Day 2: Karaoke at the Fox & the Fiddle

On any given day during any given film festival, I will see at least four and often five new films, which at the end of a festival like Toronto can mean 40-50 movies digested in less than two weeks' time. Yet, yesterday, on the second day of the 30th annual Toronto International Film Festival, I saw not one film. Nor did I so much as leave my hotel room from sunup to sundown. Instead, I spent the entire day at my computer, writing or editing the film reviews and other articles you will read in next Thursday's print edition of this publication. For while the Hollywood studios may use Toronto as a launching pad for some of their highest-profile fall releases, that doesn't mean that they take a hiatus from releasing lower-priority films while the festival is going on. In fact, it may be that these particular ten days in September are viewed as an ideal time to unload certain troublesome pictures whose makers would just as soon not attract a plethora of media attention. To wit, next weekend brings with it a whopping 15 new films arriving in local theaters — one of which, Lodge Kerrigan's Keane, is among the best American films of the year, two of which (Venom and Cry Wolf) are not even being screened in advance for critics and the other dozen of which fall somewhere in-between those two extremes.

All told, that left me with somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 words of fresh copy to either produce or pick through with a fine tooth comb before next week's pages could be put to bed and I could resume my festival-going activities. So I doggedly plowed away and, when 10:00 PM finally rolled around, decided to treat myself to my first meal of the day that did not issue from the vending machine outside my hotel room door. This entailed venturing as far as the hotel lobby and a pub called the Fox and Fiddle that I suspect may be less than the finest the city of Toronto has to offer. There, for the next 45 minutes or so, I proceeded to consume a freeze-dried caesar salad and a rubbery chicken parmesan, all the while a DJ in a cheap pinstripe suit and circa-1987 John Stamos haircut ran through a litany of pop standards. Among the highlights: Nirvana's "Rape Me" (dedicated "to all the ladies out there") and The Tragically Hip's "New Orleans is Sinking," complete with the sound effect of a toilet flushing added at key moments. This was before the karaoke portion of the evening's entertainment got rolling, and a portly middle-aged man named Pierre, who I quickly gathered to be a fixture around here, took to the stage and offered his rendition of James' "Laid," adding special emphasis to the lyric "But she only comes when she's on top."

Throughout, a rail-thin man in a horrid costume consisting of rugby shirt, shorts and Teva sandals, gyrated his body right in front of my table, while I stared fixedly at the reflections of the overhead disco ball as they twinkled in my fizzless Diet Coke. Somewhere, new movies by the likes of Steven Soderbergh, Cameron Crowe and Tim Burton were being screened, and there were, I felt certain, film critics there watching them. But as Scarlett O'Hara so astutely observed: After all, tomorrow is another day. And likewise, after dining at the Fox and Fiddle, it's entirely possible that I may never be hungry again.

--------