like that,\u201d Johnson said during the film\u2019s post-screening Q&A session.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe specificity of our city is no longer a drawback the way it maybe was in the \u201990s and early 2000s. Four Germans came up to me after the screening in SXSW and said, \u2018My god, this movie is unbelievable. So much jaywalking!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

TIFF25: Essential reads<\/p>\n

The 15 buzziest movies you can\u2019t miss at this year\u2019s Toronto film festival<\/a><\/p>\n

On TIFF\u2019s 50th anniversary, 50 moments that define Canada\u2019s glitziest cultural behemoth<\/a><\/p>\n

In defence of TIFF\u2019s Wavelengths, the incredibly shrinking film festival program<\/a><\/p>\n

Scarlett the great: At TIFF, Johansson leaves Marvel behind for a deeply Jewish story of forgiveness<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Ryan Reynolds (left) and director Colin Hanks at the Toronto International Film Festival…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":121592,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[49,48,361,75,2922],"class_list":{"0":"post-121591","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-celebrities","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-noastack"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121591\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/121592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}