I'll need festival knitting

It's that time of year: the Toronto International Film Festival approaches. This year, like last, I was away the last week of August, which really messes up one's festival preparation.

There are two ways to buy ticket packages for the fest. One is to buy a number of tickets, which one then matches to movies one wants to see. This involves sitting at a computer with a calendar, coloured pens, post-it notes and lots of leisure to check different movie times and make flow charts and time-management lists. In the last week of August, alas.

You can also buy a bunch of tickets and say, "Gimme some movies," and then get presented with some non-exchangeable tickets to movies. You can't say "no romantic comedies, please" and you can't say, "only English-language films" and you can't say you like short films or documentaries or anything. Just five movies that start before 5 pm, please and thank you.

Last year I did this and got a load of madness, mayhem and murder movies. They were all good, but not the movies I would have chosen. (I did choose one movie last year, and it was not as good as I would have liked!)

This year I aimed for the best of both worlds. I got a five-movie TIFF Choice pack, and I am super pleased with what I ended up with. Super, super pleased. This year I seem to have got the Pretty Big Gun pack. I have Keira Knightly and Ben Kingsley and Eddie Redmayne playing Stephen Hawking. (The really big guns this year are Robert Downey, Jr, Benedict Cumberbatch and Alan Rickman.)

I also got what's called a Back-Half pack, which gives me six tickets to movies in the second half of the festival, and I don't get to pick them until this Tuesday! Argh! The off-sale list is growing ever-longer, and I have to force myself to remember that I had thought this was a good idea, and that I would be delighted to see the lesser gems of the fest. I will, it will be fine, there's plenty to see....

But really, who would have thought a three-hour-long documentary about the workings of the National Gallery would be sold out so quickly? Who would want to see that, except me?

I am writing this just as the single tickets go on sale, so the TIFF site is wretchedly busy and I don't have the patience to link all these things. Stay tuned and I will try my best to blog more about it.

I guess I should also tell you about our holiday last week, the knitting I am doing, the festival knitting I will decide upon.... I always think a sock or hat goes well as lineup knitting... Oh, and school starts soon -- another reason to put off most of my festival viewing till the second week!