"Kipling! Kipling!"

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Film festivals always start to wear me down by the fifth or sixth day. Even people who work fewer hours than I tend to feel exhausted at this point. I've been doing the usual 6:30 wakeup and hitting the sack no earlier than 1 am each night, and today marks the beginning of the seventh day of that pace. I'm holding up reasonably well and keeping as focused as can be expected under these circumstances.

One of the tables at Bymark, the elegant restaurant on Wellington Street where Miramax held its after-party Tuesday evening for Scott Hicks' The Boys Are Back. Costars Clive Owen and Sam Neill attended.

I did, however, fall asleep in a sitting position on the westbound Bloor Street subway the night before last, and awoke only at the very end of the line.

"Kipling! Kipling!" I opened my eyes and looked up at a woman standing over me and trying to wake me up. "This is Kipling, sir...last stop!" I stumbled out of Kipling station and looked around at the break nocturnal landscape -- acres of unlit nothingness and endless stretches of parking lot depression -- and realized I was in Toronto's equivalent of western Siberia. I suppose I should be thankful to that woman. If she hadn't woken me some kid might've come along and stolen my bag.

I spoke early yesterday evening with Mother and Child director-writer Rodrigo Garcia, and then dropped by a delightful after-party for Scott Hicks' The Boys Are Back (Miramax, 9.25). And that was it.

Today's activities: Don Roos' Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (9 am), Tom Ford's A Single Man (11 am), Fatih Akin's Soul Kitchen at 1 pm, Steven Soderbergh's The Informant! at 3:15 pm and a chat with Werner Herzog around 5;15 pm. Where's the writing time in that schedule? Beats me.

Toronto-based artist Richard Kruger gave me a lift yesterday in this contraption, taking me from the Elgin theatre to the Soho Metropolitan hotel on Wellington Street.