Movies

TORONTO – Toronto is a big city (with a population of nearly 2.5 million), but during the Toronto Film Festival, it looks and feels like a theme park. The sidewalks are full of people, almost all of whom have the same tribal marker hanging around their neck: a festival badge. And in an impressive display of product placement (this is a film festival, after all), all those badges are dangling at the end of sponsor-emblazoned lanyards. For a week in September, Toronto is overtaken by the Starbucks nation.

As at any theme park, a big part of the TFF experience is standing in line. The hotter the movie, the bigger the buzz, the sooner you'd better show up before the screening and the longer the line and your wait is. Bill Maher's new movie, Religulous, is one of those hot, buzzy movies. It's the comedian-commentator's docu-drubbing of America's faith in faith, directed by Larry Charles, who has experience with this sort of project after directing Borat. There was a 10 a.m. screening Friday; I got there about 45 minutes early and took my place on the sidewalk behind about 50 even earlier birds.

Soon after, a man is standing behind me. He has a little pocket-sized video recorder with which he starts filming the line while offering his own narration. He turns to interview me, but he's too slow. I ask him a question before he can start asking me.

After I first expressed surprise that AMC is on a media event other than Mad Men, I asked, "Who do you work for?"

He works for AMC. The cable network is launching AMC News, timed to kick off with the Toronto Film Festival. It will provide entertainment bites on the network's Web site and short items broadcast during the cable channel's programming. "Think MTV News," he says.

Religulous proved to be like the man who stars in it. Like Bill Maher, it's smart and funny, and frustrating and infuriating. Somewhere between Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 and Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat, the movie is part satire and part polemic. But the funny thing about this often-funny film is that as it works its way through a world of true believers and charlatans, Mr. Maher proves himself to be as dogmatic and intolerant as the targets of his irony and ire.

The line trailed down an (unair-conditioned) stairwell for the next big, buzzy movie: Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married. With its raw feel and handheld look, the movie comes off as a sort of home movie, only one being shot by an invisible stranger with no one on camera aware of the camera. Anne Hathaway plays a young woman getting out of rehab – for the umpteenth time – just in time for her sister's (Rachel) wedding.

You spend an uncomfortably close few days with a family that is falling apart even as it's trying to pull together. So many secrets, so much dysfunction. Full of great moments and performances, don't be surprised to hear Ms. Hathaway's name when Oscar season comes around.

For now, I'll just mention two great side treasures of the movie, both musical. One is the appearance of singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock. Post-punk music fans who were around back in the '80s know him as a great performer of eccentric pop and know Mr. Demme as a fellow fan.

Just as the director spotlighted another cultishly cool outfit (the Feelies) in his 1986 feature Something Wild, here he spotlights Mr. Hitchcock who turns up to sing with the wedding band during the reception, including a cool, brass-and-strings version of "America," from his album Groovy Decay. The other musical treat was the appearance of "Sister Carol" East. The Jamaican reggae artist, who closed that movie with her sidewalk version of "Wild Thing," offers a rap song at the reception.

Back on the sidewalk, it starts to rain. That means you not only have to dodge people who are walking and texting, but also wielding umbrellas. Just like that, attending a film festival becomes a full-contact sport.FOLLOW Tom Maurstad on Twitter at the Toronto International Film Festival. Twitter.com/guidelivemovies

Print it | Discuss it | E-mail it to a friend