These were the big films the first year I came to the Toronto International Film Festival—or, as it was known at the time, the Toronto Festival of Festivals: Dead Ringers, Earth Girls Are Easy, Far North, Miles From Home, Memories of Me, Criminal Law, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Madame Sousatzka.

Quick, now—can you guess what year it was? Congratulations if you guessed 1988—in fact, congratulations if you recognized more than two or three of those titles.

This year marks my 20th anniversary with TIFF. Has it changed in all that time? No more so than, say, Chippewa Street in the same period. Or the world economy.

Back then, you could get a pass for Toronto—press or public, you all went to the same screenings—and, if you wanted, simply sit in the same theater all day and watch whatever they put in front of you.

If you were to have done that in 1988, you may well have discovered a lot of excellent films, as I did. Not so much the Gala films, but gems like Claire Denis’ Chocolat, Tom Waits’ Big Time, Decline of Western Civilization 2: The Metal Years, Catherine Briellet’s 36 Fillette, Red Sorghum, the Chet Baker documentary Let’s Get Lost, The Thin Blue Line and too many more to list.

The New Visions New Voices series offered films by such as yet unheralded filmmakers as Krzsytof Kieslowski, Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, Bela Tarr, Manoel De Oliveira, Monika Treut, Mira Nair and Todd Haynes, whose short “Superstar—The Karen Carpenter Story” would soon be enjoined from public screening. There was even a whole special section of films by Finnish directors Aki and Mika Kaurismaki, the first time their quirky films had been presented to an international audience.

I was hooked. I’ve been to TIFF every year since then to gorge at the trough. One year I managed to see 60 films.

In those two decades I’ve seen a lot of skyscrapers go up and the dollar come down. (Remember when the exchange rate was $1.50? Now it’s barely worth going to the currency exchange; if you’re not careful, the fees can leave you with less in Canadian bills then you gave them US.) Most of the theaters once used for screenings are gone. The ubiquitous coffee shops and takeaway pizza parlors on Yonge Street have given way to Asian food of many varieties, much of it good, fast and cheap—just what you need when you have 15 minutes between movies.

In those ways, TIFF is better. (A 10-day diet of pizza and coffee is about as good for you as the diet Morgan Spurlock documented in Super Size Me.) But I have to tell you, it’s not as much fun as it used to be. For a film fanatic like myself, TIFF has become a victim of its own success. I’ve watched as the number of media in attendance rose every year, and so has Hollywood. The studios realized that it made much more sense to bring their films to this place where so many journalists were congregating than to pay to fly them to junkets. This year there are 1,300 accredited journalists here, and it seems like all of them are chasing the same handful of films, all of which will be in US theaters in the next month or so.

It’s gotten to the point where trying to schedule what you want to see at TIFF is a mind-boggling proposition. The press screenings are so numerous as to form a separate festival away from the main body. (Which is a shame, because I would much rather attend the public screenings of films: The Toronto audiences are smart, receptive and generally a joy to experience a film with.) Many of the studios set up screenings of their own to accommodate the overflow; some even have screenings in Manhattan prior to the festival.

Saddest of all, the once-egalitarian atmosphere has eroded. This year TIFF introduced a policy of “priority” press screenings, where some journalists get precedence over others. We’re all created equal, but some are more equal than others.

Well, I’m not going to let all the ink-stained wretches jockeying for an interview with Jodie Foster or Brad Pitt or the Coen brothers ruin this festival for me. I’ll have lots of chances to see their movies and a lot of the other “big” titles that are here. Face it, a lot of these movies will be in local theaters in a few weeks, on DVD in six months and on TV next year, where you’ll probably ignore them to watch a rerun of Scrubs.

There’s so much more to see here, so many movies I’ve never heard of and know nothing about that are just dying for me to discover them. And as much as possible that’s what I plan to do in my 10 days here.

Lust, Caution

Day 1: Traffic problems keep me from getting here until late enough that I only have time for one film. I open my Press & Industry Screening Schedule (which, we are warned, should be guarded with our lives as they will not be replaced if lost) to see what’s showing around 10pm.

Here’s what I had to choose from: Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution; the Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men, Canadian maverick Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, Jodie Foster in Neil Jordan’s The Brave One, the new Michael Moore documentary Captain Mike Across America and George Clooney in Michael Clayton.

And to think that on the drive up I was considering just going to see the show at Second City instead!

If you’re going to fight a war, you have to have a plan to get you through the hard decisions. I opt for the Michael Moore movie on the grounds that it’s in the biggest theater and therefore least likely to be sold out. Bad choice. Comprising footage from the college tour Moore did on the eve of the 2004 election, it’s a disposable, self-glorifying oddity that will only give his critics ammunition.

Well, Day 1 is a wash.

Eastern Promises

Day 2: It takes a few days to get into the Toronto groove of running from my lodgings (where, on the hottest day of the year, the AC isn’t working) to the press office to check in with publicists. Not to mention trying to stay hydrated in weather that guarantees I’ll arrive at every screening soaked in sweat.

Still, it’s a relatively low-key day and I squeeze in four movies. First off is Fugitive Pieces, which was the official opening night film. Hopes are high here for this adaptation of a highly respected Canadian novel about the lifelong obsession of a man with the loss of his family to the Nazis. It’s directed by native son Jeremy Podeswa, who made the terrific feature The Five Senses in 1999 and has since become something of a house director at HBO. But while the film is respectfully crafted and sensitive as can be, it also seems more concerned with mood and content. I was left unmoved, unlike the woman at the screening who was sobbing loudly as the end credits ran.

My luck doesn’t improve much as I check out some of the other high-profile films in preparation for the first round of interviews tomorrow. Ang Lee has only made one film that didn’t thrill me, Ride with the Devil. But despite it winning the top award at the Venice Film Festival this week, I have to add Lust, Caution to that category. The movie has been getting attention for the fact that the MPAA has rated it NC-17, a rating it deserves for a few borderline explicit sex scenes. Unfortunately, they take up only a few of the 157 minutes in this film about an assassination plot in Japanese-occupied Shanghai in 1942, a lot of which could have been left on the cutting room floor.

I’m also not as blown away as some I’ve spoken to about David Cronenberg’s thriller Eastern Promises, about the Russian mafia in London. There are great set pieces, including a fight in a steam bath that you will hear about a lot, but it seems a bit anonymous, hardly the work of a director who practically invented the buzz word “transgressive.”

I don’t have such high expectations for Mother of Sighs, Italian horrormeister Dario Argento’s conclusion of the “three witches” trilogy begun with his classic Suspiria and continued in the delirious but enjoyable Inferno. With minor digital effects and lots of cheesy gore, Mother of Sighs looks like it might have been made in the early 1980s, the classic heyday of Eurotrash cinema. The audience is openly laughing at the terrible acting, random accents and gratuitous nudity, but it’s affectionate laughter. It’s been awhile since Argento’s glory days, and while some of the lurid excess is fun, it’s a shame to think that he’s been reduced to parodying himself.

The Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame

Day 3: Because so much press who come to Toronto are only here for the first half of the fest or less, interview opportunities are heavily centered on the opening weekend. There’s so much that you could be doing that any commitment means forsaking a half dozen others—not to mention all the movies you could be seeing.

So it’s more than a little irritating to sit at a press roundtable with eight or nine journalists waiting for an interviewee who never shows up. Granted, there’s a lot of partying that goes on here, and a performer with a bent for carousing is likely to be sorely tempted.

But there’s a bright side to everything, and when a table of entertainment reporters is left to their own devices for a half hour or so, gossip is sure to ensue.

Topics on this occasion include what our missing interviewee found to do that was better than talking to us (if we guessed right, it’s a choice I would have made too); how much everyone dislikes the press conferences moderated by the big-headed journalist who seems intent on turning them into his own version of Inside the Actor’s Studio; the amazing things actors will say to you and expect you to keep off the record; and a list of what celebrities are secret smokers—rather a lot of them. (My favorite is the actress who, knowing that the Golden Globes has a policy of not photographing any backstage smoking, always keeps a cigarette in her hands, just to keep the photographers away.)

I would give names, but of course then I would have to kill you.

After a morning of listening to actors and actresses and writers and directors doing a rather good job of making the stories they’ve already told a dozen times this weekend sound spontaneous (that’s why they get paid the big bucks!), it’s time to get back to the serious business of watching more movies.

The first film here that I genuinely like is The Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame. Like all of the films from the Makhmalbaf family (headed by father Mohsen, the renowned Iranian director who runs a film school in which, unless I am mistaken, all of the pupils are his own family members), this slice-of-life story set in Afghanistan uses nonprofessional actors, mostly children. The title refers to the giant statue of Buddha that was destroyed by the Taliban. In a village nearby, where people live in caves hewn out of what looks like an endless expanse of rock, a little girl wants to go to school like her neighbor. The biggest obstacles are getting money to buy a pen and notebook, and a group of local boys who enjoy playing that they are Taliban warriors—not good news when they catch her with a substitute pen, a lipstick stolen from her mother. As her father did in Kandahar, this youngest Makhmalbaf captures both the gorgeously bleak landscapes of this region while capturing our hearts for a little while with a small human story.

On the opposite scale of realism is Nightwatching, the first feature from maverick director Peter Greenaway since his six-hour epic The Tulse Luper Suitcases. Perhaps because of the failure of that project to find an audience (shown in Toronto in 2004, it has yet to be distributed theatrically or on DVD, either in full form or in the condensed A Life in Suitcases version Greenaway prepared in 2005), the new film is relatively more conventional, telling an essentially linear story that recalls his The Draughtsman’s Contract. But it’s still pure Greenaway, from its large sets crammed with period detail to its obsession with the history of painting, particularly that of the Dutch master Rembrandt, whose dark palate is mirrored in the film’s design. Though overlong at 140 minutes, it’s also a fascinating history of an artist who thought he could stand up to the power brokers of his time and paid the price for it. Hopefully it will find a US distributor this week.

One of my favorite films of the past decade was Songs from the Second Floor, by a Swedish filmmaker who has the distinction of being called the best maker of television commercials by no less than Ingmar Bergman. (It’s hard to imagine Bergman watching a lot of TV, isn’t it?) Roy Andersson didn’t start out to make commercials; he got into it as a sideline after a spell making films in the early 1970s, and stuck with it though most of the next three decades. A brief description of Songs is impossible, other than to call it a comic vision of apocalypse; better to say that it can be watched in brief segments, and that it’s funny in ways you can’t quite put your finger on. All of which is true of Andersson’s new You, the Living, and thank god we didn’t have to wait 30 more years for it. The theater was packed and the laughter was loud.

It’s a lazy habit to approach the vast menu at Toronto by going to films from directors whose previous work you enjoyed. But, as in the case with You, the Living, it’s usually an effective strategy. I decided to see The Visitor knowing nothing about it other than that it’s a new film by Thomas McCarthy, writer-director of the wonderful The Station Agent. But what more would you need to know? The leading actor is Richard Jenkins, whose face you would recognize even if you can’t place the name; he was the dead father on Six Feet Under. It’s a touching story of a man who is changed by his experiences with an immigrant couple, and if it eventually delivers a different emotional response from The Station Agent, it does so with just as much grace and conviction.

A big change at TIFF this year is that the press screenings are scheduled much later into the night. I’m tempted to catch Sean Penn’s Into the Wild, which will let out about a few minutes before 2am. But there’s a new Werner Herzog documentary showing at 9am, and I don’t want to be falling asleep in theaters tomorrow.

More next week.