Kisses, and Viggo in the lobby

TIFF '08, Monday, Day Five:

Start the day with Kisses, a wee Irish thing from Lance Daly about a pre-teen boy and girl, neighbors in grim housing on the outskirts of Dublin, who flee their effed-up families and make for the city, where they spend a day and night of bliss and horror. The two kids, Kelly O'Neill and Shane Curry (11 and 12, respectively, when they made the film), are brilliant, and the spirit (and a couple of songs) of Bob Dylan hangs over the tale -- with some bloke named Stephen Rea in a cameo as a Dylan impersonator. The accents are thick as soda bread, and like Ken Loach's Kes and Andrea Arnold's Red Road, subtitles would be a good idea if this gets a U.S. distributor -- which it should. It's the second best love story I've seen at the festival, after Slumdog Millionaire (if we're keeping score).

Also catch Management, a Sidney Kimmel-produced indie starring Jennifer Aniston and Steve Zahn. A quirky romance about a motel night manager and a traveling saleslady, Management's at its best when Zahn's character's stalker-like obsession takes the plot down unexpected roads: a Zen monastery, a parachute splashdown into Woody Harrelson's swimming pool.

Talk to Wong Kar Wai for Ashes of Time Redux, his reclaimed, restored, 1994 martial arts meditation on memory. The great Hong Kong director traveled Asia, dove into warehouses in San Francisco's and New York's Chinatowns, looking for prints of his old movie, which had been cut, chopped, butchered and lost. Putting it back together again took years.

There's a grand piano off to one side of the lobby of the Sutton Place, TIFF press and industry HQ, and for a while midday yesterday Viggo Mortensen was sitting there in a red T-shirt and jeans, letting anybody who approached sit alongside him on the piano bench, obligingly posing for snaps.

The less said about Richard Eyre's adultery melodrama, The Other Man, the better. With Kinsey couple Laura Linney and Liam Neeson -- and Antonio Banderas in the title role. Oy!

Tomorrow, Tuesday, last day for me (the fest continues through Saturday): interviews set with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Charlie Kaufman (for Synedoche, New York) and The Wrestler himself, Mr. Mickey Rourke.