Illustrations by Maddie Fischer.
To participate in the Toronto International Film Festival Scavenger Hunt, simply take a selfie with each of the eight “landmarks” around Festival Street—the three-block stretch of King Street where you’ll find key festival venues, food trucks, and brand activations—then enter a raffle to win a prize. I wondered what a “landmark” would look like as I began my search one evening, killing time before Roberto Minervini’s existentialist war movie The Damned (all films 2024). I imagined informational placards on the festival’s main theaters—maybe I could learn something about the architecture of Roy Thomson Hall, the distinctive concert hall that resembles a mirrored funnel? Or some bizarre trivia about the Reitman family, that cinematic dynasty who developed the Lightbox Theater?
I spotted the first landmark: a black square of poster board, affixed to a crowd-control barricade. It was adorned with plain white text, “THE SCAVENGER HUNT #1.” King Street is lined with private businesses—restaurants, offices, and theaters—that probably wouldn’t want to hang up such an eyesore, so all of the landmarks were pinned to temporary activation tents, as well as the fencing that designates “Fan Zones” for peeping at red-carpet premieres. I, a wayward Scavenger Hunter, weaved around agog autograph-chasers, then awkwardly squatted to snap a picture of myself grimacing with the poster board, thus blocking foot traffic to a grotesque photo-op with a Lego-fied Pharrell.
I did all of this with no knowledge of what I might win—surprisingly, the volunteers staffing the booth hadn’t been briefed on the prizes either. The Hunt was organized by Toronto Downtown West, the local entertainment district, but the information on their website is cryptic, only offering a list of local businesses who had donated unidentified prizes, like the CN Tower, the Blue Jays, Ripley’s Aquarium, and even Roy Thomson Hall. Despite the Hunt’s umbrella organization, the landmarks are not placed strategically in a way that might spotlight Toronto’s cultural vibrancy—except, perhaps, for Landmark #5, which was posted next to an Art Market booth (I arrived after it had closed up shop for the day). Nor do they guide the Hunter to interesting TIFF sites—but as one moves down King Street, they might obliviously trod on the names of the “Canadian Walk of Fame,” featuring festival alumni both beloved (David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, Martin Short) and not (Nickelback).
I didn’t expect the Scavenger Hunt to be high-concept, but I expected there to be some concept, however cheesy or hollow. Instead, I took part in a debatably real pantomime of an activity. In 2021, TIFF collaborated with Letterboxd on a movie-forward Hunt that asked participants to watch and log films from different sections of the program—that, at least, is relevant to the thing that brought us all to Toronto. This year’s Hunt was the epitome of contentless content, but I still willingly marched up and down a very busy street for no good reason and presented myself as an idiot to complete strangers. I did not win a prize. I can’t intellectualize myself out of that hole.
Saturday Night (Jason Reitman, 2024).
When I reviewed my notes from TIFF, three films reminded me of the experience of the Scavenger Hunt. First, let’s consider the way that the Hunt didn’t have much to say, but felt inevitable and perfunctory: this resembles the construction of Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night. The film depicts the 90 minutes of panicked rehearsals before the 1975 premiere episode of Saturday Night Live, then only called Saturday Night, since Howard Cosell was already hosting a show called Saturday Night Live on ABC. We see our hero, showrunner Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle, previously Steven Spielberg’s proxy in The Fabelmans [2022]), up against his own diffuse ambition for the show—he’s overloaded it with four hours of now-famous sketches and then-emerging guest comics like Billy Crystal (Nicholas Podany), whose pilot appearance was cut for time—and assorted hijinks. John Belushi (Matt Wood), flattened here into a “difficult” eccentric, won’t sign his contract, and Lorne’s assistant has a Maureen Dowd–level episode after smoking a joint. On top of that, the network execs (including Willem Dafoe as David Tebet) are using Saturday Night as a pawn in a convoluted war to keep Johnny Carson on NBC. In the film, NBC’s top brass is betting that SNL will flop to appease Carson—it’s a more compelling underdog story—but in real life, the network prayed it would succeed in order to fill a scheduling hole.
Saturday Night narrates this show-must-go-on story with the urgency of a lunar landing, powered by Aaron Sorkin–style repartée. For this deeply earnest, white-knuckle tone to make sense, the viewer has to know in their bones that SNL was a countercultural watershed, a final nail in the coffin of midcentury late-night TV, rendered here as a boys’ club of swinging dicks and very uncool rumba numbers. (The film is at least a bit ambivalent about how clean this break was, as evinced by conversations between non-white-male cast members.) From the get-go, the film relies on dramatic irony to get us onboard: Lorne tries to convince Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman) that SNL is going to work by quoting Thomas Edison, who said that people wouldn’t be able to understand electricity until they saw it in action, since it defied explanation. The audience is supposed to chuckle at Ebersol’s skepticism—we have seen SNL, and we know that in this battle between the suits and the artistes, art won. (Never mind the unhelpful gray area that, in reality, Ebersol was fully on Michaels’s side; NBC hired him to develop the show.)
In case the viewer has never heard of SNL, there are in-text reminders of how important the season-one cast was to the culture—Lorne points out the Prometheus statue in front of 30 Rock, which gives anyone who passes through those doors a mythic gravitas, while a few Che Guevara references convey Reitman’s dorm-room-poster understanding of revolutionary politics. To prove to the audience that SNL was funny, Reitman wields the Kuleshov effect. He cuts to reaction shots of his characters laughing hysterically at whatever classic bit is being reenacted, thus telegraphing how funny it is. There are portrayals of some heavy-hitters from this period, like Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), George Carlin (Matthew Rhys), and Andy Kaufman—lifelessly and unfortunately reanimated by Nicholas Braun, who, for no clear reason, also plays Jim Henson in this film. They’re tasked with mimicking classic bits and mannerisms, but it scans as futile; prestige pictures don’t often call upon performers to act, but to chase the ghosts of real people. It’s an interesting phenomenon to observe here, since SNL was the launchpad for so many storied comic impressionists—but then again, those impressions center the quick wit and creativity of the comedian, rather than parroting bits from half a century ago.
SNL, now on the precipice of its 50th season, has become the establishment, and the real Lorne Michaels is now the gatekeeping suit. To remember that it truly did have some teeth when it premiered is like considering an artifact in a museum, and I’m not sure how many people who weren’t alive to see SNL’s premiere season would be willing to buy a ticket. But there are a couple of unsettlingly impactful moments. First, there is a (crucially) dialogue-free sequence of golden-age comedian Milton Berle (J. K. Simmons), “Mr. Television,” pathetically holding the center of a conga line while surrounded by babes on the set of an old-school variety show. The sequence is intended to be cartoonishly sexist, retrograde, and cheesy, but it is also a powerful gesture toward the way that our televisual gods all fall; now, the sun is setting on the paradigm of linear television that allowed Michaels his own empire. Second, at the climax of the film, Tebet—after a long pregnant pause—tells Lorne to “go live” with the first episode of the show. It’s a perfectly deployed cliché: a whole lifetime of moviegoing and narrative expectation has primed our hearts to skip a beat. Tellingly, we feel this primal energy and excitement when Lorne is given permission to go live—when his deep-rooted, inarticulable ambition is finally validated by a network exec. That conventional path to a risky comedic series order is perhaps the film’s most poignant antique; the present lacks the safety net of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The Apprentice (Ali Abbasi, 2024).
Speaking of self-fulfilling prophecies—remember how I lurched unthinkingly through that Scavenger Hunt, even when it was obvious that I would get nothing out of it? Let’s talk about Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice. This wasn’t part of TIFF’s official selection, but I received an invitation to a press screening at the Lightbox as soon as my plane touched down in Toronto, so it was a significant part of my experience. The Apprentice traces Roy Cohn’s (Jeremy Strong) mentorship of a young, bumbling Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan), starting with their mid-’70s meet-cute in a restaurant—filmed exactly like this stare-down from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia—through the late ’80s, when Trump bust forth from the chrysalis in his final grotesque form, cutting the ribbon at Trump Tower, getting orange, getting liposuction, et al. Like Saturday Night, the film relies heavily on dramatic irony to elicit knowing chuckles; my audience loved the reveal that Reagan coined “Let’s Make America Great Again,” and tons of old chestnuts are anachronistically peppered throughout, like “the body is a battery.”
The fact that these self-aware giggles are directed at someone like Trump—and Cohn—is creepy, but more than that, it’s lazy. The Apprentice amounts to a Trump supercut in the aesthetic shorthand of a made-for-HBO political biopic, complete with gritty-Manhattan establishing shots cribbed from Taxi Driver (1976). But where a film like Game Change (2012), silly as it is, dramatizes events with a popcorn-friendly narrative arc, The Apprentice doesn’t make sense as a movie. Its point appears to be educational, informing the public that Trump didn’t just emerge from the womb extolling “winners” and “losers”; he lifted the art of the deal and learned about spray tans from Joseph McCarthy’s chief prosecutor. Strong is a cartoon here—without him, I may never have learned that Cohn reflexively bobbed his head in interviews, which Strong pointedly does as soon as there’s a cut to a medium close-up. Stan has some room to do something other than mimicry for at least the first half hour of the film, when he’s merely an unconfident heir apparent to a racist property tycoon. Trapped by a mentor-creates-a-monster plot, the film feels hermetic, and Stan’s portrayal of Trump feels predetermined; there’s no effort in Gabriel Sherman’s screenplay to look at the fucked-up histories of either of these figures and decide on one thing of substance to say about them. Instead, the film adheres faithfully to the timeline as it might be presented on Wikipedia. Because of its tables-have-turned plotting, it bizarrely tries to court sympathy for Cohn toward the end of the film, when he’s weakened by AIDS as Trump treats him like shit at Mar-a-Lago. This doesn’t make the film’s depiction of Cohn more complex, and it falls short of a misguided attempt to humanize him. It only evinces an immature, movie-world understanding of how people relate to each other.
Trump and Cohn’s spiritually vacant interior lives are not really worth probing—their impact on the wider world could be, but that doesn’t make for a very fun Saturday morning cartoon. Besides, the eat-your-vegetables version of The Apprentice would be preachy and terrible, too. Somewhere around 2019, I saw Gary Indiana give a book talk, and he offered some advice for writers who are more interested in proving a point than in letting the structure and texture of their novel convey an idea: “Don’t write a book—write a pamphlet.” The Apprentice was probably pitched as a pamphlet movie, but it’s worse than that; it’s a circus of Trump greatest hits dressed up as infotainment, the reliable clickbait strategy of virtually every news outlet. A free click is a low barrier to entry, though—I wonder how many people will pay $18 for a ticket, let alone the $20 for PVOD access, to something this hollow.
Friendship (Andrew DeYoung, 2024).
I have no idea how Saturday Night and The Apprentice will fare when released to the public, which was surely a major consideration when both of them were green-lit: these tired formats are familiar, but running on fumes, and their target demographic feels, well, old. This could be something to embrace; the industry forecast has recently been more favorable to specialty distributors. Though independent filmmaking is by no means a monolith of originality, I’d prefer that prognosis to drowning in the cinematic equivalent of Mr. Television doing the rumba. Something in me wants to believe in that reductive myth of art and industry that Saturday Night fetishizes, that it’s possible for something new to break through and succeed.
Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship is a solid movie for this moment: it turns a quest for social acceptance into a nightmare. Sure, suburban everyman Craig (Tim Robinson) has several screws loose—just like on Robinson’s sketch show I Think You Should Leave (2019–present), this is obvious the second he speaks, a little too loudly and with inventive emphasis. But as he trudges through the wintry sludge of his Anytown, USA, neighborhood, you understand why he seems on the edge of snapping. To be accepted here means sliding into a midlife crisis with few avenues for enlightenment or enrichment: Craig spends his days in an office park working for a digital marketing company where his mission is to get people addicted to products—“habit formation,” he calls it. Weekend entertainment centers around seeing “the new Marvel,” which is supposedly more “insane” than the last; Craig scolds his coworkers for spoiling plot twists while nursing beers in his garage, a “Marvel Spoiler Free Zone.” The highlight of his life, he exclaims with pride, is that he can “eat whatever the hell [he wants]”—at a generic Chili’s-style restaurant, he treats himself to the “Six-Person SEAL Team Meal” for one. Patriotic legend has it that this mouth-watering combo of ribs, mac ’n’ cheese, and a Caesar salad is what the Navy SEAL unit ate after they got Osama.
Craig could spend more time with his wife, Tami (Kate Mara), a florist who recently overcame a battle with cancer, and their teenage son, but he’s bro-smitten with his cool-guy neighbor, Austin (Paul Rudd), a meteorologist with a ’70s pornstache whose idea of a fun evening is to sneak into the town sewers. Their destination is City Hall, so they can stick it to the local government by…smoking on the roof (Austin is the frontman of a dweeby punk band called Mayor Nichols Sucks, which Craig fantasizes about joining). Austin is clearly a loser, stuck at a tweenage emotional level; DeYoung has fun putting him in embarrassing situations on his newscast. When Austin meets Craig, he probably sees a beta dork he thinks he can easily manipulate, but as Craig’s behavior moves beyond social awkwardness, verging on violence, he naturally tries to distance himself…which only exacerbates that ominous side of Craig.
The misguided “weird guy,” unfit for this or any world, is a popular stock character in Robinson’s milieu. He’s everywhere in I Think You Should Leave, and he’s also the calling card of two comedians who appear in Friendship, Eric Rahill and Conner O’Malley. While the weirdos in I Think You Should Leave veer pretty wacky, O’Malley’s and Rahill’s “weird guys” are castaway everymen pushed to their limits, less like aberrations from normalcy than infected symptoms of it. Rahill recently starred in Danny Scharar's Seth’s Prayer (2023), in which he pursues an ill-fated career as a Christian model after losing his job as a school administrator. O’Malley’s latest short, COREYS (2024), directed by Dan Streit and edited by Scharar, gets a little more Jekyll & Hyde with it. While idly scrolling Instagram Reels on a Target run, O’Malley’s deadbeat dad, Corey, sees the bizarro-world version of himself, the other Corey, living it up in Vegas. Both Rahill and O’Malley root their humor in the dead-end emptiness of “coolness” in a post-ironic age. The tacky “weird-cool-guy” Corey is sort of an aspirational mirage for normal-Corey; the joke is that, of all people with whom he could body-swap to escape suburban drudgery, normal-Corey’s subconscious is manifesting this guy, decked out in a neon button-down and an enormous cowboy hat, screaming and vaping in a messy motel room.
Friendship might not be as specific or as caustic as the shorts that O’Malley and Rahill have worked on—that tone is hard to sustain over the course of a feature—but it’s funniest when it shows us how Craig’s entire environment is full of detritus, and there’s no way out. Toward the climax of the film, Craig tries to escape his material world through a psychedelic experience; the eighteen-year-old employee of a local cell-phone store, “T. Boy,” offers him a lick of a toad’s hallucinogenic slime for $100. Craig lies down and slips into a dream: he’s in a Subway ordering a sandwich from Austin, old and gray, promisingly metaphorical. Craig asks for a sandwich with Black Forest Ham—as Tim and Eric have noted, this is the elevated meat of choice for suburban dads. Yes, of course he wants to pair his foot-long sandwich with a foot-long cookie. And…Craig wakes up! There’s no ayahuasca-style transcendence, nor a profound epiphany, just a slightly surreal vision of his everyday life.
This is a film about mass-produced emptiness, but it’s not nihilistic—it’s funny, which speaks to a certain life-force at its heart. That Scavenger Hunt might have been a shell of a thing to participate in, but it’s harmless. What’s important is that we can move on from it—we can expect more, expect better, imagine a frivolous activity for festival-goers that they might actually remember after they leave TIFF. We can’t be content with exploring the sewers; we must stride confidently out of the spoiler-free zone of the Marvel garage and into the light of a new day.
Read all of our fall 2024 festival coverage here.