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Fresh off the plane, we felt as hapless and frazzled as Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis in "The Out-of-Towners." A mad taxi dash from the airport Friday evening got us to the Toronto International Film Festival's main box office at the Eaton Centre mall at 6:45, 15 minutes before closing, but when we picked up our ticket package we got a shock: Our "Globetrotter" screening series started that night at 8:30, not the next day, as we had been told.
After figuring out north from south, we heaved our baggage onto the subway at the adjoining station and headed downtown to King Street to check into our hotel, then caught a train back uptown to Bloor Street, grabbing Thai noodles at Green Mango and aspirin at the corner drug store just in time to make the show.
Make no mistake: This is adventure travel, but movie buffs will quickly find that when the lights go down, it's worth the headache. As first-time visitors to any major film festival--let alone this 10- day, 265-feature extravaganza--and as newcomers to the city, we're seeing and learning more than we could have imagined for a vacation.
Film festivals have sprouted up seemingly everywhere in recent years, but Toronto's eclectic program shows in its 27th year why "the people's festival" is a favorite among industry types and fans.
Our series started with "Secretary," a subversively wicked romantic comedy starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader as a workplace couple in an S&M relationship. Although the film will be too self-consciously weird for many tastes, Gyllenhaal is enchanting as a submissive head case who blossoms under Spader's twitchy tutelage.
Filmmakers, of course, add to the festival experience when they show up to chat with members of the audience, and "Secretary" director Steven Shainberg's quirky wit didn't disappoint the sell- out crowd. "I've been waiting all my life to be called 'shockingly perverse,' " he said after a festival honcho introduced the picture, Shainberg's second feature.
In a post-screening question-and-answer session, a college student reviewing the film for her school paper asked Shainberg for a...