Sorry for the delay in posting this – it's funny how momentum screeches to a halt as soon as TIFF ends. Even the number of hits per day to this diary has dropped off dramatically since Friday. End-of-fest ennui, I suppose.

The festival handed out its official awards way back on Saturday and, once again, I question the legitimacy of their Audience Award. Screenings were still going on as the awards ceremony was taking place on Saturday afternoon... so what happens to the votes cast for those movies? And why is the big Audience Award-winner almost always one of the Gala films? Could it be because those screen in the largest venues and would, therefore, have the most number of votes? And the whole averaging system (the fest's new way of voting, where you rank a film from one to four, and the votes are then averaged into a single score – like, 3.75 – per film) makes absolutely no sense. How many films wound up ranking a perfect four? Probably a whole slew of them. So how do they pick a winner?

Popularity! That's how. Or how I figure they do it.

Anyway, here's who won what:

Best Canadian Short Film: Pool (Chris Chong Chan Fui)

CityTV Award for Best Canadian First Feature Film: Continental, Un Film Sans Fusil (Stéphane Lafleur)

Toronto-City Award for Best Canadian Feature Film: My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin)

DIESEL Discovery Award: Cochochi (Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán)

Artistic Innovation Award: Encarnación (Anahí Berneri)

FIPRESCI Prize: La Zona (Rodrigo Plá)

The Cadillac People's Choice Award: Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg)

Strange thing is, amid all the line buzz inside and outside of theatres, I didn't hear a single person ever say anything about Eastern Promises, good or bad. If that many people loved it, wouldn't there have been some kind of word-of-mouth thing happening?? Guess not.

The Toronto Star also named a half-dozen new talents to watch, including The Stone Angel's Christine Horne, Caramel's Nadine Labaki and Poor Boy's Game star Rossif Sutherland. Having seen all three of those films (I caught Game pre-fest), I have to agree with those picks.

My own personal awards go a little something like this:

Fave Films: Juno, Operation Filmmaker, Ping Pong Playa' and Lars and the Real Girl

Least-Fave Films: Do I even need to type them? Thank you, Aaron Eckhart, for the crapfests Bill and Nothing is Private!

Biggest Surprise: Film-wise, Caramel (7/8), which I actually saw at a press screening prior to the start of the fest, and which I thought was extremely well-done. Other-wise, seeing Roger Ebert again. Yay!

Worst Theatre for the Prevention of Line Cutting: The Ryerson (sorry Matt!), where the location of the line – i.e., outside, along a public sidewalk, sans ropes, where assorted pedestrians weave in and out of the moving line when the doors open – means "sidlers" often join the line and weasel their way in. This happened every single time I was at this theatre, and I called people out each time I saw it happening. By the last day of the fest, when at least SIX people squeezed into the line for Death Defying Acts, I actually YELLED across the line, "HEY! ALL YOU PEOPLE CUTTING IN LINE! THE END IS THAT WAY!!!!" I felt kind of silly but come on. First runner-up: The Elgin, for exactly the same reasons.

Best Theatre for the Prevention of Line Cutting: The Varsity. Sure, their military-like seriousness and precision can be scary, but just TRY to sneak in there. I dare you!

Best Quickie Meal: The cheap, plentiful, fresh-made pasta at Vinnie's in the Atrium on Bay (handy for the Ryerson and Elgin!).

Best "I Have Three Hours to Kill" Meal: Crèpes at the Marché at (the former) BCE Place! (I swear they're infused with crack.)

Must-Get Festival Staffer for 2008: For the love of all that is holy, WHY is Myrocia Watamaniuk STILL not a bigtime TIFF exec?! And, even if the fest doesn't have room for her in their ranks, couldn't she just freelance as a moderator? Please? Each time I had to suffer through a poorly run post-film Q&A (I'm looking at you, Marguerite Pigott and Noah Cowan, the latter of whom didn't actually run any of the Q&As at my films this year but who continues to induce eyerolls with his fustian, prosaic and enervative use of at least one $50 word in each of his uninspired film intros) I thought of Myrocia and her breezy, blissful Q&As at HotDocs and the WWSFF. *sigh*

Must-Get Festival Must-Have for 2008: Sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

Thanks to all for reading along, and please post your own best and worst of the fest in the comments section. We love hearing from you! (And feel free to offer your feedback on the blog itself. We're totally okay with it!)

TIFF 2007

At last! The festival is over!

I know, shocking that a comment like that would come from me, right?

As I've said repeatedly during TIFF 2007, I was just too pooped to enjoy it properly, I think. So, as strange as it may sound, I'm actually quite relieved that the whole thing is done. I'm not setting my alarm for tomorrow morning, I won't be sprinting back and forth across the downtown core and I'm fairly certain that I won't be consuming peanut M&Ms as any of my three main meals for the day.

Today, though, I did all those things.

The morning air was extremely chilly (9ºC when I left home!), and I began at the Ryerson with Death Defying Acts (6/8). I'd selected this movie more for its timing than anything else, and I was sort of apprehensive about seeing it because I feared it wouldn't be compelling. Thankfully, I was wrong and quite enjoyed it despite myself. The film, as director Gillian Armstrong pointed out in her pre-film Q&A (she'd heard about Todd Haynes doing it yesterday and followed suit!), is a "what if" story rather than a biopic, and it tracks the relationship between Harry Houdini (Guy Pearce) and a Scottish psychic/con artist (Catherine Zeta-Jones). It's beautifully shot and the art direction is gorgeous, and I didn't drift into neverneverland at any point... which is saying a lot for a 9am movie on the last day of the festival.

My only issue with this particular screening was the fact that, at the end of the pre-film Q&A, the moderator told us (the audience) to stick around after the credits because there was a "50/50 chance that we might have a very special guest joining us!" Cut to everyone in the audience sitting in anticipation as what seemed like the world's longest credits rolled... only to have the lights come up and to see no one at all onstage for anything. Thanks for making us wait an extra seven minutes for a whole lotta nuthin'! Sheesh.

(Speaking of Q&As, by the way, did you know that the TIFF website has all the press conferences available to view online?)

That additional wait, plus the fact that the movie started 15 minutes late, left me precious little time to head over to the Bader for my next film. I tried to find something resembling "lunch" en route, but line-ups at assorted fast-food establishments meant I wound up eating chocolate instead.

Anyway...

I made it to the Bader with time to spare before Smiley Face (5/8) started. It's the new film from director Gregg Araki, and it's a stoner comedy. It follows a pothead (Anna Faris) over the course of one very bizarre day. It was cute, I suppose, but it didn't really do much for me.

A quick – and perhaps ill-advised – lunch of spring rolls followed before I took in film #3, the pretentious and boring L'Amour Caché, a French film that took itself so seriously it was bordering on parody. It centers on a wife and mother (Isabelle Huppert), who's tried to commit suicide a few times and who's seeing a shrink (Greta Scacchi) to uncover the reasons why. Problem is, the whole movie is told via the device of having the main character write letters that the shrink then reads... leading to dissolves into the past, strange dream-like sequences and some breaking of the fourth wall as Huppert addresses the camera directly. The framing for the film was also off, so the boom mic was visible a lot of the time. I stuck it out for half an hour and then bailed. Enough already. But the guy sitting next to me left even earlier – he didn't even make it 10 minutes before picking up his bag and walking out!

I'm delighted to say that my final film of the fest became one of my faves. Ping Pong Playa' (7/8) is a low-budget indie comedy that's a fun, feel-good ride through the world of competitive ping-pong playing. Chinese-American Chris "C-Dub" Wang (Jimmy Tsai) loves basketball and rap, but finds himself enlisted to train a bunch of misfit kids (all of whom are adorable) at his parents' ping-pong academy when his superstar brother is injured. Aside from its inherently boisterous tone and clean, slapsticky humor, the film is buoyed by terrific supporting turns from Peter Paige and Scott Lowell (of Queer as Folk fame), as a pair of rival ping pongers, and MADTV's Stephanie Weir as the league president. I loved it.

Then, friends, the fest ended for me. No more movies.

Tomorrow, I'll post the award winners and final thoughts.

Celebrity Sightings: Nope.

Roger Ebert Sightings: Ditto.

Random Factoid of the Day: I have none and I don't care.

Line Buzz: Lots and lots of great buzz on Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame, but with the caveat that it is apparently a very tough film to watch and that it will make you cry (so I was told).

TIFF 2007

Know what's SUPER-fun?

Know what makes for an excellent movie-watching experience?

Standing in line outside during a sudden rainstorm and getting soaked from the knees down (God bless my umbrella for what flimsy protection it provided during the windy downpour) and THEN sitting through a movie inside the Ryerson Theatre, where temperatures always feel like they're in the single digits.

So went my evening. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Thanks very much to those of you who expressed concern over my fatigue. I think I slept about five hours last night, which remains the unfortunate average, but I woke up with a bit of a second wind... you know, the kind that marathon runners get if they push through The Wall and continue towards the finish line. I woke up with a little unexpected energy, had a relatively healthy breakfast and lucked into catching a bus just as I was setting out to walk to my first film. A good start!

That first film of the day was the much-talked-about Boy A (6/8) which Eric saw earlier in the week. I thought it was very well-done, but I also think all the raves I'd been hearing all week raised my expectations a little too much. But I do love Peter Mullan. I will see him in anything. I want him to record a CD of bedtime stories, I love his voice that much.

I managed to have time for a delicious pasta lunch (OMG! a real meal!) en route to my second film, Todd Haynes' I'm Not There (6/8)... a film that defies description or simple encapsulation. It's being labeled as "the Bob Dylan movie," but that doesn't exactly do it justice. It's almost like an experimental film, jumping back and forth in time and between assorted vignettes about characters possessing Dylan-esque traits. The cast includes Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere and Cate Blanchett (all of whom embody one of the "Dylans" at some point), and the movie is easily one of the prettiest (visually) I've seen at TIFF this year.

Interestingly, I'm Not There also featured a first for me at TIFF: a Q&A before the movie. Seems Haynes had to jet so, rather than not do one at all, he and TIFF CEO Piers Handling fielded questions before the film rolled. Interesting, and surprisingly effective, given that no one there had actually seen the movie yet.

A ticket exchange and quick meal at McDonald's (I know, I know) followed, and then it was time for my annual sit-down with my friend from Washington, DC, where we compare notes and talk movies for a couple of hours... always at Starbucks at the Manulife Centre. I should point out that this is the same lanyard-sporting friend I met way back in 2002, just because we sat next to each other at a screening and chatted. See? Make friends at TIFF!

Last up was Son of Rambow (5/8), before which was the aforementioned drenching rain. Nothing like sitting in a theater full of 1200 wet people and their wet umbrellas! I'm sure some of the more soaked individuals suffered from mild hypothermia as a result of the situation. The movie itself wasn't quite as funny or charming as I'd hoped it would be. The story centers on a couple of British boys in the 1980s, who decide to make their own Rambo film... and, while the concept is ripe for humor, it felt a little like Wes Anderson Lite to me. As in, quirky for quirky's sake. Don't get me wrong, it was a very nice little movie, it just didn't wow me. It was also an interesting juxtaposition to Boy A, which contains some of the same elements with vaaaaastly different results.

I also ran into my friend Angela at the screening. I hadn't seen her at all during TIFF, so we did a quick recap of what we'd each seen. She said she saw one really crappy movie.

"Which one?" I asked.

"Nothing is Private."

A quick but extremely enthusiastic dissection of the film (and how much it sucked) followed, with me citing many of the things Eric, Dan and I discussed after we suffered through it.

Only one more day to go... and that gives me solace.

Celebrity Sightings: Todd Haynes.

Roger Ebert Sightings: I believe Roger has left the building.

Random Factoid of the Day: I'm hating the "random factoid" entry. It will be gone for TIFF 2008.

Weather For Tomorrow: Deeeeliciously chilly! Sunny with a high of only 15ºC!

Line Buzz: Still more raves for Fados, some good buzz on Dans ma vie and Blind.

TIFF 2007