Lie with Me – Shot right here in Toronto, Lie with Me takes us into the wacky world of a sexaholic named Leila (The L Word's Lauren Lee Smith), who explains via narration that she doesn't know how to love – she only knows how to fuck.  Ahhhh . . . so that's the reason so many people turned out for this 9:00 AM screening.  That's the one thing you can count on the Festival to do each year: Provide a film or two containing nothing but gratuitous sex.

That's about all you get in Me, though it is shot and edited nicely, and features a strong and quite brave performance from Smith.  In the film, she ends up meeting and immediately falling for a boy (Eric Balfour), who teaches her the difference between sex and love.  Awwwww!  I bet their relationship totally works out.  She probably never cheats on him, and he probably never has any issues with her super-slutty past.

The Shore – The first film in debut filmmaker Dionysius Zervos's promised (read: alleged) trilogy is about a little girl who drowns and the affect her death has on her family.  Mom (Coyote Ugly's Izabelle Miko) gets watery eyes.  Grandma (Lesley Ann Warren) is in deep denial, and Grandpa (Ben Gazzara) hones his emotions into his seasonal seafood restaurant.  There are lots and lots of shots of the water.  And that's it, unless you want to talk about some really poor sound editing.  Miko is particularly Julianne Moore-ish, with pent up anger hidden behind a porcelain face – acting more with her eyes than any other part of her body.

The last film I saw with Lesley Ann Warren was the Festival's The Quickie in 2001, which irritated me so badly, I got up and left 30 minutes after it started.  Within minutes of my departure, planes started smashing into the World Trade Center.  I stuck The Shore out for fear something similar would happen this time (like the doody/chemical water in New Orleans turning corpses into zombies, or something).  I took this bullet for you, America.  You owe me big.

The rest of the day was spent in line to purchase individual film tickets, which was done because the Festival's online box office worked about as well as the Minelli-Gest thing.