Toronto Film Festival - lots of book adaptations coming this fall. . .

Excuse me for a moment of Torontocentrisim but this is one of those days when I absolutely love this city. Time for the annual craziness that is the Toronto International Film Festival. Single tickets went on sale this morning and after staying up late last night shuffling my various flowcharts, maps and too many post-its to count, and then struggling with an overburdened website that kept crashing on me, I have finally emerged victorious with tickets for 17 films. Lots of book adapations will be coming to screens this fall, (although I'm still waiting for Coetzee's Disgrace which I saw last year at TIFF to surface). Nevertheless if you are the type who likes to read the book first, grab a pencil.

Movies that I did manage to get a ticket for include The Boys are Back based on the memoir by Simon Carr and starring the oh-so-handsome Clive Owen. Then there is the film She, A Chinese directed by the multi-talented Xiaolu Guo and based on her novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers. I'll also be catching the animated film My Dog Tulip, based on the classic memoir by J. R. Ackerley. The voices are provided by Christopher Plummer, Lynn Redgrave and Isabella Rossellini. Speaking of classics, I also have a ticket to the gala premiere of Dorian Gray, based of course on Oscar Wilde's famous novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. This pic just happens to star Colin Firth (!) and Ben Chaplin. I'll report back.

There's also a lot of buzz about the film adapation of Sapphire's Precious , Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Up in the Air, based on the very funny novel by Walter Kirn. This movie stars George Clooney and he's perfectly cast as the main character who is obsessed with racking up his air miles. Authors are also the subject of a couple of films. Jane Campion's latest, Bright Star, details the love affair between John Keats and Fanny Brawne. And the opening film is Creation, directed by Jon Amiel and starring Paul Bettany as Charles Darwin, just beginning to write On the Origin of Species, with Jennifer Connolly as his wife Emma. I'm sure these last two films will get wide distribution later in the fall.

Ten days of coffee-fueled adrenalin. Can't wait.