Toronto '09: Day 1: Clooney has landed

Apparently George Clooney is here. His picture is all over the papers. There are reports that he serenaded a random woman in a restaurant yesterday for her birthday. He spent part of his day seated at a table signing autographs. With one hand in a cast! (In Venice, a man stripped for him.) Ah, St. George: All the charm of a politician. None of the elected office.

But even if you head downtown, where the first of the two films Clooney has here is schedule to premiere, things are pretty calm. It should be noted that things always seem calm at the Toronto International Film Festival. It doesn't colonize the city at all. Only once have I witnessed absolute mayhem, and that was for Brad Pitt a few years ago. In any case "Entertainment Tonight," Canadian edition, even flashed a quote from Matt Damon, who'll be here momentarily, about Clooney. I don't remember what he said, but they don't seem to have asked him about himself.

Clooneymania has its limits, of course. One of those movies lasts for about an hour-and-a-half and is called "The Men Who Stare at Goats." It's a comedy about a secret government operation to train soldiers to use psychic powers in combat. The funniest thing in it is the opening line: More of this is true than you would like to think. The book this movie is based on happens to be a comical but highly investigative piece of non-fiction by Jon Ronson. The movie, written by the playwright Peter Straughan and directed by Grant Heslov, tries to extract a farce. But finding something funny is one thing. Turning what you've found into comedy is something else, and this movie is contentedly amused with the idea of psychic soldiers but is too sentimental to see the farce through. This movie shouldn't be trying to touch your heart, but there it is trying to get all up in your chest. It's afraid to be cynical.

Ewan McGregor plays a sad sack reporter following a possibly psychic Clooney through the Iraq desert, and they have no chemistry, try as Clooney does to bring something wild out of his co-star. Clooney himself, in a mustache and, at some point, a foppish Travolta haircut, seems strained, which makes sense. He's carrying the whole movie on his back. A lot of the audience at the packed press-and-industry screening roared with laughter. So there's that. The movie opens next month. You can see for yourself.

Part of me wishes I'd seen one of the film-related events advertised on posters around town. I found one walking home this afternoon, and the lack of glitz and total randomness -- The Doors, Jane Jacobs, Michael Jackson, Radiohead, and F.W. Murnau promoted on the same makeshift billboard -- touched me. It's just a bunch of flyers, but what a strange panorama it creates in your brain. Feel free to free-associate and produce your own cultural mashup. I promise it's more fun than staring at goats.