Hey folks, Harry here... Behold - the nightmare that every festival planner on the planet dreads like you wouldn't believe. May the rest of Toronto's screenings go better...

Though the Toronto Film Festival is offerring some amazing films this year, and it's been fairly easy to get tickets, its higher highs are matched by some low lows. The Midnight Madness opener, Borat, even in its cancellation managed to be the most interesting theatre going experience of my life, an extremely hilarious one, but also soul crushingly disappointing. And it was the anticipation, the high levels of excitement, that made this all the worse.

Waiting in the extremely long line was special- tons of people were showing up just to try to get a glimpse of Borat, who, at the red carpet, gave everyone high fives to the sound of loud Kazakstani music.

The film started a bit late, but got a great Borat introduction.

And the film itself, at least the first 20 minutes, still make it the funniest film I have seen all year. But the comedy/tragedy of the night was when the film suddenly stopped working, and it become readily apparent that no one knew what the problem was.

Some guy near the front, a trained magician, started doing tricks to entertain the crowd, but it was just making things worse. Due to crowd demand, director Larry Charles came out looking totally cool with his long beard, suit, shades, and sneakers, to field questions with TIFF darling Michael Moore. They helped out tremendously, but you could see the fear on their faces, not really knowing what going on.

THe most surreal point of the evening was when they gestured to Ari Emmanuel in the audience and we got to have a little entourage moment. And after signing a note to excuse a kid's lateness from school friday, and taking some pictures, they were starting to get dry. Finally, Borat came out to do his Q&A, which still managed to be pretty great (he gave special thanks to "Lawrence Charles and...fat man" the excitement was on programmer Colin Geddes, who fielded questions to Borat onstage, and periodically got news from assistants running frantically about. You could see in his eyes when he got the final word, that it wouldn't happen and the screening would be relocated to the Elgin Friday night.

It was a drag....

the Captain