Technical difficulties

The ticketholders line outside Toronto's Ryerson Theater for last night's sold-out midnight screening of Borat snaked around the block; the rush line, for people hoping to snag the seats of no-shows, was even longer.

The mood inside the auditorium could best be described as ebullient anticipation: When Sacha Baron Cohen (in character as Borat Sagdiyev, a journalist from the state-run TV network of Kazakhstan) took the stage to introduce the film, the cheers were so loud you could only make out every other word he said.

The movie itself, about Barat's trip to the U.S. to learn the ways of America and improve his own country, appears to be utterly hilarious and endlessly offensive. I say "appears" because 15 minutes in, the image on the screen stuttered and then went blank. The house lights came up and the crowd grumbled and moaned, loudly but politely (this is, after all, Canada), then waited for the movie to restart.

As the wait stretched on and on, Michael Moore (who happened to be attending the screening) and Borat director Larry Charles came onstage to take questions, pose for pictures with audience members and help pass the time.

Cohen, who had already left the auditorium, made a hasty return and launched into what was supposed to have been his post-screening Q&A. Alas, it was all for naught: At 1:45 a.m., festival organizers announced the projector could not be revived and sent everyone home, promising to show the movie again the next day, same time, different theater.

Those first 15 minutes, however, were killer funny.

And they're off

I'm normally not a fan of filmed monologues or one-man shows, but This Filthy World, the first movie I saw at the Toronto Film Festival today, played as fast and funny as a normal plot-driven comedy. It helps that John Waters is such a witty and engaging raconteur, whether he's talking about the making of his own movies ("When my father saw A Dirty Shame, he told me `It was pretty funny. I hope I never see it again.'"), doling out dating tips ("If you go home with someone and they don't have books, don't [have sex with] them. And DVDs don't count.") or explaining why he's against capital punishment ("We all have bad nights.")

University of Miami grad Jeff Garlin, best known for playing Larry David's agent on HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm, directs the movie plainly -  there's an occasional cutaway to the audience, but it's mostly just Waters talking onstage - which could tax the patience of viewers not on Waters' wavelength. Me, I sat through the entire 86 minutes with a fat smile on my face.

The second film of the day resulted in my first festival walkout (it won't be the last). The Australian drama 2:37 details a day in the life of an ordinary high school that ends with the suicide of one of its students. Writer-director Murali K. Thalluri, who is a mere 20 years old, is an obvious fan of Gus Van Sant's Elephant, cribbing that film's long, uninterrupted takes and circular narrative structure, where scenes play out more than once from the point of view of different characters.

But 30 minutes in, the movie just felt like a collection of cliches - the popular jock, the closeted gay loner, the pretty prom-queen type - that were coalescing into something both familiar and dull. So I bailed and headed for After the Wedding, Danish director Susanne Bier's sudsy but utterly engrossing melodrama about a man who travels to Copenhagen to secure funds to save a Bombay orphanage and gets snared in a domestic dilemma that makes it difficult, if not impossible, for him to stay focused on his task.

While not as effective as Bier's previous film, Brothers, After the Wedding is so well-acted and emotionally raw that its plentiful contrivances didn't bother me. One of the great things about this festival is that minutes after seeing a heavy tearjerker, you can completely changes gears with a nutty, off-the-wall monster movie like The Host, a Korean horror-comedy about a family's attempt to rescue a little girl from the giant creature (a cross between a salamander and a T-rex) that stole her away to its lair.

The monster, created in part by Peter Jackson's New Zealand special effects house Weta Workshop, is fantastic, and director Bong Joon-ho fearlessly changes moods and tones from scene to scene, so the movie is constantly running off in unexpected directions. King and the Clown, which was billed as the highest-grossing film in South Korea's history, moved way too slowly for my tastes (it took 35 minutes for the titular king to make his appearance, and the clown just wasn't that funny), so I made a quiet exit and snuck in for a second viewing of Pedro Almodovar's Volver, which isn't quite on par with his last two pictures (Talk to Her and Bad Education), but is still a wonderful piece of storytelling, passionate and heartfelt and blessed by what may be Penelope Cruz's best performance ever.

My first celebrity sighting of the festival happened to be Almodovar himself, standing in the lobby of the Four Seasons hotel this afternoon, chatting with what appeared to be a squad of publicists. The rich and famous won't start arriving for real until the weekend: Brad Pitt, Jennifer Lopez, Heath Ledger, Jude Law, Sigourney Weaver, Sean Penn, Kate Winslet, James Gandolfini, Sharon Stone, Russell Crowe, Jessica Lange, Zach Braff, Christian Bale, Forest Whitaker, Reese Witherspoon, Tim Robbins, Parker Posey, Rachel Weisz, Sandra Bullock, Michael Moore, Penelope Cruz and many, many others are attending this year's festival, turning the city into paparazzi heaven for the next 10 days.

For now, though, it's one more movie for me - a midnight show, although one I've been looking forward to for quite some time.

 

Blame Canada

Sleep deprivation is one of the few drawbacks to the Toronto International Film Festival, which kicks off tomorrow. Screenings start at 8:30 a.m. and sometimes run as late as 1 or 2 a.m.. Throw in interviews, press conferences, dinners and the occasional party, and your pillow soon starts feeling like that old friend you always think of fondly and wish you could see more often, if only you had the time. 

Not that I'm complaining, mind you. I arrived in Toronto today and spent much of the afternoon poring over the festival's 440-page program book, drawing up a dream list of every movie I'd like to see (total count: 82), then consulting the screening schedule to see which ones I will physically be able to catch without cloning myself (39 of them).

That schedule changes daily once the festival begins, the movies start to show and the buzz starts circulating. Starting tomorrow, I'll be posting daily festival dispatches about what I've seen and what I'm hearing here. Since I'll be spending so much time sitting in dark movie theaters over the next 10 days, I've also chosen this year's festival as the perfect time to finally quit smoking. Extreme crankiness and irritability is certain to set in any minute now: Here's hoping the movies I'm watching will help ease the pain.