Kristen Stewart

Sometimes, books just don't translate well onto the big screen. Want proof? Look no further than this week's release, On the Road. While you've got to give director Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) credit for tackling such an ambitious project, his adaptation of Jack Kerouac's beloved classic just doesn't work.

This year's Toronto Film Festival was made up of some pretty choice characters. I'm not speaking only about the characters we watched on screen (there were certainly some doozies there), but also the characters -- in real life -- we witnessed on the red carpets, at the press conferences and on the streets of Toronto in 2012.

Do I know Kristen Stewart? No, I can never claim that. But in the past 24 hours I've seen her three times, and spoken to her once -- not for an interview, but candidly, in a hallway at the InterContinental Hotel in Toronto. In that brief five minutes I learned more about Stewart than I ever could have from any interview or gossip mag.

Not at all like the Disney animated version, and leagues away from Mirror, Mirror (the Julia Roberts vehicle released earlier this year), SWATH is dark, grim, grisly and beautiful, all at the same time.

Hope you didn't think "The Hunger Games" was the only game (sorry) in town this week: premiering in front of prints of the slam-dunk box-office smash ...