Toronto International Film Festival: An insider’s guide to babe magnets and albino alligators

Where else but in Canada would a world-class film festival feature a hockey musical for its opening night gala?

The enjoyably clunky “Score” was, however, something of a red herring for the Toronto International Film Festival, which screens approximately 300 movies in 11 days and previews everything from Hollywood Oscar bait to the Finnish-English-Russian-Swedish entry, “Laplander’s Odyssey.”

“Rainer’s Odyssey,” as I am tempted to call my cinema sojourn in the Great White North, has taken in 20 of those 300 movies thus far – the festival wraps this weekend – and encompassed manifold meet-and-greets. Racing up and down the long avenues en route to innumerable screenings, I have become an adept practitioner of parkour.

What you see as you whiz by is sometimes as entertaining as the films themselves. Is that Martin Sheen on a picket line of disgruntled hotel workers? (Yes.) Is the geeky guy encased in his entourage Bill Gates? (Yes.) Is that mega-bearded dude really Joaquin Phoenix? (Maybe not. A press release from a company called Nuclear Lounge Media stated that “Fans are being tricked and disillusioned by a fraud who arrives by limousine and is accompanied by a massive entourage of security and scantily clad groupies.”)

Bruce Springsteen, perpetually black-leather-jacketed, is in town along with his singer wife, Patti Scialfa, for the hero-worshippy but fascinating documentary “The Promise: The Making of ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town.’ ” As part of the festival’s “Mavericks” chat series, Springsteen revealed to chat mate Edward Norton, also in basic black, that his 20-something children aren’t interested in seeing him perform. “Why would any kid want to come and see thousands cheer their parents? They’d rather see thousands boo their parents.”

Fun guy Woody Allen, at a press conference for his soon-to-be-released new OK movie “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger,” was similarly upbeat. “I’ll be 75 in a couple of months and I do see myself as being waning and decrepit. For me, it gets worse and worse: I see absolutely no advantage in aging. It’s total annihilation with no hope of resurrection.”

On a brighter note, Keanu Reeves, in town to promote the romantic caper movie “Henry’s Crime,” said he might be up for a sequel to “Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey” – but “only if they come up with a good script.” Reeves was often mobbed by the public in what, in the trade, is now referred to as a “cluster grope.”

The reliably cranky Mike Leigh was in fine form at the public screening of his mostly terrific new film “Another Year.” I always look forward to his meltdowns when confronted with dumb postscreening audience questions. A few years ago, at the Q-and-A for “Happy-Go-Lucky,” a woman wanted him to fill her in on what she missed when she ducked into the ladies’ room. (His reaction is unprintable.) This year, someone asked him why “Another Year” had to end sadly. “Well,” he responded, with a look that would wither granite, “we were going to have a happy ending with elephants and monkeys but we ran out of money.”

Werner Herzog, with whom I had dinner, is another famous festival character. His new movie, “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” is about the 30,000-plus-year-old cave paintings in Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc in southern France, and it’s in 3-D! It’s a remarkable experience. The 3-D brings out the curvatures in the caves so that the charcoal drawings of horses and rhinos and, in one case, a female torso, have a roiling monumentality. These are not only the first-known drawings by humans, they are also, in a sense, the first movies.

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