FIPRESCI, the international critics’ organization to which I belong, has announced its annual Grand Prix. This year’s winner is Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood”. Go, Team Plainview!

It was my honor to be asked to review the film for the site; you can find it here. But what’s also pretty nifty is the Spanish translation of that review; it’s the first time I’ve ever been reprinted in another language, and it’s kinda awesome — I can’t stop giggling over the way my description of Daniel Day-Lewis as the bastard son of John Huston in “Chinatown” and Mr. Burns from “The Simpsons” reads en Espanol.

The Grand Prix will be presented to Anderson at the San Sebastian film festival later this month. Felicitations, P.T.!

How slow was last weekend, release-wise? Just about the only thing we could come up with for my Sympatico/MSN movies column was a rundown of the history of the scattershot parody.

It tied in to “Disaster Movie”, you see. It was either that or something on French science-fiction for “Babylon A.D.”, and there really isn’t much beyond “Fantastic Planet”, “Le Dernier Combat” and “The Fifth Element” …

… well, there’s “Eden Log“, but trust me, it ain’t worth the time.

Ben Stiller’s “Tropic Thunder” was the #1 movie for the third straight weekend, which is actually quite impressive given the way distribution works these days.

(Remember how “Indiana Jones and the Last Wheeze of the Franchise” was dethroned after one week by the “Sex and the City” movie? I bet Steven Spielberg does.)

But nobody’s paying attention to that. The story of the weekend is “The Dark Knight” breaking $500 million domestically — it’s only the second movie to do so, after “Titanic”.

That iis, indeed, something to talk about; grossing half a billion dollars in less than two months is unprecedented, and the bigness of the number is an elegant way to step around the generally meager returns of Labor Day weekend.

Still, “Tropic Thunder” hanging on to the #1 postion shouldn’t be completely ignored. It’s one more jewel in Robert Downey, Jr.’s crown … between this and “Iron Man”, he’s given Paramount’s summer a far larger boost than either Harrison Ford or Mike Myers. And who would have seen that coming this time last year?

Labour Day weekend is the slowest box-office weekend of the year; thus, it’s become a boneyard where studios traditionally dump their problem films.

Most of the movies opening this week — “Babylon A.D.”, “College”, “Disaster Movie”, “Outsourced” — weren’t even screened for us beforehand … which is just as well, really, since there are so many TIFF screenings already jockeying for our attention. (Yeah, Peace Arch screened “Goal II”, but I had a conflict; Deirdre liked it okay.)

The one exception, both in availability and quality, is “Traitor” — a good (if not great) espionage picture built around a fine performance from Don Cheadle. Unfortunately, the marketing is built around a major spoiler, and I’m positive that knowing it kept me from fully plugging into the picture when I saw it last week.

(The projector kacking out after about 20 minutes, and the subsequent negotiations with the theater personnel to move the print to another room so we could finish the movie, couldn’t have helped much either.)

But if you haven’t seen the trailer or the TV spots, and you have access to a well-maintained megaplex, you could do a lot worse.

Okay, so the grammatically correct slug would be “Cover: Mine”, but you get what I’m going for, right?

NOW’s gala pre-TIFF issue hits the street today, featuring my very first cover story for the paper — a feature on the Canada First! entry “Coopers’ Camera”. You should check it out.

And yes, this is what brought me to the “Daily Show” studios last month: Face time! With Jason Jones and Samantha Bee! And their infant son! (And Jon Stewart’s dog!) For a movie that’s actually quite good, and deserves all the ink it can get!

Seriously, people: The next time I complain about my stressful career — and even money says that’ll be happening real soon — please point me in the direction of some perspective. I have the best goddamn job in the world.

Let’s see … it’s late August, I’m seeing bizarre German movies about 14th century teenage boys who get drafted into Satanism … yup, we must be midway through the press screenings for the Toronto International Film Festival.

TIFF doesn’t officially get going for another week, but by then I’ll have filed something like fifty reviews for NOW’s expansive coverage — which starts in tomorrow’s issue, with a cover story by yours truly — and suffered at least one psychotic episode.

But right now, I’m chugging along on sugar and caffeine, and cranking out all sorts of coverage. Here’s my annual Sympatico/MSN festival overview, as well as a gallery of TIFF’s more memorable events … which has somehow been re-branded as the festival’s “most shocking moments”.

I’m not really sure what qualifies as “shocking” about the 1999 run of premieres that subsequently went on to dominate the Oscars, but I guess you have to get people’s attention somehow.

“The House Bunny” may not have conquered the box-office over the weekend — “Tropic Thunder” held onto the #1 spot — but Anna Faris’ giddy comedy did almost as well as the leader, and as Buzz Aldrin once said, second comes right after first.

And based on the unanimous critical praise for Faris’ performance — hell, some of us even went that extra mile for her — the movie has achieved its artistic goal: Anna Faris is finally a star.

It’s almost like there was some kind of plan at work here.

This is always the way it goes — the TIFF press screenings are in full gear, my every spare minute is devoted to clearing my pre-festival deadlines … and distributors are still cranking out ten theatrical releases a week. Who’s going to see all of these? Who has the time?

Okay, there’s an upside: Now that I’m at NOW, I only have to cover five of them. So let’s get right to it:

“Beaufort”: Israel’s entry for the foreign-language Oscar — well, after “The Band’s Visit” was disqualified for mostly being in English — finally gets a Canadian theatrical run. Adam finds it somewhat underwhelming.

“Boy A”: A young man (Andrew Garfield) tries to re-enter society after spending most of his adolescence in juvenile detention in John Crowley’s TIFF ’07 entry, which got dropped into theatrical release so quickly that none of us were able to prep a review. I heard good things in London, though.

“Death Race”: Jason Statham gets behind the wheel of Paul W.S. Anderson’s remake/update of the Roger Corman classic, which apparently bears no similarity to the original beyond having some racing in it, and also death. Over at Film Freak Central, Walter Chaw frames his disappointment in the proper context.

“Elegy”: Ben Kingsley beds Penelope Cruz in director Isabel Coixet’s latest meditation on the unknowable majesty of the human heart, or something. I had very little patience for Coixet’s previous films, “My Life Without Me” and “The Secret Life of Words”, so Susan takes this one.

“Frozen River“: As a working-class mom who starts smuggling human cargo across the Canadian-American border, Melissa Leo gives a wholly unsentimental performance in Courtney Hunt’s Sundance award-winner; thing is, the movie around her is kind of lousy.

“Hamlet 2“: In which Steve Coogan play a sexy Jesus who rocks us. It’s really that simple.

“Henry Poole is Here“: Luke Wilson is about fifteen years too young for the role of a wet-eyed mope who experiences a spiritual redemption in Mark Pellington’s wretched, smarmy melodrama. I kept thinking David Duchovny would have been a much better choice. And then I started thinking about that episode of “The X Files” that Duchovny and Wilson did together, and how much more I’d rather be watching that.

“The House Bunny“: I think I’ve made it pretty clear how much I heart Anna Faris, so it’s nice to see her latest starring vehicle actually make it into theaters this time. The movie isn’t much, but she’s wonderful in it — as are Emma Stone and Kat Dennings. But if you wanted to wait for the DVD, I can’t say I’d blame you. As soon as my review goes up on the NOW site, I’ll link to it here. UPDATE: Click away!

“The Longshots”: Fred Durst directed a movie. The Limp Bizkit guy. And it stars Ice Cube as a surly football has-been who coaches his phenom niece to greatness. Fifteen years ago, would any of us have ever imagined something like this? Rad swears he saw it, but I still suspect we’re being punk’d.

“Tuya’s Marriage”: Here’s another film I was hearing about in London last year — a Mongolian drama about a young woman searching for a new husband who’ll take on the keep of her injured ex as well as herself. It sounded very interesting, but I never managed to get to a screening; Andrew ultimately got it covered.

Oh, and because I neglected to link to it on Wednesday’s post, here’s my review of “The Rocker“, too.

I’m a big fan of Steve Coogan. His deluded chat-show host Alan Partridge is one of the most fully realized (and most disturbing) television characters of the last two decades, and the BBC series that featured him are the first indications of the cringe-comedy wave that came to full flower with “The Office”. There would be no Ricky Gervais, I suspect, without Steve Coogan.

More important, though, is his evolving work as an actor. In Michael Winterbottom’s “24 Hour Party People”, he accomplished the meta-fillip of playing Partridge’s actual inspiration, the Granada TV personality Tony Wilson, and even appear in the frame with the real Wilson without ripping a hole in the time-space continuum.

In Winterbottom’s “Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story”, he further meta’ed around as both the digressive hero of Laurence Sterne’s revolutionary novel and the actor playing him.

He has a key role in “Tropic Thunder”, and in “Hamlet 2”, which opens tomorrow, he plays a struggling Arizona drama teacher with a low sperm count and a few closet monsters who tries to save his job by writing a musical sequel to “Hamlet” that involves time travel and Jesus. So he’s pretty much fearless.

Boy, I wish there’d been room for all of this in the setup to my interview with Coogan in the new issue of NOW. Anyway, check it out. There’s audio!