TORONTO -- Even with a bandaged hand, George Clooney is master of the autograph mambo.

It goes like this: Sign and step, and sign and step, and pivot at the end of the line and sprint across the street and repeat. When passers-by had heard that Clooney was coming to a theater on the campus of Ryerson University on Saturday night, they stopped in their tracks. As one woman could be heard telling her husband, who was wrangling two small children, "It's George Clooney. We have to stay." So they did and Clooney was the first big name on the scene for "Up in the Air."

Sarah Adam, 22, a fourth-year (or what we call a senior) dance major at the university, was studying on campus when she heard Clooney was due. She and friend Ellery Swinkels, a sociology major and also 22, made a dash for the line with Sarah producing an H&M bag for the actor to sign and Swinkels unearthing a scrap of paper from her purse. When it fluttered across the metal barricade, Clooney chivalrously picked it up, scribbled his name and moved on.

After signing another girl's hand with his own trusty marker, he thought better of repeating the exercise and demurred when asked by another fan for similar treatment. Not good for the skin, he said, sounding a bit like his old "ER" doc but grayer and far better dressed in a signature dark suit and shirt.

Yes, you gotta love Clooney and the 34th Toronto International Film Festival certainly does.

With no Brad Pitt this year, it's Clooney everyone wants to see although they won't turn their noses up if Matt Damon or Viggo Mortensen or Michael Douglas strolls by.

Clooney is here promoting two movies, "Up in the Air" and "The Men Who Stare at Goats," which got the red-carpet treatment a day earlier at Roy Thomson Hall. In "Up in the Air," he plays a corporate downsizer and business traveler who is happiest on the road. The movie, also starring Vera Farmiga, Jason Bateman and Anna Kendrick, features some real people who lost their jobs and are inserted into moving montages.

Just when you think you know where "Up in the Air" is headed, it changes course like a plane rerouted to another airport for refueling. It easily could garner a Best Actor nomination for Clooney, who could use a mate for his supporting actor Oscar for "Syriana."

So far, no "Juno" or "Slumdog Millionaire" has emerged as a festival favorite but the crop of movies appears to be a strong one, with Drew Barrymore making her directorial debut, Megan Fox unofficially crowned the festival "It Girl," and such illustrious figures as Charles Darwin and John Keats getting their due on film, too. On the other side of the spectrum are movies such as "Kelin," a feature from Kazakhstan that uses no dialogue, just some battle cries and wails.

The festival started Thursday night and winds up Saturday with a slate of awards, although the crowds peak during the opening weekend and dwindle as the week progresses.

Some snapshots from the festival so far:

"The Road" is bleak -- the landscape stripped of color and life -- but blessed with a heartbreaking turn by Viggo Mortensen as a father trying to guide his son to a safer or simply warmer place in a post-apocalyptic world. In a couple of scenes where he shucks his shirt or clothes, you can see how thin he became. He looks like a man who is hungry every minute of every desolate day.

Among the people or organizations which receive special thanks at the end: Trustees of Conneaut Lake Park, which allowed some filming there although it's not the sort that will attract tourists.

Anyone who's worried that Mortensen is quitting acting should stop. He told a press conference yesterday that, unlike some actors who bluff about having 20 projects they're not at liberty to discuss, he was just being honest with someone a little while back. Asked if he had a movie lined up, he said no, which was twisted into reports he's leaving the business.

"I never said it," so no, he's not quitting acting. He looked in fighting trim with shoulder-length brown hair, suit, open-collar purple shirt and a heart pin on his lapel.

In other clearing-the-air matters, director John Hillcoat, Mortensen and young Kodi Smit-McPhee cast "The Road" not as a post-apocalyptic tale but a love story between father and son and their efforts to cling to decency and humanity.

"It's not really about what the state the world is in, that's a device in this story to exaggerate what anybody could understand," Mortensen said. "What's going to happen to my kid if I'm not around for a few hours? What's going to happen if I'm not around forever? Anybody can understand that, which is why I think [Cormac] McCarthy's 'The Road' has had more universal appeal around the world than any other book, including 'No Country for Old Men.' "

If the father isn't around, the boy has "no food, no roof, it's cold and there's people looking to eat him. That's about as bad as you can get," Mortensen said.

The little girls looked like they should be dressed as princesses or fairies or Hannah Montana, but they were made up as pint-size zombies as part of a tribute to director George A. Romero that attracted hundreds of people, some with fake wounds, gnawed flesh and blood, to downtown's Yonge-Dundas Square.

It was all zombies all the time, with footage from the 2008 Toronto Zombie Walk playing on an oversize outdoor screen and warming up the crowd for a Romero appearance, Canadian short about a zombie curling team and the original "Night of the Living Dead."

The head of the festival's Midnight Madness program, which was giving Romero's "Survival of the Dead" its North American premiere hours later, introduced the former Pittsburgher, who has called Toronto home for five years.

Standing against an illuminated orange and white TIFF logo, Romero said he had found a group of people he likes to work with and considers Toronto a "wonderful city," adding, "This is where I'm going to stay." He briefly recounted the humble origins of "Night of the Living Dead" more than four decades ago: "I think we were sort of pissed off that the '60s hadn't really changed the world -- some of that anger is in the film -- but basically we were just trying to make a good old-fashioned horror film that pushed the envelope a little bit."

Matt Damon gained 30 pounds -- thanks to pizza and beer -- for "The Informant!" opening Friday. He plays Mark Whitacre, an executive at Archer Daniels Midland and a whistleblower who casts himself as the hero in the white hat but has a little problem with the truth, not to mention keeping his mouth shut.

Asked at a press conference what his wife thought of his weight gain, he said, "There was just more of me to love. She was a good sport about it. We had fun. I loved parading around with my belly and my stepdaughter thought it was really funny, too," that he got "all squishy."

His character's running interior monologues are hilarious (it's as if someone opened up a latch on his brain and shook out every random thought, observation, factoid or aside). Screenwriter Scott Z. Burns said he was always fascinated with the idea of an unreliable narrator, which prompted Damon to simultaneously offer an impromptu commentary about a nearby chandelier, much as his character would have done. It brought down the house and produced an impromptu round of applause.

When asked about Oscar buzz -- since actors who change their appearances sometimes win awards -- the ever-charming Damon joked, "I tallied up all the things that seem to gain awards, and we just basically made up an algorithm and then wrote the movie around that. That's why I did it."

Pausing for a comic beat, he added, "And then the Oscar campaign is over."

Ewan McGregor sprinted to the door of the Sutton Place Hotel, outrunning some photographers on his tail. Kris Kristofferson greeted fans outside the Intercontinental Hotel, while inside in the restaurant Penelope Cruz entertained a table of 10 reporters and then gave up her seat to "Broken Embraces" co-star Lluis Homar, who brought a translator along to help him through the few rough spots.

Yards away, Alfred Molina, Peter Sarsgaard and Dominic Cooper made selective rounds for their movies. Fans have been stationed outside the Intercontinental, Four Seasons, Park Hyatt and other swanky venues with digital cameras or cell phones in hand.

Cruz, in a summery belted dress with ruffles across the hips, hot pink sweater and wedges that added three or four inches to her height, talked a bit about appearing in Rob Marshall's "Nine," opening Nov. 25 in Pittsburgh. She worked on the movie from late August 2008 to February, with January and February spent in Italy.

"I loved it, I always wanted to do a musical and I loved the feeling of dancing for five hours a day ... and the challenge of having to sing and having to prepare for that and feeling completely vulnerable."

Scared? "Of course, I think we all were scared and we could all understand how the other one was feeling, that's why we had a very supportive team, we were all together all the time. The training part, we had a building full of different rooms where we would do the singing, the acting, the choreography," with classes all day long.

The final reel of Jane Campion's film "Bright Star" was put on upside down for a packed press and industry screening. At a crucial moment in the movie, the picture went out of focus and then the characters of John Keats and Fanny Brawne appeared suspended from the ceiling like bats and talking gibberish.

By the time experts appeared in the projection booth, it was too late to do anything and the theater started to empty out. One wag cracked, "I think he dies," since the young English poet had been stricken with tuberculosis at that point and was contemplating heading to warmer climes. Because of the snafu, the festival squeezed in another showing of the movie at 8 a.m. Saturday

On Saturday, the movie at the Ryerson was cut short when someone pulled the fire alarm not long before the end of Joe Dante's "The Hole," about brothers who find a seemingly bottomless hole in their basement. As festival-goers filed out, one grumbled that if the movie doesn't get a distributor, he may never know how it ends.