A moment of reflection is an order as I look back at this year's TIFF experience. What have I learned?

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.

"Vision is a creation, not a perception," declares New York artist and writer, Hugues de Montalembert, as he shares the manner in which his life and perceptions changed after being blinded by paint thinner during an attack in his apartment in 1978.

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.

It's the last movie podcast of the Toronto International Film Festival, with a look back at the final four days of film festival overload.... along with some thoughts on ticket prices, audience reactions, other festivals in Toronto, and the usual movie and DVD news.

Click here to listen to the MP3!

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.