The word on Paul Verhoeven's Blackbook (Zwartboek) around the TIFF was that it's "Showgirls meets Schindler's List," which is a cute bit of shorthand but decidedly misleading, not that I can begin to imagine what that movie would be like. All it really means is that we're never going to let Verhoeven live Showgirls down, so who can blame him for going back home to Holland, where he's still an object of veneration? Alas, you can take Verhoeven out of Hollywood but you can't take Hollywood out of Verhoeven; Blackbook is not so much a return to form--by which I mean a throwback to his subversive early work--as it is a supplement to his American output, the kind of Oscar-baiting wartime saga you just know he'd been aching to make with studio resources but only had the guts to execute in his native tongue. (In the press notes for the film, Verhoeven confesses that he stuck with genre in the U.S. because it better disguised his loose grasp of the English language.) The admittedly well-paced picture follows one Dutch Jewish woman's transformation from Anne Frank into Mata Hari as Rachel-cum-Ellis (Carice van Houten, for whom big things lie ahead) takes a Gestapo general (Jeroen Krabbé doppelgänger Sebastian Koch) for a lover as well as a job at his office, hoping it will all lead to the release of some fellow resistance fighters. Intended as a corrective of sorts to the implicitly anti-Semitic Soldier of Orange, Blackbook is no less a sticky wicket in that it distils espionage tropes from the Nazi atrocities; when Rachel's entire family is gunned down on a barge along with other Jewish fugitives, it's a mere catalyst, lacking much in the way of sincerity or historical resonance. With its increasingly glib machinations (at least one late-film contrivance would embarrass the writers of "Three's Company"), the screenplay by Verhoeven and long-time collaborator Gerard Soeteman could in fact have just as easily served as the template for a Roland Emmerich/Dean Devlin turkey. Verhoeven the Auteur dutifully mimics Hitchcock here and there (and even Hitchcock heir Brian De Palma in a flagrant Carrie homage), though he's most evident in van Houten's multiple disrobings--which, despite being at odds with Blackbook's commercial aspirations, give the film its strongest whiff of artistic integrity by shutting the door to the middlebrow-friendly PG-13 rating. PROGRAMME: Gala Presentations

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After having the title of his debut novel Generation X co-opted by the popular vernacular, Douglas Coupland staked a claim in the chick-lit-for-guys genre, his publishers no doubt hoping that zeitgeist lightning would strike twice. If anything, Everything's Gone Green, Coupland's first foray into screenwriting, makes him seem like Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused, still courting the twentysomething idealists because even though he gets older, they, so easy to commiserate with, stay the same age. Here we learn that Vancouver has sold out to its Hollywood North image, that the slow metabolism of the cubicle world discourages office drones from trying to climb the corporate ladder, and that money is poison--messages, all, that are at best disingenuous and at worst unseemly coming from a famous author now plying his trade in the film industry. The movie doesn't empathize with slackers--who'll be drawn to it like moths to a flame--so much as it offers them the seductive illusion of empathy, televangelist-style. (There's a pot subplot for good measure.) Leads Paulo Costanzo (late of TV's "Joey") and Steph Song are charming enough, but they're treading water; at the very least, Coupland would need the luxury of prose to vindicate this material. PROGRAMME: Canada First!

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Those hoping this unpredicted sequel to the terrific Henry Fool will be a Before Sunset should brace themselves for a Texasville. I think the problem is not that Parker Posey can't carry a picture (Posey's more of a movie star than she is a character actor, after all, so inflexible is her neurotic persona), but that her Fay Grim can't carry a picture. In that sense, Fay Grim is a little bit like a highbrow Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, with virtually everyone from Henry Fool returning to lend satellite support to a spastic cipher who was at best a beard for the subsumed homoeroticism at that film's epicentre. Reinventing Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan, limited to a powerhouse cameo) as an international man of mystery (thereby re-inflating his punctured ego, which maddeningly annuls Henry Fool), the movie jets single-mother Fay all over the globe in search of her estranged husband, whose once-derided memoir--sought after by the publishing world now that Henry has become a fugitive, natch--might actually be an encrypted document that poses a threat to National Security. Timely where the first film was timeless (THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER's Michael Rechtshaffen succinctly called it "a seriocomic Syriana"), Fay Grim is a constant, fatiguing toggle between obnoxious quirk and Al-Jazeera. Put simply, everybody's trying too hard--or not hard enough. PROGRAMME: Special Presentations

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Larry Fessenden has always been an artist and a consummate professional, but there's a newfound commercial glaze to The Last Winter--however ironic its use of widescreen--that makes one feel somehow less inclined to coddle it. An ambiguous statement, I know; I guess what I'm saying is that if I have any reservations about the piece (and I had fewer about Wendigo and Habit), I don't really fear seeming anti-intellectual in voicing them. Fessenden's own private The Thing, The Last Winter unfurls at an Alaskan outpost, where the blustery Pollack (Ron Perlman, delivering another perfectly-metered performance) has docked hoping to kick-start stalled plans to drill for oil. He's pitted against environmental scientist Hoffman (James Le Gros), with whom his former girlfriend Abby (the lovely Connie Britton) has fallen into bed, giving Fessenden ample opportunity to exploit the alpha-male subtext of many a red state/blue state conflict. In fact, the Bush/Gore allegory is so compelling in and of itself that, while I wouldn't begrudge the picture its horror elements (Fessenden is the genre fan's salvation, after all), with supernatural as opposed to psychological forces taking out the team, The Last Winter builds to an apocalypse whose nihilism suggests equivocation. Too, the picture is kind of perched, teeter-totter-like, on a shocking Blair Witch set-piece, never to reach its lofty heights again. Still and all, an elegiac piece of filmmaking that transcends cheap thrills in each of its onscreen casualties; I'd love to see Fessenden try his hand at a war movie. PROGRAMME: Contemporary World Cinema

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To paraphrase comedian Andy Kindler talking about The Three Stooges, I finally figured out why I don't like sketch comic Michael Ian Black: he's not funny. Until The Pleasure of Your Company, Black's hyphenate debut, I thought maybe it was a/n natural/irrational aversion to his countenance--he looks bizarrely like a member of Our Gang, one who just keeps getting taller. But that ferret face is only the most appropriate avatar for Black's hipster snottiness. Around these parts, we often talk about movies that hate movies; The Pleasure of Your Company is by and for people who hate movies. There were a lot of laughs at my press screening, and I can't help but think it's because we'd reached the halfway mark of the Festival: the audience was bloated on cinema and thus up for anything that facilitated schadenfreude towards it. The plot essentially finds perfect strangers Anderson (Jason Biggs, informally reprising his American Pie character) and Katie (Isla Fisher) getting engaged on a whim and then making bad first impressions on each other's friends and future in-laws; The Pleasure of Your Company is all sarcastic contrivance and convention and you're supposed to laugh at it (and at rom-coms in general by proxy), but a snake can't subsist on its own tail for very long. (Less than ninety minutes, it turns out.) Putting quotation marks around contemporary junk cinema--even the edgy jokes are "edgy"--is just more of the same hollow irony Black practises as VH1's resident Mike Nelson. The man's neither a satirist nor a postmodernist--he's a parasite. If you're wondering how the movie managed a half-star, it's because I'm an ape and Fisher looks awfully sexy in black lingerie. PROGRAMME: Special Presentations

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This Canuck Rushmore really got on my nerves. The movie makes a crucial miscalculation in the early going by introducing its puny teenaged hero, Duane Balfour (Douglas Smith), in revenge mode: given that we already know Duane's girlfriend (Jane McGregor) is way out of his league, he would seem to have pre-emptively settled any scores he could possibly have with the Most Popular Kid in School (porcine Nicholas Carella, as miscast as Haylie Duff was as the distaff equivalent in Napoleon Dynamite), and so this retribution without an onscreen context looks petty. Hoping to redeem the family name (his father, a prophet of doom, was killed in a Ruby Ridge scenario), Duane eventually decides to run for mayor, but he's a Quixote surrounded by pragmatists; when Duane finally throws in the towel, his entire support system--family, friends, teachers--breathes a sigh of relief. (Anything less would be frankly unCanadian.) Small problem: director Michael Mabbott isn't media-savvy (while guesting on a radio show, Duane doesn't wear headphones; an asshole news reporter's microphone is never plugged into anything; etc.). Big problem: Citizen Duane is an underdog/coming-of-age comedy that's neither funny nor poignant nor ingratiating. PROGRAMME: Contemporary World Cinema

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I knew I would love The Host as soon as I realized that the man in the surgical scrubs was none other than national treasure Scott Wilson, who, in his most heinous role since In Cold Blood, observes dust on the jars of formaldehyde in the morgue of a South Korean military base and bullies a reluctant attendant into disposing of them by dumping their contents down the sink. It's not merely that I enjoyed watching a post-Monster/Junebug Wilson complete a hat-trick, but also that, because he's an actor of such gravitas, he manages to distil all the atomic terror of Rubber Suit cinema into a single barb of Western arrogance. This is a movie that makes its points succinctly (after we've just seen dozens of Koreans devoured by a beautifully-realized giant fish monster from the Han River, the local news reports on the lone American casualty), and if The Host doesn't have very nice things to say about the U.S. influence on Eastern culture, it offers a life-affirming portrait of the Everyman, with our unlikely hero, shiftless widower Gang-du (Song Kang-ho), reminding of a moving passage from Pauline Kael's Nashville review in which she notes that the outwardly-misanthropic Haven Hamilton is the only character who acts selflessly following the climactic assassination attempt. At the risk of downplaying how funny the picture is, allow me to single out its cinematic fluency; comparisons to Spielberg's Jaws, Jurassic Park, and especially War of the Worlds are inevitable, but the homage that resonated with me is a close-up of Gang-du's young daughter Hyun-seo (Ko Ah-sung), her face vertically streaked with dirt in a way that uncannily evokes Kwaidan's Hoichi the Earless. Foreshadowing in retrospect, it feels like director Bong Joon-ho's reassurance that he won't, unlike Spielberg of late, cop out. PROGRAMME: Midnight Madness

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As much as I'd love to jump on the C.R.A.Z.Y. bandwagon, I found its characters repellent and its soundtrack selections laughably pedestrian. (The picture's recycling of FM staples like "Space Oddity" and "Sympathy for the Devil" doesn't achieve suture so much as it makes the director, an alleged vinylphile, look like a philistine with an awfully small record collection.) Still, I can't deny that it marks a sort of progress for Canadian film in that it at least gropes for joy, has relatively healthy attitudes about sex, and isn't without peripheral vision. While it's still too soon to determine if C.R.A.Z.Y. will go down as a trailblazer or an anomaly, Torn Apart (La Coupure), which hails from the same province (Québec), nevertheless feels like a giant step backwards. The movie opens with soccer mom Christine (Valérie Cantin) doing the horizontal mambo with her lover Christophe (Marc Marans) in an apartment with the shades incriminatingly drawn; when she returns home, her mother (Marie-Christine Perreault) says something to the effect of, "How was your visit with your brother Christophe?" Mom seems to know that their relationship is incestuous, as do Christine's adolescent children--son and daughter effigies of Christophe and Christine--and the cuckold, Mario (Michael Kelly), but why should they seek catharsis when they can torture themselves with this intel? A suffocatingly insular moebius strip of masochism, Torn Apart (the French title's literal translation is "The Cut") exists solely to maintain the cinematic status quo. It doesn't look like much, either. PROGRAMME: Canada First!

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I question whether Denis Dercourt's Chabrolian The Page Turner (La Tourneuse de pages)--which more than earns its presumptuous double entendre of a title--actually has anything of consequence to say, but I sure got a charge out of it. Mélanie, a butcher's daughter, blows her shot at getting into a music conservatory by becoming flustered when one of the entrance exam's administrators, famed concert pianist Mme. Fouchécourt (Catherine Frot), interrupts her audition to sign an autograph. Some years later, the grown-up Mélanie (L'Enfant's Déborah François, who cleans up good) worms her way into Fouchécourt's life and proceeds to demonstrate that Hell indeed hath no fury. What's refreshing about The Page Turner is that Mélanie's revenge scheme, such as it is, is predicated on serendipity: although the picture sets itself up as a shell game, Mélanie isn't a sooper-genius out to prove the screenwriter's flair for reversals of expectation; she just repeatedly dangles herself on a hook and hopes for a bite. (Given that François suggests the love child of Anna Paquin and Julie Delpy, it's never a long wait.) Cold-blooded in that delectable way we associate with Patricia Highsmith, the film plays a little like a Sapphic Leave Her to Heaven (in particular with regards to Mélanie's sadistic treatment of the Fouchécourts' young son, Tristan (Antoine Martynciow)) while simultaneously harking back to All About Eve, though it blessedly lacks the latter's attendant piousness. Fans of Patrice Chéreau's Gabrielle may find Pascal Greggory's final scene as M. Fouchécourt especially witty. PROGRAMME: Contemporary World Cinema

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Online critic N.P. Thompson recalls a colleague lamenting the absence of cell phones in Ingmar Bergman's recent swan song Saraband, and in many ways, Susanne Bier's overwrought but not ineffectual After the Wedding (Efter brylluppet) is Bergman for these manic times. A fashionable strain of Western self-loathing courses through this tale of a fat cat, Jørgen (Rolf Lassgård), who summons Jacob (once and future Bond villain Mads Mikkelsen), the Danish head of a Bombay orphanage, to his office in Denmark, ostensibly to size up another potential almsman. In actuality, Jørgen is in the advanced stages of a terminal illness and wants to groom Jacob--his wife's ex-lover, as well as the biological father of his daughter--to replace him, if more at the dinner table than in the boardroom. Swapping the iris filter of her Brothers (Brødre) for a no-less-mannered eye motif (at various intervals, After the Wedding inappropriately resembles either a spaghetti western or a Lucio Fulci movie), Bier seems to dread directorial anonymity now that she's untethered from the legitimately-undistinguished Dogme95 aesthetic. Still, the performances manage to weather these hyperactive cutaways, with Lassgård proving in his wrenching final scene that you can drop the Big Daddy façade without dishonouring the archetypal dying patriarch of Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams. PROGRAMME: Gala Presentations

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