Tattle | Starring in Toronto

Story starts hereTORONTO - The Focus Features roster here at the Toronto International Film Festival ("Eastern Promises," "Lust, Caution," "Reservation Road" and "Atonement") is deservedly winning raves, but today we'd like to tip our hat to local entrepreneur Sidney Kimmel, whose Sidney Kimmel Entertainment production arm has one of the festival's most enjoyed films, "Lars and the Real Girl" (co-executive produced by one of this paper's owners, Bruce Toll).

Yes, it's about an uptight office worker (Ryan Gosling) who buys himself a sex doll, but it's the first sex-doll movie you could ever go to with your kids and your grandparents. Seriously, it's warm, sweet and as chaste as a politician running for office.

But way more truthful.

More on the film as it gets closer to its October release, but yesterday while we spoke with one of the film's stars, Emily Mortimer, we asked about her wickedly funny supporting role on "30 Rock," with Upper Darby's Tina Fey.

"I loved it," she said. "Tina is a most amazing woman – the nicest powerful person I've ever met. She's producing, writing, starring . . . I've got a crush on Tina Fey."

In "History of Violence," the most talked-about scene involved violent stairway sex between stars Viggo Mortensen and Conshohocken's Maria Bello.

"Her family is so great," Viggo told us, while discussing his new film, "Eastern Promises." "I had to apologize to them."

In this new film, the talked-about-scene is a brutal fight in a steam room in which Viggo takes a beating.

"Maria's brother Joey should be pleased," he said. "I am just as bruised. It's karmic retribution."

Since we're name-dropping Philadelphians (sorry, Dan Gross), we learned yesterday we can also claim writer/director Tamara Jenkins ("The Savages"). She was born in Lankenau Hospital, attended Penn Wynne Elementary "for a minute" and later went to Lower Merion High School.

Cody banks on talent

As Stuart Scott says on "SportsCenter," "Don't hate the player, hate the game."

That said, it would be easy to hate Diablo Cody if she weren't so darn nice and humble.

With her debut script, "Juno," a Toronto favorite, Cody has become a hot screenwriter (Steven Spielberg is a producer of her new show for Showtime) and for a change a hot screenwriter is actually hot. While virtually every writer here is a somewhat disheveled, neurotic white male, Cody is a former stripper and phone sex operator (she blogs at thepussyranch.com), with a magenta streak in her hair and tattoos of '40s pinup girls on her leg and arm. Yesterday, she did interviews in short red shorts and a Superman T-shirt.

"Juno," which should open in December, is her first screenplay and she only tried it because a movie producer who was a fan of her blog thought she'd be good at it.

She was.

Good thing Cody struck gold on her first attempt because she says she has no perseverance. "If 'Juno' had gone nowhere I wouldn't have written another one."

Oscar buzz of the day

Tommy Lee Jones is at his sardonic best in the Coen Brothers' "No Country for Old Men," but he's heart-wrenching, and on screen nearly ever minute, in Paul Haggis' war drama, "In the Valley of Elah."

Torontobits

Director Ang Lee postponed a number of interviews Saturday due to illness, but it turns out Lee wasn't sick at all. He had secretly flown back to Venice to receive that festival's top prize, for his new film, "Lust, Caution."

In his screenplay for "Eastern Promises" and more so in his writing of "Dirty Pretty Things" Steve Knight shows off a fascinating understanding of the British underclass.

It must all be from research. Knight was one of the creators of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" which he and his partners sold last year to Dutch game show/reality producers Two Way Traffic.

Marveling at our ability to take interview notes in odd geometric patterns with arrows and handwriting going in all directions, the delightful Keira Knightley (the Oscar-buzzing "Atonement"), told us we should frame the notes, sign them and sell them as art.

"They're a great insight into the way your brain works," she said.

"That's the problem," we replied. "Besides," we told her, "they'd have more value if you signed them."

Here for "Lust, Caution," we asked Tang Wei what she liked most about Toronto.

Her surprise answer: "The squirrels."

The squirrels?

"We don't have them in China," she said through an interpreter.

"But squirrels?" we said, using the international facial expression for "Huh?"

She smiled, and for a brief moment we wanted to run outside and catch her a squirrel.

Keeping in mind, however, that Toronto is one of the more affluent, cosmopolitan cities in North America, we asked if she liked "Anything else?"

"Yes," she said with an even bigger smile, "the pigeons."

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