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On Wednesday afternoon I went down to the Sutton Place Hotel to pick up some passes for a press conference. Just as I was walking in the place, Verne Troyer—the actor who played Mini-Me—was leaving. His assistant held the door open for him, and Troyer, in an expensive looking black and gold mobility scooter, drove through it to a waiting SUV.

The most surprising thing about this unexpected sighting was just how tiny Troyer was. He looked like little more than a pale, baldhead. His clothes seemed so loose, just the sleeve through which an animating arm might bring a hand puppet to life. Honestly, I though I could pick him up by the head in the same manner that I might palm a volleyball. He looked immensely vulnerable and fragile, and it was sad rather than cute.

Troyer, who is 40, stands 2 feet 8 inches tall, which is about the width of that doorframe in your hallway–you know, the one that’s too narrow to get your sofa through. He’s one of the smallest people on the planet, and because of this, he’s a celebrity.

Understandably, he wants to be thought of a star and not a freak, and so, throughout his career, he’s adopted this sort of gangster, ladies-man persona. You see pictures of him copping attitude in tinted sunglasses, groping some Playmate at one of Hefner’s booze-ups, and just generally trying to fob himself off as a regular, hard-partying, Maxim-reading dude–just another celeb with a drinking problem and a sex tape.

But that’s not what we see when we see him, we see Mini-Me, one of the smallest people on the planet.

On the second floor of the Sutton Place, there’s a Blackberry display that’s manned by three 20something salesmen. They’re likely waiting for a better job, just earning some summer beer money before heading back to school, but they probably like working the Festival, as every once in awhile they get to see a celebrity. Yesterday it was Mini-Me.

They talked excitedly about meeting him and getting his assistant to lift him up on the counter to pose with all the phones. Each one of them had their picture taken with him, and they all looked the same. The pale head of Verne Troyer– with a frozen grin on his face– beside a bent over Blackberry salesman. Almost Warholian.

For Troyer’s trouble, he was given a free Blackberry.

Later, over the course of a reckless and boozy night, the salesmen will show the pictures off to their buddies. They’ll all laugh and crack jokes before heading off to the next bar, living the perfectly normal masculine life that’s always eluded Troyer.

On the way down to the Sutton Place Hotel, the cab driver and I talked about the various stars he had driven around town. His English wasn’t very good and it was often very difficult to understand what he was saying, but I think that he said Anthony Quinn and some actress from Moulin Rouge–the one who wasn’t Nicole Kidman. Obviously, this was pretty disappointing, and perhaps sensing that, he added Sylvester Stallone to the list.

“He is very small man, very small, but real good guy.”
“Do you think he’d be small enough to fit in a teacup?” I asked.
“Yes, I think that Mister Stallone might fit almost in the tea.”

The Sutton Place Hotel is one of the locations in the city where press conferences for the Film Festival take place. I was there at the media office trying to get press credentials for some of the conferences, and of course, I had not followed procedure at all. It was a mildly humiliating experience, with the staff managing to be perfectly polite, but still entirely unfriendly.

In the lobby, a small guy with floppy, platinum hair sat playing the piano. Self-consciously jazzy, he tossed his hair, hoping to be discovered by some Hollywood hotshot.

Last year, Viggo Mortenson sat down and fooled around on the same piano while throngs of oblivious media milled about. This didn’t’ exactly surprise me, as the media– always lost in the faux-urgency of their Blackberries– are usually more focused on themselves, and how they appear to the world, than on what’s going on around them.

Walking up Bay to Bloor, people with TIFF passes swaying from around their necks, spoke into cell phones, begging for an audience:

“Yeah, well, I’m writing a feature now with one of the writers from Gossip Girl…”

“Look, I understand that it’s your project, I understand that it’s your baby. You developed it…”

“No, her agent is being very difficult, but honestly, her career has stalled and I think she pretty much has to accept what we’re offering…”

Up the street at the busiest intersection in the city, three women came walking out of the glare of the sun. All blonde and in their mid-forties, they looked like they could have been Playmate models in Romania twenty-five years ago. Sporting unnatural tans and designer sunglasses, they wore thousands of dollars worth of bad taste on their bodies. As they hit the corner, the tallest one, the one with the largest breasts, asked her two friends, “Do you want to get some Champagne?”

As she said this, she had to step around a man who was lying on the street corner. With a full head of white hair and a bright, red face, he lay beneath a blue blanket begging. Hat in hand, his arm was outstretched on the sidewalk, while the fingers on his other hand were pressed up against his lips, as if asking us to keep a secret. So dramatic, so floridly obvious was the contrast, that it seemed like it could have been performance art.

But it wasn’t.

A woman jogs by the Four Seasons Hotel, and it’s clear that she’s spent every bit as much time on her outfit as if she was going out for a fancy dinner party. Oh, she’s wearing her tight, white tank top and Lycra shorts and has her hair pulled back in a youthful ponytail. Behind her designer sunglasses and plugged into her iPod, she bounces past all the bustling cafes, hoping that people might think she’s a beautiful actress in town for the Festival.

At the lunch counter at Pusateri’s, a man in a pink shirt tries to pay for a muffin and a coffee. He has an effeminate, slightly incompetent manner. Befuddled, with his two hands cupped together, he holds out a pile of subway tokens and spare change from all sorts of different countries, “ I have no idea what a Canadian dime looks like, you take what you need,” he says to the girl working. He’s theatrical, acting like he’s always had to rely on the kindness of strangers to get by in this world.

From the table behind him comes an irritated, sarcastic voice, “Roger, it looks like a quarter!” Also in a pink shirt and around his age, sits a woman who looks like she could be his sister. I imagine that she’s been looking after her brother since their mother died back in 1994, and that they’re notorious eccentrics who live in a big, old house full of accidental antiques and cats. The woman looks at me, “We’re not from around here, okay?”

As usual, I ask the girl behind the counter what celebrities she’s seen. There is some confusion about whether Oprah has been in or not, but she is certain that Megan Fox has been there. She’s too polite to tell me what she thinks of her, but the hesitation and reluctance in her eyes makes her feelings clear.

Behind her, a blonde girl who has been listening to our conversation, puts a cheesecake away. She looks over at me, “ Megan Fox has been coming in every day buying sandwiches.” The girl has a scowl on her face as she says this. She says that she’s short and skinny, and then imitates her by slumping around. The East Indian girl, who earlier wouldn’t say anything, stifles a giggle. The blonde adds that most of the budget for The Transformers must have been spent on fixing Megan Fox’s bad skin. It’s clear that the she doesn’t think Fox pretty at all, and resents that she’s the dream girl of boys she goes to high school with.

The Hazelton Hotel on Yorkville erects a thickly woven hedge around its patio during the Festival. This protects the privacy of the people in there, and creates an aura of mystery. Anybody could be there! Walking by, you hear muffled and slightly disembodied voices that every once in awhile, break into the inaccessible laughter of glamor.

An older man is packing up his Tarot Card table on the street corner adjacent to the hotel. I ask him if he’s read any celebrity fortunes recently, and he looks up at me, smiling brightly, “Oh, no! Hell, I haven’t even seen one!”

On Saturday, Rachelle and I took the dog on a stroll down to Yorkville. It was a beautiful day and the Toronto International Film Festival was in full swing, so the city, and everybody in it, was feeling kind of excited and world class.

Between his two children, a father walked down the sidewalk holding their hands. They all had the open, vulnerable smile of tourists looking for stars on their faces. Wearing Tilley hats that seemed to open up to the sun, they looked blossoming Daffodils.

Perhaps fifty people, all jostling one another hoping to catch a glimpse of celebrity, were assembled in front of the Intercontinental Hotel. As they were watching the entrance, a limo on the street behind them smacked into a cab, creating a huge crunch—the sound of power. The crowd all spun around at once, with one woman exclaiming, “ Oh. My. God!”

At Bloor and Avenue, Heidi and I waited outside a church as Rachelle ran an errand. Beside us on the sidewalk was a beggar wearing nothing but shorts and a cast on his arm. Aided by a walker and a nurse, a very pale and very elderly woman made her way slowly down the street. She stopped in front of the beggar and began to look through her change purse, and as she did so, he told her that he had cancer. “Oh, my,” she said, “I’m sorry. I’ve just been treated for cancer myself.” He asked her is it was gone. “Yes, I hope so,” she said, handing the man a quarter, “ I really hope so.”

As this was happening, a woman waited to cross the street. She was stunning. Draped in the expensive shopping bags of the district, she tossed her perfectly blonde hair and smiled back at the people watching her. She wore a mini skirt and a tight, loosely knit white sweater through which you could see her matching black bra. When the light changed she began to hurry across the street, heading to the Park Hyatt Hotel. Her four-inch heels clicked against the pavement, and everyone watched, trying to figure out who she was.

On the patio at Pusateri’s everybody was dressed up, trying to look like they belonged. They spoke loudly of the films they had seen and the parties attended, wanting to give up the appearance that it was all “work.”

I asked the cashier inside what celebrities she had seen.

George Clooney.

I tried to get her to say that he was actually tiny, but she would not. Beaming, her eyes alight at the memory, she said, “Oh Lord, he was so HANDSOME!”

A young woman joylessly bused the lunch counter. She didn’t look like she enjoyed her job very much, and gave every indication that she felt the same way about her life. I asked her what celebrities she had seen, and rather sourly, like the memory was unpleasant, she said, “Megan Fox.” She told me that she was little more than five feet tall and that she looked WAY better on TV than she did in person. She allowed a small smile to animate her face as she revealed this last piece of news.

I think that everybody I knew who saw District 9, loved it, and from what I could tell, the critical assessments in the media were also glowing, and so, it was with an open, optimistic and entirely excited heart that I went to see the movie.

I thought that the premise, the launching point for the movie, was absolutely brilliant. In this case, the mysterious arrival of aliens on the planet– which is usually portrayed as either catastrophe or salvation in Sci Fi– appears to be little more than a refugee dump. How would humanity deal with the unwanted class of an alien civilization?

However, after about the first five minutes, I watched in dismay, as District 9 became a very conventional, derivative and annoyingly commercial enterprise.

For reasons that are not clear to me, the lead character was modeled after Steve Carell’s portrayal of Michael Scott in The Office. It was a curious and awkward stab at humour, one that helped drain the movie of the complexity and nuance the premise deserved. Content to use a visual shorthand rather than constructing a style of it’s own, District 9 plundered a variety of sources in what seemed an aimless manner. There were symbolic references to ET, Aliens, X-Files, The Fly, and numerous others, including the documentary frame of The Office (now something of a horror-film cliché), which they sped away from whenever convenient.

The movie itself wasn’t exactly coherent, and to enjoy it as so many did, you have to live in the present, by which I mean allow yourself to propelled along by the visual dynamism, rather than sitting back and thinking about what was actually taking place.

After about half an hour, it struck me that the movie was in fact built to structurally resemble a video game, which is not necessarily a bad thing. However, it does mean that District 9 is an expression of chaotic, visual energy. It’s explicit and superficial, adhering to the philosophy that the more components it contains, the better it is. The narrative, such as it is, is all about problem solving– the acquisition and mastery of specific tools in order to solve problems in a shifting landscape–rather than say, the maturation of a character. You don’t learn lessons in District 9, you move from level to level.

After about an hour, I just wanted the movie to end, having nothing invested in any of the characters on the screen. I simply could not shake the feeling that the movie was merely a trailer for the TV series/video game/sequel it was designed to precede and market, and I found myself wishing that the producers had an artistic goal rather than a commercial one, because the premise was so strong.

What do you do when somebody you love becomes a moron?

Sadly, Rachelle—my most beautiful Petal—has taken to wearing moccasins all the time.

It started innocently enough. She had hurt her foot while kicking somebody at floor hockey practice, and found that shoes were a little constricting after the injury, and that she felt better wearing something looser. We happened to have an old pair moccasins lying around and she took to wearing those. At first, it was just around the apartment, but in due course she began wearing them out for little errands, and now she wears them all time.

It’s embarrassing.

The other day, while we were dining out in the Distillery District, Rachelle looked at me from across the table. Wearing her moccasins, and with one braid in her hair, she made a toast,

“May the Warm Winds of Heaven
Blow softly upon your house.
May the Great Spirit
Bless all who enter there.
May your Mocassins
Make happy tracks
in many snows,
and may the Rainbow
Always touch your shoulder.”

Normally, she’d say, “Cheers, big ears!”

So far, she’s made 16 dream catchers, which now hang from all of our light fixtures, a totem pole for the back yard ( a Dacschund as the primary “spirit-guide”), and has taken to leaving those little piles of rocks outside of every new place we visit.

I don’t know, I suppose it’s a phase she’s passing through, just like after she saw Fargo and Lord of the Rings, but still, any advice would be greatly appreciated. I mean, I’m sick of having to call her “Walks with Wonder, Shoots with Force.”