The Toronto film festival isn't nearly as homey or sweet as the telluride festival. But it's very nicely run and active. Go Leafs.

- The Magic Flute
Kenneth Branagh's fanciful adaptation of the opera, in opera form. The music was beautiful and the singing amazing. The story was fun and funny and whimsically adapted as set in world war one style trenches. The cinematography looked beautiful at times, but it was projected in a Christie digital projector, which has unpleasantly visible pixels (screen door effect) and in this particular screening at least, very bad quantization and noise in the dark regions, which was bad enough to be distracting. Digital projectors are a disappointment in large venues compared to film.

- 10 Canoes
An offscreen aboriginal in the present narrates a story of ancient ancestors going on a hunt to collect geese and eggs from the swamp and telling a story of their ancient ancestors meant to teach how to live right. All past and past - past ancestors spoke in aboriginal, yet the story came across, as did lessons on aboriginal skills in building canoes, hunting, and surviving in swamps. With entirely believable characters, beautiful scenery, and very funny.

- Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (excellent)
Sold out, some people waiting on line for last minute tickets for 9 hours managed to get in. We saw Borat himself heading out to the stage before coming home. Probably the most anticipated screening in the festival.

The first try failed due to technical problems with the projector. The second try was more successful, and was absolutely hilarious. Probably the first time I've found a highly anticipated movie to exceed even the best expectations. While much of the schticks are replays of concepts already tested in the BBC and HBO series, these are almost all premium and tied together with a story about going across America. Truly some of the funniest moments on film. Children do not think bears are good ice cream vendors.

- To Get to Heaven First You Have To Die (very good)
Tajik movie about a young man's quest to reach manhood. With his nose as his cherry, he stalks every pretty woman he sees, some pleasant, some to far more complexity than he bargained for. Cute, slowly paced, but charming and engaging.

- Lights in the Dusk
A very slow Finish movie about a not very lovable looser's inability to overcome his inadequacies. His only assets are inextinguishable hope and the pity of his few friends, of which only the latter has much value.

- Bamako
A mock trial between the World Bank and the people of Africa with some very stirring and passionate speeches about the evils of neolibralism and the consequences of privatization and some loosely related story lines that are woven back and forth. Ultimately, unfortunately for the material, the speeches don't do the subject justice and the story line isn't cohesive enough to be compelling.

-The Way I Spent the End of the World
A funny, lively Romanian movie about the fall of Ceausecscu. Cute and very interesting. Very sparsely edited so that it was hard, at times, to follow the story, but it all held together in the end. The use of child actors in Eastern European films is interesting and compelling, unlike US movies which make them so saccharine snarky you want to either puke on them or kill them. These are kids one could believe as kids and actually enjoy spending time with.

- Palimpsest
A polish movie about a cop trying to find out who killed a good friend of his. The scenery is dark and complex, the story hard to follow but compelling and suspenseful. The lead is the narrative view, and he becomes more and more obviously compromised as a rational observer. Unfortunately the conclusion fails to deliver on the audience's work in trying to understand the plot and apparently disconnected events that build up to the conclusion.

- Retrieval
Another Polish movie, this about a young man's assumption of responsibility for a refugee Ukrainian woman and her child. His skills as a boxer are his entree into the world of petty thugs, and he ultimately does well, despite a sterling conscious that seems always about to prove his undoing. The conclusion seemed abrupt and left the story in a very unsatisfactory state, sadly given that the characters are well developed through the film and go through a believable transformation. Like Palimpsest, one can't help thinking that the movie was on the verge of being so much more than it came out as.