Break out the Razzies. Not sure if I have the vocabulary to describe how bad the River Queen was. The dialogue was lousy, the script unintelligible and the acting below par for a Samantha Morton movie. No wonder none of the cast showed up for what was the film's world premiere at the Paramount theatres on Monday night.

The director and producers, including the New Zealand Film Commission, were in attendance and had to take the lumps by themselves. More than a few people walked out and the applause afterward was whatever the opposite of deafening is.

Dave Chappelle became a pop culture phenomenon with his hit Comedy Central program Chappelle's Show, a boundary pushing sketch comedy program that injected some much needed life into the genre's representation on the tube.

With the success of the show, and the record setting sales of Season One on DVD, Chappelle is suddenly worth a small fortune. And what does someone with a $50,000,000 windfall do? Throw a huge block party in Brooklyn with your dream musical lineup and invite your friends out by the thousands.

Seven Swords is one of the most beautiful films at the festival this year, a pictorially sumptuous martial arts epic that successfully weds the style of classic wuxia pictures with a surprisingly strong western (the genre, not the hemisphere) flavour. It's not in the same over-stylized league as Zhang Yimou's Hero, but then, Yimou generally let his photographic sense get the better of his storytelling intentions in that film; Swords is more user-friendly, but ultimately less satisfying. It's a grand old tale, to be sure, but it has difficulty connecting with the audience: seven swords means a lot of main characters, and throwing another half-dozen into the mix on top of that makes for a crowded starting line. There are a lot of plates spinning here, and like so many whirling martial arts maneuvres, not all of them land intact.

Big Fishies eat little fishies as the phraseology goes, though in the case of Rowan Wood's Little Fish I'm puzzled as to what went on at all.

Tracey (Cate Blanchett) is desparately trying to advance her life as best she could after becoming involved with heroin use in her 20s. Now clean and sober, but still living like a teenager in her mom's house at 32, she is revisited by her ex-boyfriends surrogate father, Lionel (Hugo Weaving) and ex-boyfriend Johnny (Dustin Nyugen Nguyen) who still seem rather attached to her in different ways. Lionel's former heroin use still haunts him as the after-effects rage through his body and Johnny returns from Vancouver after being sent away due to a car accident that amputated Tracey's brother's leg.

But has anyone really learned from their mistakes? Apparently not ...

Some kid totally freaked out Steven Soderbergh. "Do you like Toronto? Can I give you this?" Here was a kid - probably somewhere in his late teens who wanted to deliver the Oscar winning director a letter. Soderbergh took it all in stride, noting that he did like the city, until now.

The context was the post-screening Q&A for the movie Bubble, a plot twisting story set in and around a doll making plant in smalltown USA. In what is perhaps a sign of things to come, Bubble is being released simultaneously in movie theaters, on DVD, pay-per-view cable and satellite television.

After failing to get some last-minute tickets yesterday, I found myself in front of the Four Seasons hotel "star gazing." I was shocked to see that so many people would stand outside a hotel waiting for a slim chance of seeing a celebrity for a few seconds.

As loser-esque as it sounds, I had a good time just hanging around waiting for some celebrities to grace me with their presence. Having a camera also made the whole thing seem like some form of hunting (not that I hunt) or fishing (I don't fish).