Complete madness at tonight's screening of SPL, with a late-night talent departure that could have gone wrong in so many ways but worked out all right, mostly due to the patience and politeness of the Toronto fans. 

Also, having seen The Wayward Cloud, I will never be able to look at watermelons in quite the same way again.  It's as if someone mixed up footage from three different projects - a slow art house piece, a musical and a making-of documentary for a porn film - and spliced it all together in the editing room.  I'm not sure if that's a recommendation, but it did have some seriously funny moments.

I've hit that point in the festival where it seems completely normal to spend all day either watching movies, talking about movies, or helping to show movies.  Real life is intruding a day early, since I'm cancelling my morning movie plans to attend a funeral.  Sympathy for Lady Vengenance takes a back-seat to helping a friend out with a relative's death, I'm afraid.

Home between screenings because I left that most essential piece of festival equipment - the cellphone - at home before heading out to an 11:30 a.m. Short Cuts selection.  Next up is a Midnight Movies documentary at 2:45, The Notorious Betty Page at 5 pm, The Wayward Cloud at 8 pm and a volunteer shift starting at 10 pm.  Whee!

There are over 200 films at this year's film festival.  Even seeing ten a day, you'd never get through them all.  So what did I do this morning?

I went to a repeat screening of The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes.

In my defense, I did love the film the first time around, and big-screen showings of Quay Brothers films are rare treats. 

I also got a chance to attend the Mavericks session with Nick Park, the animation genius behind the Wallace and Gromit characters.  Hearing about his early adventures making claymation shorts in his parent's garage was a real treat.

We had a full house for tonight's Midnight screening of The Great Yokai War.  Although I still find it odd to think of the director behind Ichi the Killer doing children's fables, there's no question that Takeshi Miiake has a fantastic imagination and the skills to bring his vision to life.

The volunteer trailer fanfare music has been replaced by Twisted Sister, compliments of tonight's Midnight Madness screening, Metal: A Headbanger's Journey.  A tight documentary exploring the history and roots of one of the most maligned and under-appreciated musical genres, it got an enthusiastic two-devil horns up from the audience.

It was a crazy day at the Ryerson, and it seems that our late-night metal fans were the best behaved of the bunch.  At least we got Gretchen Moll into her limo before the serious swarming started.

I'm so tired that I've begun randomly replacing words as I speak.  My brain will think volunteers, and my mouth will spit out volkswagon.  Good-natured bunch that they are, the other volunteers haven't been laughing about it, at least not openly.

In lieu of sleep, films.  I've seen a pack of great movies over the past two days, including Dear Wendy, Everything is Illuminated and Shooting Dogs, a powerful film about the Rwandan genocide that is both difficult to sit through and worth every second. 

"Lock and load" is the process of moving people, usually actors or directors, through the waiting crowd into or out of the theatre during the festival.  It looks a bit like a Kumbaya moment, with a half-dozen or more volunteers linking arms to form a human barricade, but it's pretty effective - provided the person in question actually stays inside the protected space, rather than wandering off on their own, as one A-list actor did last night.  Poor fellow seemed a bit traumatized after being mobbed by a hundred or so screaming fans with just the film's publicist and one TIFF employee to help protect him.

Lock and load is also a popular volunteer task, since it does involve getting to see celebrities from about two feet away, however briefly.  You can't collect autographs or take photos, but you can confirm that, yes, Bono looks just like you'd expect him too, Elijah Wood's eyes are really that blue, Naomi Watts is really that pretty and Eva Longoria is actually much tinier than seems possible (her security staff probably double as windbreakers!). 

Of course, you have to be careful that your brushes with celebrity don't get too close, as was the case for an unnamed Ryerson team member who accidentally walked in on another A-list star in an unlocked bathroom stall.  Whoops!

Last night's screening for Bangkok Loco was the easiest yet, with the director slipping into the theatre unnoticed while the crowd swelled around the departing Mr. Wood post-Everything Is Illuminated. The film itself was awesomely surreal and gorgeously shot, and the crowd was buzzing as they headed out.  The director, Pornchai Hongrattanaporn, also had the best outfit I've seen thus far at the festival, bar none.

There's a rumor floating around that an audience member actually threw up during the screening of Sunday's MM flick, Isolation.  I don't recall the scent of vomit hanging around the theatre, but I could almost believe it, given the gruesome realism of the film's mutant bovine effects.

In unrelated news, I have the fanfare music from the NBC/Universal volunteer appreciation trailer stuck in my head.  This can't be a good sign.

Another late-night entry: either my body is adjusting to the schedule shift or I'm integrating the hallucinations nicely into my regularly-scheduled reality.  Either way, tonight's Midnight volunteer shift went very smoothly, although I did manage to arrive just a bit too late for the Breakfast on Pluto red carpet sightings.  The crowd really enjoyed Evil Aliens, a classic Midnight selection featuring, well, evil aliens.  And a combine harvester.  Half the budget most likely went to fake blood and body parts.

Just a couple of screenings today, including Shark in the Head, a quiet but impressive Czech film about an elderly man with schizophrenia.  I managed to get turned away from the Rush line for press/industry screenings of Tideland not just once, but twice within the same afternoon!  (volunteer film vouchers are good for industry as well as public screenings, which comes in handy when you're trying to see films that have already gone rush).

On the plus side, I was able to get access to the press/industry screening for The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, the latest feature film from the Brothers Quay.  Simply astonishing.  Alas, I am too tired to do it any better justice this evening!

Quick update before I pass out for the night - as usual, things at the festival move so quickly that it's hard to get it all down in writing. 

Opening night went fairly well - things looked tense for a little while, since a longer-than-anticipated red carpet with the stars & director of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang almost created a VIP cross-over with Sarah Silverman of the Midnight screening, Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic. Still, the theatre team managed to pull it off with just a half-hour delay in our last screening, and I added Robert Downey Jr, Val Kilmer, Shane Black and of course Ms. Silverman to my list of up-close sightings while doing crowd control. 

Tonight's shift went as smoothly as the bad guys went down during the midnight film, Banlieu 13.  From the excitement of the crowd as they headed out, it sounds like the film was a success.

I also managed to fit in a couple of screenings: the press preview of Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride, Shanghai Dreams and the premiere of Thank You For Smoking, a biting take on the character of a tobacco lobbyist.  All fantastic, I should add (in lieu of a proper review).  Sadly, I think I'm going to have to skip out on my plans for an 8:30 a.m. screening tomorrow - I just can't get by on four hours sleep like I used too!

Taking a cue from Jason Reitman's blog, I figured that it would be helpful to indicate why I've been asked to keep this blog.

I've been volunteering with the TIFF for 6 years now. This year, as last, I'm the volunteer captain for the Midnight Madness screenings (yes, all 10 days). 

Captains, in TIFF parlance, are experienced volunteers who take responsibility for making sure that the rest of the volunteers on a shift know what they're supposed to be doing and are happy about those assignments. We also function as a go-between for the volunteers and the theatre reps, handle some paperwork and wear slightly goofy-looking headsets.

The shifts run until 3 am, making sleep dep a prominent feature of my TIFF experience, but they're also, in my biased opinion, the best volunteer gig at the festival.  The MM crowds are always fun, off-beat, enthusiastic and - surprisingly, given their love of fake blood and ultraviolence - really well-behaved. 

My final pre-festival shift was yesterday morning, helping to input volunteer cancellations into the database and calling around for replacements. Every time I visit the volunteer office, I find myself even more in awe of the abilities shown by Mbabazi, Chris M and the rest of the TIFF volunteer team staff in keeping the whole behind-the-scenes operation running. Not only do they manage to oversee 10 days of chaos (and months of prepatory madness), but they mostly keep a smile on their faces while they do so - and even remember a shocking number of volunteer names in the process! (considering there are hundreds of volunteers each year, that's pretty impressive...)

After my shift, I darted over to the Ryerson venue, home to all but one of the Midnight Madness shifts, where we ran through walkie procedures and line management. The first few nights are usually rocky, especially since Ryerson is still a pretty new venue, and this year we're starting off with a pair of galas, including a red carpet arrival for Robert Downey Jr. Nothing like diving straight into the deep end...

The film-watching aspect of my festival started off with a bang this morning at the press & industry screening of The Devil and Daniel Johnson, a fantastic look at the life and career of troubled musician and artist Daniel Johnson (as you might have guessed from the title). Johnson has struggled with manic depression throughout his life, and the documentary delved into issues of creativity, madness and the toll on the people around him with sensitivity, humor and grace. Highly recommended, especially for the unconventional interview with a member of the Butthole Surfers (although folks with a dentist phobia might not enjoy it so much...)

Just two more days until the start of the festival and I am feeling woefully unprepared!  By this time last year, I'd prepared a color-blocked schedule ranking every film I wanted to catch during the TIFF, complete with day-by-day schedules and alternate viewing times for my top picks, to be updated every evening after my last shift based on what I did (or didn't!) get to see that day.

This year, I'm taking a different approach: serendipity.  One of the most exciting things about the TIFF is the opportunity to experience films that I might otherwise never stumble across, and taking an unplanned approach to screenings pushes that concept to the limit. 

As always, I'm going to pack in as much Canadian cinema as I can manage (I'm especially looking forward to <a href="http://www.e.bell.ca/filmfest/2005/films_description.asp?id=91" target="new">Eve and the Fire Horse</A> and <a href="http://www.e.bell.ca/filmfest/2005/films_description.asp?id=47" target="new">The Cabin Movie</A>) and do my best to steer clear of anything that has already secured decent distribution (except for ones I'm especially excited about, like <a href="http://www.e.bell.ca/filmfest/2005/films_description.asp?id=282" target="new">The Corpse Bride</A>).  But beyond that, anything goes!

As for volunteering, I've signed up again to captain the volunteer crew for the Midnight Madness shifts, all 10 nights of the festival.  Another sleep-deprived TIFF for me!