Of the two things I'll never see again, one wasn't a movie at all. The festival's opening night was supposed to close with a midnight screening of Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat, whose subtitle, I am happy to report, is "Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan." But 20 minutes into the film, just as Cohen's road-tripping Kazakh journo was learning how to make a "not" joke, the projector gave up the ghost. Cohen (or rather Borat, since Cohen made all his public appearances in character) assured the audience the problem would be fixed soon. "We had the best projectionist in Kazakhstan stick it together with horse glue," he said hopefully. But the minutes dragged on, and even the amateur mesmerist in the fifth row couldn't make time go faster.

A CRACKING GOOD YARN: Paul Verhoeven's Black Book, a highlight of this year's Toronto Film Festival.

Enter Michael Moore, gadfly documentarian and onetime projectionist. He joined the confused-looking throng huddled around the projector, and within minutes, the crowd was chanting his name (or perhaps they were just trying to drown out the mesmerist). As a messenger was dispatched to scavenge replacement parts, Moore and Borat director Larry Charles took the stage for an impromptu Q&A. Charles, who looks like a cross between a Hasidic rabbi and Elwood Blues, was asked by one audience member if his stringy beard was real or a disguise. Deadpaned Charles: "Both." A crack about Entourage role model Ari Emmanuel prompted an indignant "Hey!" from the man himself, who was seated the balcony, to which Moore replied, "Fix this or you're fired, motherfucker."

Alas, even a Hollywood superagent couldn't procure projector parts at 2 in the morning, so the evening shut down with a brief exchange between Borat and festival programmer Collin Geddes. But before he left, Borat had one parting shot. The clueless Kazakh, who gets some of biggest laughs indulging parodic anti-Semitism, yelled, "I blame the Jews!" and vanished into the night. (The movie, incidentally, was extremely funny, though not quite as much fun as not seeing it.)

By the next morning, the evening's antics were all over YouTube, a sign that even the biggest film festival in North America is not immune to the effects of microcinema. Every festival screening was preceded by a Motorola ad featuring 10-second excerpts from movies shot on cell phones: not long enough to get much of a sense of the film, but ample time to draw hoots and guffaws from the audience. Often, it was followed by an ad for a multiplex chain advising viewers to "See movies the way they're meant to be seen — Big." Who says the industry's in crisis?

Though he typically shoots on 8mm stock, Guy Maddin has no trouble thinking big. Brand Upon the Brain!, a semi-autobiographical fantasia set on an island orphanage, premiered as a "silent" film with orchestral accompaniment, a live narrator and three sound-effects artists (mangled celery for the sound of tearing flesh), not to mention an alleged castrato. (The lips of the large man in the cape and fur hat didn't quite match the angelic soprano coming out of the speakers, perhaps explaining the pre-show thank-you to a local children's choir.) A furious collage whose plot pits a cross-dressing teen detective against a mad scientist who drains children of their precious nectar, Brand is a dizzying Freudian fairy tale, relentlessly overstylized yet deeply personal. Naturally, Maddin claims the most outlandish parts are taken from his own life, like the scene where children jump on an old man's coffin to sink it into flooded ground. (The film repeats at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 15, but both screenings are sold out.)

Just as implausibly personal, if executed with significantly less panache, Bobcat Goldthwait's Sleeping Dogs Lie begins outlandishly and develops into a surprisingly mature (if not too mature) examination of the price of honesty. Formerly titled Stay, and best known as "the dog blowjob movie," Dogs opens with Melinda Page Hamilton, then a bored college freshman, idly deciding to suck off her pet pooch. (Don't worry: no animals were harmed, or pleasured.) Cut to several years later: She and her boyfriend are engaged to be married, and he proposes that they reveal their deepest secrets to each other. After some dithering, she complies, and the resultant strain poses the question of whether there can be such a thing as too much truth. Though its shocking premise seems to augur a gross-out comedy, Dogs is more tender and insightful than any movie with a woman going down on a dog has a right to be. The camerawork is merely functional, and low-light scenes are plagued by a weird diagonal striation, but if only because the bar was set so low, Sleeping Dogs Lie was one of the festival's most pleasant surprises. (Here's another: The film has U.S. distribution.)

The festival's most exuberant shock, however, was Paul Verhoeven's Black Book, his first film since 2000's dismal Hollow Man. Less a return to form than a rebirth, the return to Verhoeven's native Holland cross-breeds the director's scatological cynicism with the World War II thriller, producing an ever-shifting examination of wartime morality which is, first and foremost, a cracking good yarn. Dazzling newcomer Carice van Houten plays a Dutch Jew who dyes her hair blond and infiltrates Nazi HQ after her family is murdered while trying to flee. Seducing Germans with her sultry alto, she wends her way into an expanding maze of plots and counter-plots which undermines absolute morality on both sides. An absurdly enjoyable (and vice-versa) blizzard of plot contortions gives way to the most pessimistic happy ending in recent memory. Festival consensus is that van Houten, who survives implied comparisons to Garbo, Harlow and Dietrich, is about thirty seconds away from international stardom.

Just as surprising an entertainment was Syndromes and a Century, from the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Weerasethakul (or "Joe," as he's known to his English-speaking friends) is esteemed among cinephiles for cryptic, sensual works like last year's Tropical Malady, but Syndromes is something different, a shot of pure filmmaking joy. Loosely inspired by his parents' memories of working in hospitals as young doctors, Syndromes is a loose skein of tongue-in-cheek vignettes, shot through with the abstract weirdness of everyday life. There's a singing dentist, a Buddhist monk who dreams of being a DJ and a mysterious room full of smoke and half-finished prosthetic limbs. While recurring themes (one of which is recurrence itself) are easy enough to extract, the movie as a whole will likely require further viewings to reveal all its secrets. But you certainly don't have to understand it to enjoy it.

Going into the festival, the film to see was Gabriel Range's faux documentary Death of a President (or, as the festival schedule diplomatically put it, D.O.A.P. ). It didn't take long for the press to find out that the president in question was George W. Bush, touching off an entirely predictable furor; even the New York Times went so far as to label the movie anti-Bush without indicating that they'd actually seen it. In fact, the film's first half is a sobering and compelling account of a sitting president's assassination; anti-war protests turn violent, the mood in the streets gets ugly and Bush is gunned down after giving a speech to a group of wealthy businessmen. Range takes no delight in Bush's mock death, underlining the fact that, no matter how much one might want Bush gone, his violent removal would be bad news for all concerned. But the movie loses focus once the hunt for Bush's assassin begins, attempting to reframe the significance of his death as the search shifts to different suspects. In some ways, D.O.A.P. 's predictions are too tame; considering the outrageousness of its "what if...," it's a bit of a letdown to find the Cheney administration merely expanding the Patriot Act. (No internment camps? No forced deportation? Dream a little, guy.) A technical tour de force marred by a handful of sloppy technical errors, D.O.A.P. needs minor cleanup before its Stateside release. Here's hoping that presidential speechwriter's reference to "Kim Il-Jong" comes out in the wash.

(sam@citypaper.net)