8-28-03
I wonder what it's like to submit an order for tickets to the Toronto
Film Festival and then actually get ALL the tickets you
requested? Because, in all the years that I've been attending the fest,
that's never, ever happened to me.
It doesn't look like it'll happen this year, either, since I'm in box
ten.
What exactly does that mean, you may wonder? How does this affect the
grand scheme of the festival universe? What the hell do boxes have to
do with anything, anyway??
Allow me to illustrate...
I'm in box ten.
Box ten.
Box ten out of 81 (!!!) boxes of orders collected by 10am of the
"random draw" cutoff date (today).
Box ten out of 81 boxes of orders collected when the "random" (ha!
random my ASS!) draw resulted in box #30 being drawn as the winning box
to be processed first. After the orders in box 31 are done, they'll
move on to box 32, then 33, then 34 and so on until they get to 81, at
which time they'll loop back around to the beginning and do box one,
box two and continue on to box 29. After that they'll process
all the other orders submitted after the initial order-form-dropoff
cutoff. (For a blow by blow of how this ridiculous, moronic and largely
unfair process works - or doesn't work, as it were - refer to last
year's rant on the subject.)
So, some 61 boxes full of ticket orders will be processed before the
box-office minions ever even get to mine.
And that, friends, ain't good news for me.
I submitted requests for some 34 films. If I get half of those, I'll be
happy. But I'd damn well better get Casa de los Babys, my big
Maggie Gyllenhaal must-see flick, or I'm going to be very, very, VERY
unhappy.
I'm not going down without a fight, either. In order to (hopefully)
prepare for the inevitable, I'll be spending the weekend coming up with
a brand new alternate schedule of films (no easy task when you're
looking at 30+ movies) for myself. That way, when I trek to the box
office at the crack of dawn on Monday morning to pick up my tickets and
see how many I managed to successfully snare, I'll be ready to pick a
whole bunch of new movies to replace the ones I didn't get. This could
mean I wind up seeing some unexpectedly wonderful movies I might have
otherwise missed. Or, it could mean I find myself angrily sitting in
crap movie after crap movie as a result of being forced to choose from
the less-than-stellar cinematic leftovers (Brown Bunny, here I
come!).
As my friend Angela said, the lighting of incense and recitation of
incantations has begun. All my appendages are crossed and I'm hoping
against hope that, somehow, I wind up as unscathed as possible by the
godawful ticketing system many festivalgoers view as pure evil.
My only consolation is that I didn't wind up in box 29. There's always
next year for that kind of wretched luck.
— Vickie
