EXTREME CINEMA.

TORONTO (Ont.); ONTARIO

I Heart Huckabees (Film); GOING Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry (Film); LAND of Plenty (Book); ASSASSINATION of Richard Nixon, The (Film); CHILDSTAR (Film); PALINDROMES (Film)

HOFFMAN, Dustin, 1937-; WENDERS, Wim, 1945-; BACON, Kevin, 1958-; SOLONDZ, Todd

The article reports on Toronto's film festival. In one of the Toronto program's oddest movies, I Love Huckabees, Dustin Hoffman plays an "existential detective" who probes coincidences in his clients' lives and raves like an aging acidhead about how everything is connected to everything else. But you didn't have to be mad, or on drugs, to connect the dots in the wheeling constellation of cinema and stardust known as the Toronto International Film Festival. What emerged from this blur of 328 titles was a cinema of extremes -- extremes of sex, politics, intolerance and slaughter. First your heart goes out to veterans protesting the Vietnam war in Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry. Cut to paranoid, post-9/11 America, where a deranged Vietnam vet in a surveillance van tracks a suspected Arab terrorist through the streets of L.A. in a Wim Wenders drama called Land of Plenty. Then cut back to the '70s, to The Assassination of Richard Nixon. One minute a 12-year-old boy is losing his virginity in McKellar's Childstar, then a 12-year-old girl is plotting to get pregnant in Todd Solondz's Palindromes. You try to embrace Kevin Bacon as a reformed child molester in The Woodsman, then in Mysterious Skin you wince as a boy is initiated into sex by his Little League coach. Dazed, you walk out into the sunshine and watch police arrest a video artist for taunting demonstrators protesting a Canadian documentary about him killing a cat. 9 Songs is just a sweet portrait of two lovers bathed in the toasty glow of infatuation. Who knows where this might lead. If porn crosses into the mainstream, we'll never hear the end of it. Measuring a star's ability to open a movie and outgross the competition could take on a whole new meaning.