by SARAH ROWLAND

Poor Cameron Crowe. The Almost Famous director is fast-becoming the joke of the 30th Toronto International Film Festival. Before every screening of Elizabethtown, some TIFF rep comes out and makes a disclaimer that what we're about to watch is a work in progress. That's an understatement; two-and-a-half hours later, all we're left with is a jambalaya of overplayed themes, dragged-out subplots and bed sores from sitting in one spot so long. Apparently Crowe is currently cooped up in a studio trying to finish cutting his Kentucky romcom, which stars Kirsten Dunst and Orlando Bloom. If he's really at such a loss as to what scenes he should kill, might I suggest ditching the 20-minute roadtrip montage tacked onto the end, Susan Sarandon's embarrassing tap dance number and the 10-minute "Freebird" crescendo?

But for every Elizabethtown screened at this year's TIFF, there are several unexpected indie gems and countless Asian sensations.

Director Jeff Feuerzeig, for instance, doesn't need to change a thing about The Devil and Daniel Johnston. This heartbreaking documentary about Austin's iconic outsider musician and his ongoing battle with mental illness is so good, it makes the Dandy Warhols vs. Brian Jonestown Massacre doc DIG! look like a high school spat. Highlights include Sonic Youth cruising the streets of New York searching for their little outpatient protégé, and the bidding war between two major labels that Kurt Cobain sparked when he started showing up to every photo shoot in a Johnston T-shirt - while Johnston was locked up in a psych ward convinced that demons were trying to kill him.

While Johnston fears the devil, others bow down to the Beast in Metal: A Headbanger's Journey. Armed with a Master's degree in anthropology and a lifelong obsession with Iron Maiden, co-director Sam Dunn explores every facet and subgenre of metal culture, from Birmingham's beginnings to Norway's church-burning days to Sunset Boulevard's hair metal. He even looks at the homoerotic undertones of grown men in unitards serenading starry-eyed boys.

In Pick Up the Mic, the homo content isn't a sidebar. Alex Hinton examines the world of gay hip-hop and how, for some, rhyming is the only outlet for an otherwise oppressive existence.

Still to come in the rock docs program is Scorsese's No Direction Home: Bob Dylan and Stoned, a biopic about Brian Jones.

Other standout films include John Hillcoat's Australian western The Proposition, which was written by Nick Cave and stars Guy Pearce as the middle brother of an outlaw gang. The deal is he can save his little brother from a public hanging if he turns his older brother over to the sheriff. Imagine a bunch of tightly wound cowboys riding around in a Nick Cave song and you get the picture. As an added bonus, Hillcoat has shot one of the best bullet-to-the-head scenes to hit the screen in recent cinematic history.

In Breakfast on Pluto, director Neil Jordan lives up to hype with another film about a tranny caught in IRA politics. Despite the obvious parallels, this is not The Crying Game 2. It's a far more optimistic tale of a sweet but incredibly naïve Irish girl named Kitten (Cillian Murphy), who heads to London in search of her birth parents.

In the laugh-out-loud category, The President's Last Bang is a wickedly funny black comedy about the 1979 assassination of South Korean president Park Chung-Hee. And Michael Winterbottom's Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story is hilarious film-within-a-film based on the making of Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. And judging by the way comedian Steve Coogan and Winterbottem have been spotted around their hotel giggling like a couple of school boys, this film was as fun to make as it was to watch.

>> Movie Listings