On this week's podcast, I catch up with some of the directors at The Toronto International Film Festival. Halifax's Chaz Thorne drops by to talk about Just Buried and Poor Boy's Game.

Also on this week's podcast:
* Director of This Beautiful City, Ed Gass-Donnelley talks about improv and shooting in Toronto's Queen West.
* An interview with Hollywood Chinese director Arthur Dong and legendary actress Nancy Kwan


Other ways to get the podcast:

Listen | Download the podcast
iTunes | Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes
Yahoo | Subscribe to the moviesTO podcast through Yahoo
RSS | Add the moviesTO podcast feed to your RSS Reader
Search | Search the audio on Podzinger

I'm feeling the burn. Another six films today brings the total up to 19 since the start of the festival, and these late late nights at the Ryerson are starting to wear on me.

The Sunday night Midnight Madness is where the rubber really starts to hit the road in terms of your personal fatigue, especially when it's the fourth Midnight in a row with no sign of stopping. After the decadence of the Mother of Tears opening and the zombie zaniness last night, Sunday night is time to settle down with some quality craziness (Black Sheep premiered in this slot last year) and try to ignore the fact that your left ass cheek has given up the ghost and gone permanently numb.

As such, Colin Geddes programmed Japanese single-name filmmaker Sori's animé spectacular Vexille as the antidote for the Sunday night blues, and I'm grateful for that. It's a gorgeous and slick piece of animated filmmaking, with enough juice behind the storyline to keep even the very tired sitting forward in their balcony seats.

My childhood memories of Genghis Khan were, for the most part, fueled by those popular and grossly misinterpreted images of a stoic, bloodthirsty warlord, often standing between mounds of freshly decapitated heads in the sunset. Silly I admit that even now and then, my wandering perceptions of the great Mongolian ruler could look a lot like something straight off the pulpy covers of Canon the Barbarian. Forgive me, reader, I was a sponge of popular culture.

Mongol is an epically scaled Euroasian co-production made in Germany, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Mongolia. The story focuses on the early years of Khan's life, from a nine year old boy to a man played with focused calmness and resolve by the charismatic Japanese star Tadanobu Asano (Ichi the Killer, Last Life in the Universe). While the film does contain some grandly scoped scenes of violent sword warfare (don't go in expecting the ludicrous mayhem of 300 however), for much of its running time, we instead get a love story and a humanized look at the would-become Mongolian emperor, who would eventually go on to conquer China and half the world.

A look at the news and events surrounding the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival, and a very quick look at one Canadian short film every day.

Day Four

It seems like everyone in this city steps up their game when the Toronto International Film Festival rolls around. And I do mean everyone. The buskers on the corner of Bay and Bloor have two amps, two guitars, a bass, a flute, and a drum kit. Sure, there are buskers like this all around the city during the rest of the year, but rarely do you see a full band playing Journey covers on one of the busiest corners in Toronto. And rarely do you see a crowd of fifty to a hundred people just sitting around on the sidewalk listening to the band play a Stevie Wonder song.

Before I begin, a public service announcement to the women of Toronto: wearing enormous amounts of perfume to a film festival screening is really, really obnoxious. I know you consider perfume to be a legitimate part of your cosmetics routine, but it's time to reconsider the lineup.

On to the zombies:

The undead freaks were out in force at the Ryerson Theatre for the world premiere screening of George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead. The ticket-holders line stretched so far around the block that it almost met the tail end of its own rush line... which was not insubstantial in itself. I never tire of bad zombie makeup and bargain-basement PVC corsets, and I got plenty of both.

The legions of brain-eatining wannabes were on hand to witness a personal appearance by Romero, the original architect of zombie horror, who presented his film to a packed house at midnight and received a standing ovation in the bargain.

Toronto-based Refresh Partners have created a Facebook Application to view and manage the films you plan or want to see at this year's Toronto International Film Festival.

I just added the application to my profile and filled in the films I already have tickets for. But I really like that they've also included the option to specify films I want to see (but don't have tickets for). This might come in handy as I'm looking to trade two tickets I have for the Tuesday showing of Paranoid Park for something next Friday night. (Hint, Hint)

Get the Facebook Application for the Toronto Film Festival.