I have learned the art of party crashing having crashed 3 parties this year. OK, so it's a bit easier in my case because I have friends on the inside, but ... indeed ... they too have not been officially invited and yet, still magically show up to drink and dine on hors d'eouvres.

As a supplementary skill I've learned as a result, is the art of bullshit. And I don't mean bullshit as in, "Do you know who I am?" because that never works. More like, "I sent my RSVP in late/last minute, that could be why I'm not on the list." Bat the eyes and smile (for the ladies). For guys, show up talking on your cellphone looking like you're talking to someone who couldn't make it to the party but that you're meeting someone inside. This also works for the ladies who refuse to use their feminine wiles in this case.

I've also learned/ realized that I'm now addicted to coffee thanks to the Starbucks promotion team walking around with coffee canisters strapped to their backs.

Black Sun is not your typical "talking head" documentary. Not even once do we see the film's subject. Rather, first-time director Gary Tarn provides images of people and places that are often hazy, sometimes kaleidoscopic while Hughes de Montalembert narrates his life post-blindness. The result is a fascinating, if sometimes uneven, addition to the genre.

De Montalembert tells us that when he had sight he didn't know any blind people, at least not socially, and asks, "Where are the blind people?" His answer is, "Society has dumped them into a dark pit," and this film pulls the audience into that pit, the mind of a person robbed of sight, though it is not as dark as we would imagine.

Prepare yourself for a rare indulgence - a film that's 85 minutes of pure, adrenalin-pumping, permenently-affixed-grin FUN that doesn't kowtow to Hollywood conventions. Wallace and Gromit's first full-length feature is a cracking rush of blood to the spine that leaves you tingling with pleasure from the sheer enjoyment of it all.

For the uninitiated, Wallace and Gromit are a man and dog claymation duo who first appeared in the short film A Grand Day Out (1989). It introduced audiences to Wallace, a sweater-wearing, cheese-loving, inventor of Rube-Goldberg contraptions, and Gromit, an intelligent pooch who spends most of his time extracting Wallace from complex but hilarious situations.

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I was a wordy kid. There are hilarious videotapes of me before the age of ten where I am spouting off full-throttled verbiage with the alacrity of Alex Trebek. Still, the key to every single thing that I said before I turned twelve is a matter of style over substance: the words might have been big, but they were still expressing the mental space of a child.

The big problem when adults write for children (in any medium) is the enormous temptation to write the youngsters with the presence of mind of grown-ups. This temptation was apparently too much for Twelve and Holding's screenwriter, Anthony S. Cipriano, who has created a trio of 12-year-olds who speak and behave less like 12-year-olds than any 12-year-olds I've ever met. We get it: it's supposed to be a movie about kids, for adults, and thereby, Cipriano is just using the kids as cyphers to get his meaning across. The only problem with that is that we as an audience just can't believe it.

Title aside, there's very little sympathy at play for Lee Geum-ja (Lee Yeong-ae), the heroine of Sympathy for Lady Vengeance; if anything, the film is fairly resolute in its unwillingness to show revenge as having any kind of cleansing, reaffirming effect. It's just more violence, and ultimately pointless. That the various characters in the film engage in vengeance with varying levels of glee (which we, as an audience, are expected to share to the same varying degrees), is fairly beside the point. Geum-ja never finds her absolution, so neither should we.

Douches Froides is one of the most clumsily-made films I've ever seen at the Toronto International Film Festival. Usually, when a fest film is bad, it's at least bad in an interesting way; Froides is anything but. It's so unbelievably bland that one becomes mystified upon contemplating why anyone would have made this movie in the first place. It's drab, boring, and ultimately pointless. It's an after-school special with the goofy charm taken out, and moderate nudity put in. No, on second thought, it's not even that good.

Of course, it had to be raining in Toronto friday, as we braced ourselves for The Toronto International Film Festival's final weekend, and a return to our normal lives we've been so successfully avoiding.

This is absolutely depressing

Among the volunteer's who have been working hard every night during the gala screenings, mid-week brought upon the realization that in all the velcro backing and popcorn sweeping, many of us had wallets full of pink slips we'd yet to use to get in to actual MOVIES at the various theatres around the city. Realizing you have extra and giving them away to friends with time on their hands may not be as good as actually going to screenings, but hey, it's good to help out your friends. This is all about community.

We haven't been alone in devoting overwhelming page real estate to the festival. All the usual suspects - the Globe, the Star, the Post, Now, Eye, Dose - have all been in on the act, as have a number of perhaps lesser well known blogs and other online media outfits.

Of course, what separates the big media players from the blogs, or shall we say citizen journalism is not only money and resources (people, equipment etcetera) but perhaps most importantly access. We here at blogTO applied for media accreditation to this year's TIFF and were denied. Upon appeal, we even made note that the White House - a conservative bastion some might say - have granted bloggers media access, so why not a supposedly forward thinking and culture-friendly organization like the Toronto International Film Festival? Upon further review, our application was again refused. A terse form letter played the role of explanation.

As noted during the introduction of the film, In Her Shoes is not the project that springs to mind when one thinks of Curtis Hansen (who made the fantastic L.A. Confidential). Because Hansen found relevance and importance in the questions presented in the script, his engagement with the characters brought a level of sincerity and attention not often found in works in this genre (which I would describe as a comedic family drama).

There's a startlingly beautiful moment in The Notorious Bettie Page, where Bettie is alone in the woods with a photographer for one of her frequent bikini modelling shoots, and mentions that she's been thinking that there's no real reason why she should be keeping the bathing suit on at all. With typical carefree immodesty, Bettie doffs her top and then her bottom and stands up out of the foliage, facing the photographer head-on, resplendent in her natural beauty looking for all the world like a goddess of feminine empowerment. The photographer blushes and gently reprimands her. He directs her to turn away from the camera. "We can't show... that," he admonishes. He can't even bring himself to say the word "vagina," let alone photograph one.

Little Athens is a film that has seemed to slip underneath the radar of most critics and subsequently most festival goers. When I saw this film on Monday afternoon the theatre was half empty. Shameful. This is an absolutely brilliant film - one that needs to be seen by as many people as possible. Toronto, you have a chance to redeem yourself as Little Athens screens tonight at 9 PM at Varsity Cinema.

After I saw Little Athens I quickly logged on to IMDB.com to see what others were saying about it. Not a single vote was posted. Three days later, there are 31 votes...and Little Athens holds a user rating of 8.5 out of 10! It is easily the best film I have seen at the festival thus far; and I am hoping that some distributor has enough sense to get this puppy into theatres as soon as possible.

I'm so glad I didn't.

For fans of Egoyan's work, or dare I say it for fans of quality films in general, you won't be disappointed. Aside from perhaps Capote this is the best film I've seen all week. And the viewing was double the fun because Egoyan himself showed up to introduce it and take part in the Q&A afterwards.

Hyun-Jung gets dumped by her longtime boyfriend only to quickly marry a gentleman who has pursued her relentlessly. But what exactly is the reason she married him for? Because she needed the attention he was willing to give her? To quiet the worries of her family? Does she actually love him, or was it just so she wouldn't end up alone? While Hyun-Jung makes the right decisions for herself at the time, her short-sightedness soon catches up in sacrifices, lies and selfishness.

Lucid must have seemed like a great idea at the screenwriting stage. As a finished film, it shows one of those classic disconnects between theory and practice (pre-production and production). The film seems to be predicated upon the belief that the audience cannot possibly guess its "twist" before the film deigns to tell us; more accurately, it is probably founded on the assumption that its audience will take everything that is put on screen at face value, simply by virtue of that it is on screen. That's a pretty massive error in judgment. The only way to really hide in plain sight like this is to make sure that what you're putting on screen makes absolute logical sense, so that we can't possibly guess that what we're seeing might not be real... and unfortunately, there are a few too many elements of Lucid that scream "TWIST!!!" long before the film gets around to admitting to it.