A few notes on my second day in Toronto while I make coffee and try to figure out what to eat for dinner and which movie to see in tonight’s late slot:

1. The above image was taken last night, about two blocks away from the main festival venue.

2. No one around here seems to be able to talk about The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford without dropping the word “masterpiece.” I saw it this afternoon, and I have to agree that it’s a really beautiful film. I also have to admit that I dozed off for about five minutes right in the middle (two totally inappropriate things that I do really well at afternoon festival screenings: cry, and fall asleep). I walked out wishing I could walk right back in and see it again–which I’m contemplating doing later tonight.

3. There are literally six ads from festival sponsors before every screening–even press screenings. It’s the price of running a festival this big, I guess, but the NBC-Universal ad in particular is really getting on my nerves.

4. Fox Searchlight hired a band of actors to jog around the line for the press & industry screening of Juno, wearing copies of Michael Cera’s track uniform. They posed for photographs and passed out Juno-emblazoned boxes of orange tic tacs. Most of them had the physiques of personal trainers, inspiring more than one catty comment from onlookers regarding how much “better” these guys looked in the outfit than Michael Cera. I, of course, begged to differ. Photographic evidence after the jump.

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With the Toronto Film Festival beginning tomorrow, we’ve just about concluded our Telluride coverage. Here are some highlights. You’ll find a full guide to our Telluride reportage, minus Friday’s upcoming all-Telluride episode of FilmCouch, after the jump.

Kevin interviews Sean Penn about his Telluride directorial triumph, Into the Wild.

Karina has a detailed preview of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.

Paul talks to Werner Herzog about “life, risk and how his mom quit smoking.”

“In Superbad, Michael Cera fantasizes about a world in which ‘girls weren’t weirded out by our boners, but actually wanted to look at them.’ Juno takes place in that world.” Karina reviews the Festival’s biggest buzz-getter, and Paul interviews director Jason Reitman.

We love People on Sunday. Paul says the 1929 silent film “contains the most seductive first kiss I’ve ever seen on film. No joke.” Karina looks at the historical context.

“It’s true that I was in a rather fragile, sleep-deprived state at the time, but even now, the morning after, as it were, I still love this film.” Kevin’s talking about I’m Not There. He also talked to that film’s director, Todd Haynes.

“When I was 20 years old, I moved from Chicago to San Francisco, and I did it for George Kuchar.” Karina offers some thoughts on the experimental legend/Telluride honoree.

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The surprise hit of the Telluride Film Festival, Juno is not quite the unqualified masterpiece that the breathless buzz might lead you to believe: its high-concept slanguage sometimes feels over-written, its visual style can get a bit too twee, and there are two or three bridge scenes in the third act that feel like imports from a much stupider movie. But in a year heavy on halfway-decent studio-supported sex comedies, Juno stands out for successfully plumbing the subversively bittersweet depths that Knocked Up strove for but mostly missed. It’s a crowd pleaser, it’s a tear jerker, and even if it doesn’t completely reinvent the genre, it does move a few fairly familiar sitcomish situations in exciting directions.

Juno’s one truly revelatory element stems from screenwriter Diablo Cody’s apparent intention to have her title character serve, at least in part, as a device through which to examine the sexual desires of teenage girls. Juno (played by Ellen Page) is a boyish, foul-mouthed, kitsch-steeped, irony-packing, hoodie-wearing, Iggy Pop-worshiping smart-ass. She’s savvy enough to understand that the bully who mocks her does so to disguise his crush, but she lacks the self-awareness to truly comprehend her power over men and boys.

In a burst of genuine passion disguised as boredom, Juno swaps virginities with her best friend Bleeker, a lithe, brainy track star played by Michael Cera. We see their single sexual encounter through Juno’s gaze, in brief, golden-hued flashbacks which allude to Juno’s deeper feelings, but when the teenager discovers she’s pregnant, she knee-jerk plays it cool. She arranges to give the baby up for adoption to a couple of grunge-nostalgic yuppies (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman), and almost unwittingly distances herself from Bleeker the baby daddy. A horribly inappropriate love triangle ensues.

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• In what Variety makes out to be the great underdog story of the year, Superbad overcame its R rating to make about $31 million in its first weekend. With its name-brand comedy pedigree, summer-long media blitz, and total lack of demographic competition, it really did have it rough.
• In a brief blurb of a piece from the same trade’s weekly print edition, Pamela McClintock implies that with several strikes looming, it’s actually in the studios’ best interest to downplay their successes. If they stick to pumping the stat that six out of ten films lose money, they might be able to get away with the bargaining stance that they “can’t afford to make many concessions.”
• Somewhat lost in the last week’s shuffle over IFC downsizing their distribution business (wisely? desperately?) was the news that they’ve acquired Catherine Breillat’s Une vieille maîtresse (the title has been alternately translated The Last Mistress and An Old Mistress) for day-and-date release. The film, which stars Asia Argento and which I’ve heard is the most mainstream thing Breillat has done in a while, will play the New York Film Festival next month.

Lately I’ve been a little worried that my creepy, old-lady crush on Michael Cera (star of Superbad, which opens today, and which Vulture has dubbed “the greatest movie of all time”) is starting to become a problem. I take some comfort in the knowledge that I’m not the only one. In her Salon review of Superbad, Stephanie Zacharek called Cera a “gangly sweetheart”; Carina Chocano described his performance as “surreally loveable.”

But that’s nothing compared to the clip above. It’s the creation of YouTube user ilovemichaelcera, who appears to be a teenage girl named Allison. Allison’s synopsis of this clip, her sole contribution to the YouTube canon, reads as follows: “i love him watch trhis dont be disturbed.” Allison packs so much into 28 seconds that it’s hard to isolate a favorite part, although I’ve now watched it ten times in the last ten minutes, and the part where Allison puts her head on Cera’s TV cousin/paramour’s body cracks me up every time. Allison, honey — I’m not disturbed. I wish I was.

Here’s a round-up of a few late-afternoon tidbits from across the film blogosphere:

• At Slackerwood, Jette Kernion has a fully-illustrated review of the Alamo Drafthouse’s Simpsons Feast. “The second course soon followed: Blinky (the three-eyed fish) in a sauce made from tomacco (Homer’s magical crop that resulted from planting tomatoes, tobacco, and uranium from the nuclear power plant)…His eyes were made from white asparagus and caviar. He was a very tasty three-eyed fish.”
• AJ Schnack takes a look at the year thus far in documentary box office. When you see the year’s Top 20 docs laid out by grosses, the discrepancy between the fiction and nonfiction economic systems really hits home: “Looking at the year to date documentary box office, the elephant in the room (there are so many mixed metaphors in that) continues to be SICKO … no other [documentary] film has crossed $1 million at the box office.”
• Like Film Junk, I too got really excited when I heard that a trailer for Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind had leaked onto YouTube. And then I tried to watch it.
• At Edward Copeland On Film, Odienator remembers The Roach, “one dance that blew me away” upon watching John Waters’ Hairspray for the first time. “I laughed so hard that I choked on my popcorn. If you lived in the neighborhood I grew up in, this was an activity with which you could identify. It was pure John Waters, a mix of absurdity and social commentary. Here was the rich snob girl from Baltimore stomping roaches and shaking her ass while the lyrics commanded her to “squish, squash, kill dat roach!”
• My creepy old-lady crush on Michael Cera continues unabated.