OK, we're a week away from Toronto International Film Festival and I redeemed my 20-film package just yesterday. Overall relatively painless process, except for the new-to-this-year shenanigans of random assignment of seats in half the theaters, which meant I ended up getting seats waaaay in the front or waaay in the back for bunch of the screenings. Ehh, whatever. If it's physical comfort I wanted, I'd be lying on a beach drinking cocktails with little umbrellas in them, not lining up to see 3 movies a day.

Among the tickets scored: the new Barry Jenkins (If Beale Street Could Talk), the new Damian Chazelle (First Man, the new Neil Armstrong biopic starring, who else, Ryan Gosling), the Timothy Chalamet addiction-weeper (A Beautiful Boy), the Lucas Hedges gay conversion therapy weeper (Boy Erased), a pair of Eastern European period pieces from directors who won foreign film Oscars (Sunset, and Never Look Away, from Son of Saul and Lives of Others directors, respectively), the new Zhang Yimou (Shadow), the new Alfonso Cuaron (Roma), a Korean drama that took Cannes by storm without winning anything (Burning, starring Steven Yeun!), the actual Cannes Winner from Japan (Shoplifters), the new Steve McQueen in which Viola Davis leads a posse of gangster wives on a job (Widows, which looks BADASS), the one in which Nicole Kidman plays an ugly detective (Destroyer), the new Oliver Assayas/Juliette Binoche joint (Non-Fiction), and the new Claire Denis sci-fi thriller starring Robert Pattinson (?!) called High Life, which might be amazing or terrible. Oh, plus a Robert the Bruce biopic in which Chris Pine will attempt to do a Scottish accent (not very well, judging from the trailer) -- I'm watching that mostly for lulz (and because I have the hots for Chris Pine, sue me).

After the package redemption days, there comes the individual ticket purchase day. I'm gonna try to get a few more tickets to random interesting-seeming films I haven't heard much about. I usually end up doing about 25 films over 9 days or so.

RIP my eyeballs in advance

Go Vonnie! I salute you! And your eyeballs. That's some serious film fest commitment.

I had a friend who organized her whole year's vacation around the SF Film Fest (back when it was more of a thing than it has been of recent years). Dag, they had a great programmer through the 80s and 90s.

Dude, Vonnie, you are a monster. respect!

That is one helluva list. I really want to see (and probably eventually will, but not all at once!) about 90% of it.

Go Vonnie.

Every year I say I'm going to go to TIFF and it passes me by every year.

Go Vonnie! Worth the eyestrain no doubt.

Thanks, all! It's a beast of a festival. There were several other films I wanted to see that I couldn't fit into my schedule, but overall, I am psyched with the ones I got. Will report back on the films periodically!

Yes! Take notes.

ACKSHUALLY I think it's great and kinda progressive that POC can have a fluffy rom-com movie with no particular deeper meaning. White people been having meaningless rom-coms forEVER

I felt the same way about Love, Simon -- a totally fluffy teen love story, no big whoop. But gay! Yay!