The Quiet – Over the last several years, Jamie Babbit has quietly assembled some of the most brutally honest and campily hysterical portrayals of dysfunctional suburbia, burgeoning teen sexuality, and high school life with an emphasis on cheerleaders and popularity.  Her work on the woefully short-lived television show Popular, and cult hit But I'm a Cheerleader left me eager for more, and I got it with The Quiet.  Only with less of the camp, since this film plays way more straight and much more serious than I was expecting.

Dot (The Ballad of Jack & Rose's Camilla Belle) is a deaf mute sent to live with her godmother (Edie Falco) after her father dies.  In addition to her handicapabilities, Dot also has to deal with a wicked cheerleading stepsister (Elisha Cuthbert) and a stepdad (Martin Donovan) with some pretty messed up ideals about what a perfect family represents.  And people talking about her like she's not there.  And nobody, other than a lunch lady, knowing sign language.  I could go on, but I won't.

There's nothing new or groundbreaking here in terms of content, but as usual, Babbit (she's also directed PSB-recommended television shows like Gilmore Girls, Malcolm in the Middle, and the hastily-canceled Wonderfalls) puts it all together really nicely.

The Notorious Bettie Page – For some reason, Gretchen Mol (The Shape of Things) was the last person I thought of when I heard Mary Harron (American Psycho) was making a biopic about "the girl with the perfect figure."  Didn't think she had the goods, so to speak.  But the two women pull off a rare accomplishment: Making a biopic that is neither overly long (see Ray) nor slave to a paint-by-numbers format (see Ray).  The majority of the film is in black-and-white, for Pete's sake.

Okay, there are some other issues, like rewriting history about Page's Congressional smut trial testimony, and the story about the destruction of the bulk of Page's photographs and negatives, taken by the legendary Irving "the Pin-Up King" Klaw.  And the fact that the film just kind of ends, but that's part of the formula-breaking thing, so I'll keep quiet about it.  Mol is terrific, looking like a cross between Rachel Weisz and Jennifer Tilly, and the supporting cast (Lily Taylor, Jared Harris, David Strathairn) is a lot of fun, too.  And you learn a ton about Bettie, from her life in 1930's Nashville through her rocket to fame after a move to New York City in 1949.  Harron uses a lot of period stock footage that seamlessly fit into her picture.

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story – It's difficult to concisely describe what the latest from Michael Winterbottom (9 Songs) is about.  What you see on the screen is essentially Winterbottom's mockumentary about the fictitious shooting of a film adaptation of an unfilmable 18th century novel called The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.  We're treated to both the behind-the-scenes goings on behind the camera, as well as finished footage from the picture.

Steve Coogan is the star of both Winterbottom's movie, as well as the fake one contained therein (which is directed by Jeremy Northam), and his performance made me laugh more than any other at this festival, save Sarah Silverman.  He's never read the book, which tells the non-sequential story of his character's conception, birth and unfortunate naming, mostly because he's too busy flirting with his assistant (Naomie Harris) without his girlfriend (Kelly Macdonald) finding out.  Also, there's the battle over the film's financing, script, last-second casting decisions, as well as a reporter (played by actual New York Times writer Stephen Rodrick) who will run a story about Coogan's debaucheries unless he is granted a lengthy interview, and a constant battle with the costume department over his heel size so he can remain taller than co-star Rob Brydon.

This is really funny stuff, especially if you're into British humor, or appreciate lots of inside jokes about the filmmaking process.

Bee Season – Oakland is the setting for the third film from the directing team of Scott McGehee and David Siegel (The Deep End).  Truthfully, this picture might have blown me away if its driving force wasn't rooted in the mysterious secrets of Kabbalah, which instead, made me feel like I was being brainwashed with some kind of cult recruitment film (especially since Naomi Fuller's adaptation of Myla Goldberg's novel pretty much mocks at least two other major religions).  At the end, I knew something horrible or something magical was going to happen, but instead, I got something that looked like a Fruitopia commercial.

Richard Gere and Juliette Binoche might be the big names in Season, but the star is their screen daughter, newcomer Flora Cross, who plays Eliza Naumann, a sixth-grader who is the youngest of two children in a dizzily happy Jewish family.  Eliza begins to work her way through local levels of the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee (see Spellbound).  The further she gets, the more whacked out her family starts to act.  Mom (Binoche) breaks into houses to steal shiny trinkets from strangers.  Big brother Aaron (Max Minghella) abandons Judaism when he meets a super-cute Hare Krishna disciple (Kate Bosworth).  And Dad (Gere) becomes convinced the odd fugue states Eliza enters when she's spelling a word is some type of mystical ability described in his doctorate thesis on the Kabbalah.  And I thought I had things rough when I was in the sixth grade . . .

Season was made with care, but little warmth.  This was okay for the tone of The Deep End, but it just doesn't fit here.  It's by no means a bad film, though.  If you can block out the Kabbalah junk, maybe you'll be able to enjoy it more than I did.

Where the Truth Lies – It's hard to tell what will alienate audiences more: The multiple narratives, the multiple time settings, the NC-17 rating, the mockery of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, or the Where the Truth Lies' last 20 minutes, which offers more twists and turns than your lower intestines (after a certain number of jukes, you'll just stop caring).

Atom Egoyan (Ararat) directs and adapts (from the Rupert Holmes novel) this story about a '50s nightclub duo who had the world in the palm of their hands before suddenly and unexpectedly breaking up right after a wildly successful 1957 Veteran's Day Telethon to raise money for sick children.  The bulk of Lies' action takes place 15 years later, where crack reporter Karen O'Connor (Alison Lohman) is trying to uncover the truth about a dead hotel employee (Rachel Blanchard) discovered in the posh suite of "straight-man" Vince Collins (Colin Firth) and "wacky Jew" Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon) after the aforementioned three-day telethon.  The more Karen digs, the more surprises she uncovers.  I think the biggest surprise is that Lohman was playing Nicolas Cage's daughter here at the Festival two years ago (Matchstick Men), and here she gets slammed by Bacon and has a girl/girl scene this year.

The ending is such a strange cliché, most of the folks on the way out of my press/industry screening were openly mocking it on the way out.  You don't encounter that too often here, since most viewers at these screenings are too scared to talk about a film's merits without conferring with a small pack of colleagues first.

These five films were all screened before 7:00 PM (whew!) which left me time to take in the Red Sox/Blue Jays game, in which Big Papi Ortiz slammed two home runs.  The first sailed right into my section.  Die Yankees!