Struggling for fresh ideas for your T-shirt stand at the Hillside Festival this year? I have just the ticket.

“Guelph is great!” says Julianne Moore at an interview earlier today. And she said it with so much emphasis, the exclamation mark is totally warranted. You could even use two or three. Now imagine that printed on the front side alongside a picture of her all sketched out in Boogie Nights. Then on the back you can print what she said next: “But the prison for the criminally insane is not so nice.” We’ll have to take her word on that since they don’t do guided tours of what used to be the Ontario Reformatory. Otherwise, I can’t wait for Xavier Rudd to look out from the stage and see a sea of those Ts.

Moore and the other makers of Blindness held court at a luncheon at the Hotel Martinez. Actor and screenwriter Don McKellar admitted to feeling a little worse for wear after the film’s post-premiere shindig, at which I consumed both free Veuve Clicquot and free lemon macarons — formidable! Judging by the visual splendour of the yellow Yves Saint Laurent dress Moore wore to the premiere, I don’t think her handlers would’ve allowed her near anything that might have left a smudge. Such swanky circumstances are a very far cry from the squalid conditions seen on screen, though she claims that Guelph’s old lock-up was not such a bad place to spend some time. “It’s on these beautiful grounds, this bucolic park thing,” she says. “There are all these ducks and little chipmunks running around. It was a lovely summer in Guelph.”

Indeed, it sounds like a great place to spend the end of the world, or at least make a movie about it. But she notes that the horrific dystopia depicted in Blindness should not be regarded at a comfortable remove. “I always say movies don’t predict the future, they really reflect the culture,” she says. “In the last five or even 10 years, there’s been so much that’s happened politically and socially and in terms of natural disasters and man-made disasters, it’s been overwhelming for us. There’s a huge sense of anxiety globally — this film definitely reflects all that.”

Moore adds that the movie’s non-specificity of time, place and character allows it to touch on a wide range of contemporary dilemmas. “I think it becomes reductive if it ends up being like an ‘issue film,’” she says. “It’s not like we’re really proposing a solution. It’s just like, ‘Let’s ruminate on it.’ That’s definitely what’s so moving about it. It allows you to participate in it — in a sense, we’re all participating in it every single day. The film allows you to feel part of something, not separate from it.”

Consider Blindness an all-inclusive sort of allegory — it’s a point that Moore’s collaborators all echo. But the mostly sour tone of the first wave of reviews in the trade magazines suggests the world of the film is not necessarily one which many critics are happy to have visited.

Instead, the movie that garnered the heartiest applause in any press screening I’ve attended so far was Kung Fu Panda. A special selection this year, the forthcoming Dreamworks animated pic (out June 6) also prompted the best received photo-op of the week: Jack Black doing slo-mo kung fu moves while being surrounded by dudes in panda costumes. The movie itself isn’t nearly so cheesy — indeed, it’s the most enjoyable and energetic Hollywood toon since Over the Hedge. Voicing the part of a furry martial arts adept, Black is uncharacteristically un-Jack Black-y in that he doesn’t pile on the shtick — he actually shows a measure of restraint. By contrast, the action setpieces are so wickedly kinetic and savvily choreographed, the result feels more like vintage Yuen Woo-ping than Shrek 3. And that’s a very good thing.

On tonight’s agenda: the latest by Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the debut feature by British art star Steve McQueen (no relation) and a new trio of films about Tokyo by Michel Gondry, Leos Carax and The Host director Bong Joon-ho. The lattermost movie’s cool potential may be sky high but no hipster would be caught dead wearing a T-shirt that said: “Tokyo is great!” Elora, Fergus or Orangeville, on the other hand…

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