If you (like me) saw Bruce McDonald's new film, The Tracey Fragments, at the Toronto International Film Festival, then you (like me) might also be of the opinion that the film sucked. We can get into critical responses on McDonald's film, which opens today at the Royal, in a minute - but for the time being, let it never be said that McDonald isn't giving the naysayers the ultimate opportunity to do him one better.

To coincide with the nation-wide release of the highly experimental Tracey Fragments (which stars hottie Haligonian up-and-comer Ellen Page), McDonald has made the complete collection of raw footage from the shooting of the film available on the Tracey Fragments web site, thetraceyfragments.com. The challenge? Do with the film what you will.

The project is called Tracey Re-Fragmented, and like the film itself, it's a journey into the continued plasticity and destructability of the filmed (and/or videotaped) image in the YouTube Decade.

It's a film festival about mental health, run out of the mental health hospital that was once so memorably featured in Timothy Findley's insane-o-palooza, Headhunter. The only thing missing from the Rendezvous with Madness picture is actually running the festival during Hallowe'en. Instead, you'll have to wait until November 8 to begin viewing this year's lineup of short and feature films from all over the world.

I know we're supposed to call it the CAMH now instead of the Queen Street Mental Hospital, but then again, Rendezvous with Madness - which is run out of the CAMH and whose charter is to program films touching on mental health and addiction - is using the "insanely good films" pun in all its promotional materials this year. So maybe the PC boundaries are finally slipping a bit.

Regardless, Rendezvous (which makes use of the CAMH's in-house theatre for screenings, and enlists staff volunteers from the Centre's patients) is one of the most exciting and unique festivals in our already festival-glutted city.

The festival kicks off next Thursday, November 8th with its gala presentation of Carl Bessai's feature film Normal, recently featured at the Toronto Internaional Film Festival. The film stars Carrie Anne Moss and Canadian film standby Callum Keith Rennie among an ensemble cast of people whose lives are rent by the death of a 16-year-old basketball star.

The closing night gala for this year's Toronto After Dark film festival is just a night away, but the flick that really drew my eye in this week's lineup was Shinya Tsukamoto's ode to J-horror, Nightmare Detective. The film screened tonight at the Bloor Cinema.

The festival's international programmer, Todd Brown, introduced the film, starting by chiding anyone in the audience who had failed to take in last night's screening of Alone - which, at almost the exact same moment it was screening here in Toronto, was winning a pantload of awards down at the L.A. Screamfest. He told everyone who had missed the Thai conjoined twins horror movie to slap themselves.

(I slapped myself.)

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.