Up at the Toronto International Film Festival and, to be honest, it’s pretty sleepy in terms of Asian films. Here’s what I’ve seen:

BLINDNESS – not an Asian flick per se, this adaptation of the award-winning novel of the same name is about a plague of blindness that strikes the world, leading to the infected blind being quarantined in unsupervised prison camps that quickly descend into anarchy and hideousness. Mark Ruffalo goes blind and his still-seeing wife, Julianne Moore, follows him into quarantine. Danny Glover is on hand, as is Gael Garcia Bernal and Sandra Oh, who has a small part as Minister of Health. This is one of those annoying movies that stretches for allegory, where characters have numbers instead of names, and many of the most annoying tropes of psuedo-intellectual filmmaking such as “Wise Old Black Man who Utters Wisdom” (Danny Glover – what? Morgan Freeman wasn’t available?), “Cleansing Showers of Rain that Wash Away Everyone’s Sins” and “Piano Being Played beautifully in Middle of Bombed Out City.” Tedious, moronic and tiresome this is a movie that constantly features running water, showers, rain, spilled liquids and dripping milk and it’ll send you running to the bathroom every five minutes to pee. Yoshino Kimura, the hooker with the heart of gold in SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO, plays the wife of the first victim of the blindness, who’s played by Yusuke Iseya (DOG IN A SIDECAR, MEMORIES OF MATSUKO and he and Yoshino were in SUICIDE SONG together). They’re both good, but the movie’s such a bore that it hardly matters. Their paint just dries a little better than everyone else’s.

ACHILLES AND THE TORTOISE – the newest flick from Takeshi Kitano, this is a straight-forward story of the making of a young painter, covering his life from youth to middle age. If there wasn’t Kitano’s name on the credits and if it didn’t start with an anime sequence, it would feel like a mid-century, human realist film from Shochiku. Tons of fun paintings, a lot of them by Kitano, and sharp editing make the first 2/3 of this movie a low key treat. But the second Kitano himself shows up playing the artist in middle age, careful observation is traded for leering slapstick and by the time it ends with a typically Kitano reaffirmation of the bonds of marriage you’re already heading for the exit.

GOMORRA – the best foreign film I’ve seen up here so far, this Italian flick only features Chinese folks incidentally, but it’s an amazing crime film about the reach of the modern day mafia in Naples that’s slated for a January 2009 release from IFC Films. If you liked the PUSHER movies then this is like taking all three of them at once.