When you live in downtown Toronto, you quickly become accustomed to the people calendar -- when the streets will be silent, and when they'll be buzzing. It starts when school lets out -- young kids hit the playgrounds while the college kids head home and free up the late-night sidewalks. Every third person is now a tourist, stopping every few feet for pictures or to look at a map. On the weekends, the city often becomes a ghost town, as hordes head up north to cottages. But then it's back to school, often marked by the eager new engineers running around the city painted purple.

And just a few days later, they're joined by slick stars and a million press badges as the Toronto International Film Festival gears up. The stars are out, as are the press, the movie lovers, and the eager onlookers. Teeny boppers buzz like packs of bees around the Four Seasons and other Yorkville haunts for a peek at someone famous. It's movies and fans everywhere.

But reviews don't give you a taste of the city, nor do quick glimpses in films like Chicago and Urban Legend. You can see it retro-style with SCTV, but that city is in the past. The best way to get a taste of Toronto without being here is through Canadian filmmaker Don McKellar. Between the films he's directed and those he's acted in, you can get many tastes of this town, from exotic women to last nights on Earth. In honor of the fest, and of the wonderful T-Dot, I offer you: Childstar and Monkey Warfare.

Welcome back to another edition of Insert Caption -- the game you won't want to burn after reading ... because, well, how could you win any prizes then? Last week we asked you to give us your best college-esque caption for a photo from the new comedy College. In return for your brilliance, we were shelling out a one-of-a-kind beer pong table. Sweeet! Only one winner this week, so congrats to John R. for his inspiring take on a classic tale ...



1. "Unfortunately, try as he might, Peter just couldn't find his way back into Narnia" -- John R.

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This week, we're shacking up with our old Oscar-winning pals Joel and Ethan Coen as they get ready to unveil their latest darkly comedic crime caper, Burn After Reading, starring folks like George Clooney, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich and Frances McDormand. Prizes? Oh yeah, check it: One Grand Prize winner will receive one Burn After Reading USB 2.0, one T-shirt, one Water Bottle and two Wrist Bands. Wait, there's more! Four first prize winners will each receive one T-shirt, one Water Bottle, and two Wrist Bands. Sound off below!



Read the official rules for this contest

Cinematical has just received this exclusive poster for Happy-Go-Lucky (click image to enlarge), directed by Mike Leigh (Vera Drake, Secrets & Lies). The film, which premiered in Telluride and is currently screening at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival, stars Sally Hawkins as an eternally optimistic teacher living and working in North London. Apart from the exclusive clip we debuted on Cinematical earlier in the week, Kim had this to say about the film: "All in all, I quite liked Happy-Go-Lucky; it's certainly one of Leigh's more mainstream-friendly films, and will appeal to moviegoers beyond the dress-all-in-black, gloom-and-doom cinephile crowd, while still retaining enough of the Leigh touch to satisfy most of the purists."

Happy-Go-Lucky will arrive in theaters with a smile on October 10.

Burn After Reading, the latest from the Coen Brothers, makes its North American debut this year, following last year's rapturous Toronto reception for the Oscar-winning success of the tense, terse No Country for Old Men. After making No Country for Old Men, in perverse Coen-logic, the timing is clearly right for a messy, mean-spirited, profane punchy comedy. Burn After Reading is built around a classic Coen plot -- there's a valuable something out there, and various ill-equipped, dimwitted people see it as the answer to all their problems -- and the pleasure of seeing the big ensemble cast bite down hard on small parts until the juice drips down their chin is dry, funny and rich. (Brad Pitt's work alone as a fitness trainer whose I.Q. is as immeasurably low as his body-fat percentage is, bluntly, inanely great -- full of verve and conviction, and deeply funny.)

The Coens make movies about desire -- the stuff of drama -- but they often choose to make them about idiocy -- the stuff of comedy -- as well; as various characters around Washington, D.C. pursue, posses or hope to profit from a lost CD of data that an ex-CIA man (John Malkovich, fussy and hilarious) has misplaced, the plot's in part just a canvas for Coen-syle, carefully-timed punchlines and comedy so dry it'll leave your lips chapped. There's also some great inside-baseball movie-joke stuff about the cliches of every techno-thriller -- the Taiko-drum scores, the lower-left-of-the-screen-type establishing place and time, the moody shots of shadowy figures who may or may not be following our heroes -- that work in a smart, sideways fashion, too. And every actor in Burn After Reading is playing someone having some kind of mid-to-late-life freakout, grabbing at chances to be happy, and failing while flailing and spitting out four-letter words as they go down; Kim will have her full review up later, but we laughed. A lot.

Look, I don't want to make it sound like an either/or thing. You can see wide-release films AND art-house indies. I'm just saying that on this particular weekend, the only wide release is something starring Nicolas Cage in a mullet, and it wasn't screened for critics. So if it were an either/or thing, this would be a good time to become an art-house fanatic, and the Indie Spotlight is here to let you know what your options are.
Seven films are opening in limited release today: August Evening, Everybody Wants to Be Italian, Mister Foe, Ping Pong Playa, Save Me, A Secret, and Surfer, Dude. Here's the scoop on each of them.

Everybody Wants to Be Italian
What it is: A romantic comedy about a man and woman who both pretend to be Italian because they think the other is. OK, maybe this doesn't actually sound any better than the Nicolas Cage/mullet thing.
What they're saying: At Rotten Tomatoes, all of the reviews so far are giving it a big ol' kick in the meatballs.
Where it's playing: A few dozen theaters all over New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, and ... Salt Lake City? Well, OK.
More info: The official site has a handy list of theaters where it's playing.

Ping Pong Playa
What it is: A light, clean comedy about an Asian-American kid who has to step in when his family's ping pong championship is threatened.
What they're saying: Cinematical's Monika Bartyzel found it simply adorable last year at Toronto, saying it's predictable but charming. The reviews at Rotten Tomatoes are mixed so far -- it's either sweet and likable, or an annoying Napoleon Dynamite retread.
Where it's playing: New York City, plus the California cities of San Francisco, Alhambra, Berkeley, Glendale, Hollywood, Irvine, and San Jose.
More info: The official site has upcoming playdates, too.

Long awaited in the wake of his 2005 debut Brick, Rian Johnson's The Brothers Bloom is a magic trick of a film; the second it's over, you want to see it again so you can try to catch how you were tricked, but you also want to see it again so you can return to the joy and wonder of being wrapped up in the nimble, deck-shuffling hands of a born showman. Watching it at first, some of The Brothers Bloom's creative and thematic elements seem like they're on loan from Paul Thomas Anderson (opening narration by Ricky Jay, pop-whiz-bang camera work, the troubled-but-tender relationship between the two brothers) while others feel as if they've been cribbed from Wes Anderson (deadpan confessions, whimsical set design, a parallel-universe setting where people still travel to Europe by steamship). The truth is, as much as The Brothers Bloom may feel like it's cribbing from other films at first, this is Rian Johnson's movie, and even if my more dreary and discerning critical faculties told me the final act goes on, perhaps, a beat too long, my inner moviegoer was sitting bolt upright, smiling, bright-eyed and carried away.

Brothers Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) and Bloom (Adrian Brody) have grown up on the make, in a world of, as Jay's stage-setting narration puts it, "... grifters, ropers, faro fixers, tales drawn long and tall. ..." Stephen builds cons; Bloom gets close to the marks. Stephen's work on their scams is a weird, lucrative form of self-expression; as Bloom puts it, "My brother writes cons the way Russians write novels. ..." Bloom's work on their schemes is a weird, lucrative form of self-loathing; Bloom learns early on that playing a part means never having to be yourself, that he, when " ... being as he wasn't, could be as he wished to be." Stephen wants more. Bloom wants out.

Rachel Getting Married is a terse, smart, funny and tough family drama about forgiveness and failure written by Jenny Lumet; it's also a loose, smart, broad and bright film about family and love directed by Jonathan Demme. When these two things are in sync, the end result is something truly impressive – a moving story that appeals to your heart and soul without insulting your intelligence, a film full of big scenes that never stoops to the most obvious possible iteration of those big scenes, a movie loaded with great and sincere performances from the top down. When the two parts of Rachel Getting Married fall out of synch – as they do, most notably, in the last third of the film during Demme's raucous, joyous post-wedding reception – it's less catastrophic than it is curious, and the final film is still very much worth watching.

Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) is getting married; her little sister Kym (Anne Hathaway) is coming for the big event ... which involves getting picked up from her most recent stay at a rehab clinic. A cynic could look at Hathaway's part in Rachel Getting Married and paraphrase Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder: Always go full rehab. And while it's true that the Academy and critics tend to reward gritty, hyperbolic portraits of drug-addiction's misery, the fact is that Hathaway's Kym is not quite as simple as that. Kym knows all the things she's done wrong; she also knows she'll keep doing some of them. Immediately, in the car, the lines of battle are drawn, with Kym going on the offense as part of her defense mechanisms, asking her dad (Bill Irwin) and step-mother (Anna Deavere Smith) about how Rachel's holding up: "Are all of her latent food issues coming up? Is she still hoarding Snickers and Cool Whip under the bed?" Soon, Kym's plunged into the thick of the preparations for Rachel's wedding, responding to the chaos by adding to it. ...

We've stayed away from all the Ghostbusters rumors these past couple days because last time we crossed this road, we were told nothing existed. Well, seems that's not at all true: Variety reports that Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky (The Office, Year One) have been asked to write a script for a Ghostbusters sequel (reported earlier today by Pajiba.com) that may or may not "pass the torch to a new group of ghost chasers." Funnily enough -- and even though he flat out told us he had nothing to do with it -- this is totally in line with those early rumors that "The Apatow Clan" would be involved in some capacity; namely Seth Rogen. When we asked him about it during the Pineapple Express junket, however, the man denied knowing a thing. Then again, he's an actor ... and he's paid pretty damn well to pretend.

The Apatow connection is also there in that these two writers are behind the Apatow-produced Year One, which, ahem, is being directed by Harold Ramis -- who, in case you forgot, played Dr. Egon Spengler in both Ghostbuster movies. No word from Columbia Pictures on the project, and Variety is simply throwing out all the same fluff that's been reported on other sites for months now. Could we see a reunion and a torch passing? Will the Apatow folks take over the Ghostbusters franchise? I'd certainly be down for it.

You?

(And now we shall continue to run circles around this monster until someone finally caves ...)

In what is shaping up to be either a colossal train wreck or an inspired piece of lunacy, Southern belle Ashley Judd has joined the cast of the upcoming comedy Tooth Fairy as the titular character's girlfriend. Before (some of) you get your hopes up that a major studio production will feature a lesbian relationship, read on to learn how the superb dramatic actress figures into the story.

Dwayne Johnson was signed by 20th Century Fox for Tooth Fairy back in February, as Monika reported. He was to play "an ordinary man who's brought in to try to save the tooth fairy kingdom," though I prefer the unofficial synopsis that has found its way onto IMDb: "Tess is a 6-years-old girl who is very dissapointed when Derek (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) tells her that the tooth fairy isn't real." (Misspellings not mine.) Talk about high concept!

Variety now clarifies that Johnson will be playing a minor league hockey player nicknamed The Tooth Fairy, no doubt because he has a habit of knocking out opponents' teeth with his rough play. Judd will be playing his girlfriend, a single mother of two children, no doubt a romantic relationship that will help tame the Tooth Fairy's violent ways, especially when one of Ashley's children loses a tooth (just guessing here). You can probably write the rest of the story as predictably as two of the credited writers. Production starts in October under the direction of sitcom vet Michael Lembeck.

Cinematical is very excited to bring you this exclusive clip from the new flick JCVD, which, surprisingly, has watched a tremendous amount of buzz build around it since it first screened at this past Cannes Film Festival. Now, as part of the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival midnight slate (it premieres tonight!), JCVD will receive a more proper introduction (or should I say, re-introduction) to the world. JCVD, of course, stands for our good friend Jean-Claude Van Damme, star of such action flicks as Kickboxer, Timecop, Universal Solider (first bootleg I ever watched), Double Impact, Death Warrant ... shall I go on?

From what I understand, JCVD follows Van Damme (who stars as himself) as he travels back to his home country in an attempt to find peace and tranquility after whatever was left of his career seemed to vanish. We'll have a review coming up very soon, but in the meantime check out this very funny clip below as it should give you an idea of the vibe this flick is going for. Dare I say this might be one of my most anticipated films of the fall season? JCVD will also play Fantastic Fest before arriving in theaters (in limited release) on November 7.