The Toronto After Dark film festival opened tonight with its gala presentation of Jim Mickle's zombie apocalypse film, Mulberry Street. Like a slew of recent "zombie" pictures, Mulberry Street isn't about actual zombies at all - hello, they're supposed to be undead.

Instead, Mulberry Street essays yet another tale of a body-and-mind-warping plague sweeping across civilization and creating havoc. In this case, the plague turns people into rats.

When the grim realities of post-undergrad "real life" hit me square between the eyes ten years ago, I did like many middle class twentysomething white boys and entered the church of Tony Robbins. Hey, we all need our messiahs, and being generally disinterested in Jesus and Superman (though the latter has subsequently changed), I went for the motivational speaker with the big voice and the even bigger hands.

Robbins coined the concept of "life coaching" about two clean decades before it became a corporate buzzword that hovers nimbus-like around my day-to-day office existence to this very day. And to leave my "too cool for this" street cred at the door for a minute, a lot of his techniques - from the now-antiquated Personal Power tape program - genuinely helped dig me out of a substantially difficult time in my life.

I'm not much for buzzwords and lingo, but good advice is good advice, and Robbins has plenty - along with an almost stunning quantity of enthusiasm. My interest in seeing Robbins speak in Toronto today was largely centered around getting a chance to evaluate whether the package I had bought so cleanly into ten years ago, was still all I had cracked it up to be.

Attention all Gryffindors, Ravenclaws, Hufflepuffs, Slytherins, Marauders, Death Eaters, Ministry officials, house elves, goblin bankers, Quidditch teams, people in pointed hats, and even the well-informed muggle: Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling is coming to Toronto.

The Globe is reporting that Rowling will make her only Canadian visit in support of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (a novel in dire, dire need of publicity) on October 23rd at the Wintergarden Theatre. Raincoast Books, who publish the Canadian editions of the Harry Potter series, is hosting the event.

To avoid what would almost certainly be a ticket-buying riot, there will be no tickets for sale; seats for the all-ages event will only be available through random draws and via libraries and school boards. Ten double-passes will be awarded daily starting today and running through September 28 on the Raincoast web site, at raincoast.com/harrypotter.

You're allowed to enter once a day until the end of the contest, so it's time for the Potter-faithful to start showing how much damage an internet-based fan culture can do to a web server when they really, really want something.

On Saturday afternoon, the Toronto International Film Festival handed out its awards, bestowing honours on the usual perplexing array of films from around the world that otherwise spent their time at the festival this year well below the public's radar.

The public's radar, on the other hand, was front-and-centre for the Cadillac People's Choice Award, the founding father of all those godforsaken "Be an original" ads that preceded the feature films this year ("Death Shark!" "Dance Fight!"). First place in the popularity contest goes to David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises, with a runner-up prize to Jason Reitman's brilliant Juno.

blogTO's film crew was all over the fest this year with their coverage. Read on to find out what we picked as the best of the festival.

Forget parties, forget closing night galas; the Toronto International Film Festival truly comes to its rousing close at the Ryerson Theatre with the final Midnight Madness screening. Songs were sung, beach balls were bounced, we "arrrrrrh"ed our way through the anti-piracy card for the very last time, and rum was occasionally imbibed at the Rye-high tonight, before Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury's sick pregno-horror gore-fest À l'intérieur hit us square in the eyeballs.

The filmmakers are French, and friends of last year's closing filmmaker, Kim Chapiron (who brought us Sheitan). There's no two ways about it: if their horror movies are to be believed, the French are a deeply disturbed people.

Oddly enough, DAINIPPONJIN is probably the best overall film screened at Midnight Madness this year - but that doesn't make it the best Midnight Madness film. Every year, the programme will screen a movie that is in fact above its station (last year it was Princess). Midnight films live and die on over-the-top antics and their geek-cool cred, but rarely can they be mistaken for "real" movies.

With DAINIPPONJIN, I'm not so sure. The flick is a subtle and sharp-minded comedy along the lines of Beat Takeshi's work (Takeshi is in the main body of the festival this year with Glory to the Filmmaker). DAINIPPONJIN is hilarious, a story of a low-key shlubb whose "job" is to serve Japan as a local superhero. Daisato (Hitoshi Matsumoto, who also directed) is having a documentary made about him, in which he describes his seemingly menial existence, while occasionally making detours to power plants to be "powered up" into a gigantic, Hulk-style monster-slayer in purple underwear.

It's a zesty piece of filmmaking, I'm just not sure it's right for this programme.