Final numbers have yet to be released, but “Happy Feet” appears to have beaten “Casino Royale” at the North American box-office.

Wow.

Not that a $40.6 million take for Bond 21 is in any way a bad thing, but the thought that “Happy Feet” could beat it (with an estimated $42.3 million) is a real shock.

Sure, it’s half an hour shorter and on a bajillion screens, and sure, Warner promoted the snot out of it … but, really? Word of mouth didn’t start to cripple it by Sunday morning?

Oh, and in entirely unrelated news, the Academy has announced its short list of contenders for the Best Documentary Feature award. The list of 15 titles includes such shoo-ins as “An Inconvenient Truth”, “Deliver Us from Evil” and “Dixie Chicks: Shut Up & Sing“, as well as a quartet of Iraq titles and the heavily-buzzed “Blindsight”, which naturally I managed to miss at TIFF.

“Jesus Camp” is in there, too. I still can’t believe nobody’s releasing it in Canada, what with the Ted Haggard controversy and all. Doesn’t Odeon have the domestic rights to Magnolia’s films?

CG movies take years to produce, so there’s no question that George Miller’s “Happy Feet” was in the works long before Luc Jacquet’s “La Marche de l’Empereur” became Warner Independent’s smash hit “March of the Penguins”.

What’s remarkable, though, is how similar the computer-animated movie is to the original French version of the documentary — at least at first.

The original cut of “Marche”, for instance, had no narration. The penguins spoke directly to one another, their voices supplied by the French actors Charles Berling and Rohmane Bohringer. Their courtship was structured as a series of poetry exchanges.

The penguins of “Happy Feet” court through rhyme, too, though it’s not quite as high-minded a process: These birds sing pop songs to one another, in the style of “Moulin Rouge”, belting out tracks like Prince’s “Kiss” or Elvis’ “Teddy Bear” to the accompaniment of an invisible orchestra.

Each penguin has a specific “heart song” that he or she must find in order to procure a mate; Miller, naturally, has decided to tell the story of the one penguin who is different. Unable to sing, little Mumble communicates his heart song through the magic of tap dancing .. and his special difference will ultimately, and quite literally, change the world.

Whether or not you buy into “Happy Feet” will probably depend on how willing you are to follow Miller on his vision quest. Strictly on the evidence of “Babe: Pig in the City”, I was willing to follow him pretty far — for my money, it’s the best fairy-tale movie produced in the English language — but there are so many different tones and ideas fighting for screen time here that the movie becomes an exhausting mess long before it reaches its ridiculous finale … where Mumble, having been exiled from his home by the troop elders whose religious fundamentalism has led them to conclude that his tap dancing is an “abomination” in the eyes of their god, returns triumphant with a beeping web of circuitry affixed to his back.

I thought he’d come home as a suicide bomber.

Of course, you don’t get that kind of deeper meaning in a movie where Robin Williams voices two ethnic sidekicks, but Miller’s staging made it seem possible. I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I will say that “Happy Feet” is one of the year’s strangest, and most personal, pictures. For what that’s worth.

Oh, and “Let’s Go to Prison” sucks.

It puts its best action sequences up front and manages to avoid actually starting for an hour, but “Casino Royale” is still the best James Bond picture in years. Daniel Craig owns the part, Eva Green is a nice foil and it doesn’t even matter that the villain is kind of a wuss this time around.

Go see it. It is very good.

Considerably less good are the rest of this weekend’s offerings.

“Fast Food Nation”: Richard Linklater attempts to graft a fictional narrative onto Eric Schlosser’s non-fiction dissection of the world McDonald’s has made … which just turns every character into a didactic mouthpiece, and reduces the very real horrors of Schlosser’s book to a series of climactic money shots.

“For Your Consideration”: I have the distressing feeling that Christopher Guest’s comedy well is drying up. His ensemble is starting to visibly jockey for screen time, the jokes are becoming increasingly less barbed, and the pacing is off — by the time Fred Willard turns up as his usual cheerful-rube, I was relieved, because it meant we had to be at the halfway point.

“A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints”: Dito Montiel’s autobiographical whinge about his knockaround youth in Queens has a great cast — and never mind Robert Downey Jr., Shia LaBoeuf and Rosario Dawson, that Channing Tatum guy has real chops. But Montiel has no vision, and the picture ends up being a movie about other movies, instead of a movie about a life.

Oh, and there’s also “Let’s Go to Prison”, which I’ll be seeing later this afternoon (assuming my latest dental appointment doesn’t go south and derail the whole day), and “Happy Feet”, which Rick reviews for Metro but which I can’t even begin to describe in this post. I’ll tackle it tomorrow.

Boy, I wish Metro was putting my stuff online faster.

In its second week of release, “Borat” once again topped the North American box office, holding that “Santa Clause” sequel at bay and adding an additional $29 million to its take.

(Estimated ten-day gross: $67.8 million. Given the movie’s budget, that makes this a runaway smash.)

Sacha Baron Cohen make serious benefit from this, I hope. And I also hope that Fox pushes him for a Best Actor nomination — he’ll never win, of course, but this kind of performance deserves to be considered by the Academy on some level.

Oh, and I was going to post a link to my Metro review of “The Return”, but it doesn’t appear to be up yet. No big loss, really; the movie’s pointless. So there you go.

UPDATE: Here it is.

Last week was a really, really good one for movies — you had your “Borat“, your “Flushed Away“, your “Sleeping Dogs Lie“. All strong, interesting and genuinely creative films. And all very funny, too.

This week, there’s one: “Stranger Than Fiction“, a lovely little bit of surrealism that stands as the sort of mainstream cousin to Charlie Kaufman’s “Adaptation” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” — or, possibly, what those films might have been if they’d been made by a mainstream director.

I’ve never really enjoyed anything else Marc Forster has made — “Monster’s Ball” is posturing crap, “Finding Neverland” is competent but entirely uninteresting and “Stay” is an overly digitized mess — but this one’s just about perfect. It’s charming, it’s funny, it’s quite moving, and it doesn’t even matter that the trailer reveals a crucial plot point. Just see it.

Everything else, you can miss. Here are the quick-n-easy summaries:

“Conversations with God“: Remember that “Simpsons” episode where Homer skips church to watch the football game, and God drops by for a chat? This is a lot like that, only terrible.

“Driving Lessons“: Julie Walters dives fully into the role of a drunken, egomaniacal actress (apparently patterned after Dame Peggy Ashcroft), but the movie around her is kind of a slog. Oddly, Walters has no rapport whatsoever with her co-star, Rupert Grint, despite having played his mother in several “Harry Potter” movies.

“A Good Year“: Russell Crowe plays an asshole banker who learns to be less of an asshole when he inherits a French chateau and gets to know the wacky locals. Oddly, he’s much more convincing as an asshole.

“Harsh Times“: And speaking of assholes — “Training Day” screenwriter David Ayer makes his directorial debut with this jittery study of two jacked-up idiot friends (played with impressively misplaced commitment by Christian Bale and Freddy Rodriguez) who tool around Los Angeles making trouble. Ayer thinks he’s remaking “Taxi Driver”. He ain’t.

“The Return” was not screened for critics, so I’ll be catching that later today. The trailer makes it look a lot like “Carnival of Souls”. Hmm.

I was shocked to learn, over the weekend, that Adrienne Shelly — best known for her work in Hal Hartley’s early films “The Unbelievable Truth” and “Trust”, but also a filmmaker in her own right — had been found dead in a TriBeCa apartment, an apparent suicide.

I’d met her at a couple of Toronto festivals, and while you can never really know anyone from a casual conversation in a crowded hotel corridor, she just didn’t strike me as the type to end up that way; she was just too centered. (Check out her appearance in Rosanna Arquette’s documentary “Searching for Debra Winger“, if you have a chance.)

Anyway, it turns out it wasn’t suicide after all; a construction worker has been charged with second-degree murder in her death. Ray Pride’s eloquent summary can be found here.

So, um, yay. I hope the New York Post runs a correction.

“Borat” make big surprises on American boxed office, coming in at #1 for the weekend despite playing on barely a quarter of the screens of its closest competitors, “The Santa Clause 3” and “Flushed Away“.

This is huge. And if the movie maintains its position — or picks up additional speed — when Fox widens its release this weekend from the current 837 screens to an expected 2500, who knows where this could go?

Sacha Baron Cohen would make glorious Oscar nomination …

I’m appearing on CTV Newsnet this afternoon to discuss “Borat”, and whether it signifies the destruction of all we hold holy, or something.

Not sure whether it’s going out live or being pre-taped for later broadcast, but if you turn on your TVs at 3:15 EST and wait, you’re bound to see me sooner or later.

You can also stream it at this link, apparently.

Is “Borat” the best movie of the year?

Maybe not, but it’s up there — not only does it upend every expectation we have about what constitutes effective moviemaking, but it also has more to say about the reality of America (and Americans) than any other film on our screens.

Also it’s so funny it might induce hypoxia. And it has a naked wrestling sequence with three distinct acts. Niiiiiice.

Other movies opening this week:

“Boynton Beach Club“: A movie for people who really, really like watching TBS.

“Flushed Away“: The Aardman animation studio goes digital, with results so faithful to its previous Claymation productions that several critics don’t appear to have realized this movie’s made entirely of bits and bytes. It’s not “Wallace and Gromit” … but then, what is?

“Sleeping Dogs Lie“: Bobcat Goldthwait spent so much time in other people’s crappy comedies that he’s learned what not to do when making his own; yes, the DV aesthetic is atrocious, but the sweetness of Melinda Page Hamilton’s remarkable performance gives the movie plenty of sunshine. Too bad they changed the title; “Stay” was a lot more appropriate.

Due to a combination of really annoying factors — late print, throbbing tooth, rapidly disintegrating family — I managed to miss “Babel”, but you can find Chris Atchison’s review here, if you’re curious. I’ll try to catch it over the weekend.

Saw “Saw III“.

Didn’t love it.

Of course, $34.3 million in ticket sales suggests my opinion ain’t worth all that much at the moment …