When this Canadian clambake was started back in 1976 by three eager film buffs in a Toronto saloon, they couldn't convince one Hollywood studio to send them a full-length feature. Thirty-five years later, TIFF is arguably the friendliest, most popular and best organized movie convention in the world. This year it sold 300,000 tickets to 300 films in 11 days, generated a revenue of $170 million; published a program book 448 pages long; and boasted a staff of 100 full-time employees, 19 programmers and an army of 2,000 unpaid volunteers in orange T-shirts who do everything from ushering to pouring salt on your popcorn. TIFF has come of age, and this year it has even moved into a brand-new permanent home at the Bell Lightbox, a sci-fi superdome on the site of an old parking lot owned by the father of director Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters), replete with art galleries, film libraries, five state-of-the-art screening rooms and two restaurants where the flacks and hacks gather to meet, greet and tweet. They're still $25 million short of their $196 million fund-raising campaign goal, but ready or not, they opened anyway, staging a Sunday afternoon block party with balloons, fireworks, live rock bands, celebrity arrivals and trucks of free cupcakes. One caveat: Along with smaller, glam-free flicks, the dynamic has changed geographically, too. Now that festival headquarters has shifted miles away, from the swanky neighborhood of Yorkville to the seedy downtown entertainment district near the waterfront, the annual Brangelina parties, shopping sprees at Tiffany's and posh luxury hotels are a thing of the past. With screening venues sprawled all over the city and the press agents and stars 10 miles away, it is nothing to spend $40 on a taxi ride between movies to share a cocktail with Catherine Deneuve. The red carpet premieres are on one side of town in traffic gridlock, but the boldface names have to travel to the gift lounges on the other side of town to collect their free swag bags of Hermés scarves, Gucci handbags and Canadian maple syrup.

Things were off to a rocky start. The TIFF opened in the middle of a bedbug invasion that left audiences at the early press previews complaining of bites on their thighs, backs and rear ends, and so armies equipped with pesticides invaded the combat zone in the days before the official red carpet rolled out, and sponsors and organizers have promised an "itch-free festival." So far, so good. But when all is said and done and the last projector starts rolling, the only that matters is the movies. Excelsior! This year, the richness and diversity has a higher quality than usual. From documentaries about disgraced New York governor Eliot Spitzer and the decline of American public education (starring Bill Gates), to a graphic gay porno film called L.A. Zombie that has been banned in Australia, there is something for everybody. After the opener, a campy musical about hockey with Olivia Newton-John that was generally dismissed as an embarrassment, things picked up with two of the best films I've seen in decades. Actor Ben Affleck has triumphed as both star and director of The Town, a cajones-in-your-face crime drama about the brutal crime scene in Boston's historic Charlestown neighborhood, labeled the bank robbery capital of America. Mr. Affleck is wonderful as the leader of a gang of violent, ruthless thieves who makes the mistake of falling for the pretty, blindfolded hostage who can turn them in to the Feds. Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker) is especially creepy as the most vicious thug in the group, and Jon Hamm, in one of his first major roles since Mad Men, emerges as a powerful screen force in the role of a witty, hard-boiled F.B.I. agent. Set in the Boston alleys and Irish bars familiar to Scorsese and Eastwood, and featuring a $3 million robbery during a pivotal Red Sox game in Fenway Park, it is a film with a grip as smart and unforgettable as it is fresh and surprising. The Town is the best heist movie--as well as the most intensely plotted, brilliantly written and carefully directed film about the complex members of a criminal gang--since The Asphalt Jungle. Equally memorable is Never Let Me Go, a lyrical, haunting and lushly photographed adaptation of the great book by metaphysical novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (Remains of the Day), about idyllic children growing up in a baronial English country school who love, laugh and learn about life as all children do, until we discover [ed note: Spoiler alert!] they are clones in a dystopian government project, secretly marketed for the purpose of donating their organs to society in order to save mankind. Carey Mulligan, the Oscar-nominated marvel from An Education, leads a splendid cast that includes Keira Knightley, Charlotte Rampling and Sally Hawkins, in a cautionary tale about the dangers of science vs. humanity. One of the few films I've seen lately that audiences and critics were still debating fiercely days after its premiere, Never Let Me Go is a heartbreaking, imaginative work of art that left me devastated. So did Hereafter, a touching triptych of stories related to the theme of life after death; it finds Clint Eastwood in a more muted tone than usual, with Matt Damon as a sensitive psychic.

After nine months of Hollywood drivel, TIFF is always the launching pad for works of more serious ambition. Common underlying themes in the films coming this fall include people seeking dignity in the face of overwhelming adversity and the sad desperation of terminally lonely people trying to connect in a troubled world--to someone, some place, some sense of justice and meaning, anything! As the director of Trust, actor David Schwimmer does a disturbing job of tackling the terrifying world of Internet predators. In this powerful drama, an emotionally vulnerable 14-year-old in Chicago falls for a boy she believes to be a cute California volleyball player in a popular chat room, but when he arrives in person, while her parents are out of town, he turns out to be a 35-year-old rapist who is nothing like his photos or promises. The story centers on the disastrous effects of the rape on the girl as well as her parents (Clive Owen and Catherine Keener), as they all cope with a nightmare that changes their lives forever. Tony Goldwyn's Conviction is the inspirational true-life story of Betty Anne Waters (Hilary Swank), a Massachusetts wife and mother who devotes her life to proving the innocence of her brother Kenny (Sam Rockwell) after he is sentenced to life in prison for a murder he didn't commit. Neglecting her husband and two sons while scrimping and saving to put herself through law school, she pulls every lever in the corrupt legal system with the aid of famed attorney Barry Scheck (Peter Gallagher) to reopen the case, only to discover after 16 years of work that the DNA evidence has been destroyed. The film chronicles her undying faith as she overcomes one obstacle after another;  Ms. Swank is aided by a first-rate cast (Juliette Lewis, Melissa Leo, Minnie Driver and others) and a script that plays like a detective yarn. The ending will leave you cheering. Beautiful Boy is a wrenching story about two parents in a rocky marriage (Maria Bello and Michael Sheen) who are shocked to heartrending depths of despair when their perfect 18-year-old son commits a mass shooting on his college campus before taking his own life. In the hot new "hunky alpha males in jeopardy" genre, nothing could be more harrowing than 127 Hours and Buried. The first one is writer-director Danny Boyle's first film since the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire, the true story of adventurer Aron Ralston, who fell through a crevice on a hiking trip through Utah in 2003 and lay pinned under a boulder for 127 hours until he was forced to cut off his own arm to save his life. A graphic story of courage and survival guaranteed to make you pinch yourself to keep from fainting, with James Franco giving a heroic performance, it forced several members of the audience to be carried out on stretchers during an early preview in Sundance. Not for sissies. In Buried, Ryan Reynolds is a civilian truck driver delivering kitchen supplies in Iraq who wakes up in a wooden coffin underground with no oxygen and a cigarette lighter running out of fluid. With my heart pounding and nerves jangled, I was only able to stand it until the snake showed up. But I wasn't bored.

If proof was ever required that the movie business has changed, consider Robert Redford. The once glamorous and hugely powerful commodity is here like everybody else, shlepping a new film he directed with independent money called The Conspirator, hoping to interest a distributor. It will need all the shlepping it can get. The Conspirator takes place two years after the Civil War during those dark days of April 1865, when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. John Wilkes Booth, who was gunned down before the curtain fell, is just a peripheral player in the aftermath of the shooting at Ford's Theatre. Seven men and one lone woman--all civilians--are accused of being co-conspirators in a corrupt trial that should have been tried by a jury, not a military tribunal. The war department, run by Lincoln-appointed Edwin Stanton (Kevin Kline), is so hell-bent on pacifying a country desperate to avenge the president's murder that it sacrifices the Constitutional rights of an innocent woman without a shred of evidence. The result is a shameful trial that is both immoral and illegal. Mary Surratt (Robin Wright) is guilty of nothing more than the misfortune of owning the boardinghouse where Booth sometimes visited and his followers lived, but even after the court finds her not guilty, Secretary of State Stanton changes the verdict and makes Mrs. Surratt the first woman ever sent to the gallows in the U.S. With excellent performances by Ms. Wright (she's dropped the Penn), James McAvoy, Tom Wilkinson, Evan Rachel Wood and Danny Huston, a carefully researched screenplay and the kind of period authenticity most indie-prods on a reduced budget only dream about, Mr. Redford has provided a worthy footnote to a part of American history they do not teach in classrooms. The Conspirator has "worthy" stamped all over it with a capital "W," but to me, it lacks momentum, its commercial prospects seem dim and with a running time of more than two hours, it is somber to the point of tedium.

Not bad for a first week in Toronto. And still more new films by Jean Luc Godard, John Sayles, Ken Loach, Francois Ozon, Stephen Frears, Darren Aronofsky, John Carpenter and Werner Herzog to sift through, plus Kevin Spacey as crooked politician Jack Abramoff, and Mickey Rourke as a broken-down jazz musician stranded in the desert who falls in love with the Bird Woman in a traveling circus. So many movies, so little time. Sleep, balanced meals, exercise--they're all on hold. You live on pizza, candy bars and eye drops. Then you prop your eyes open and head for another double feature.

rreed@observer.com

"City eyes putting transit dinosaurs back on track in Red Hook, Brooklyn," reads this morning's New York Daily News headline. Streetcars, which seemingly went the way of bowler hats and impromptu musical numbers, could be the latest (if not the most cutting-edge) solution proposed for Brooklyn's public transportation strain.

"We're looking back to the future with our transportation network," Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan said yesterday.

Residents quoted by the Daily News don't seem to mind that most of the vehicles move at a leisurely pace. "It's an absolutely positive idea," said Shayla Sweatt. "It's up-and-coming, and this could really open it up."

Brooklynites may perhaps do well to speak with residents of Toronto, which has the largest street car system in North America. Asked a recent headline, "When does a 5-kilometre trek take 40 minutes?"

The Obama administration may, however, have made it easier for Red Hook to build a better system, now that funding for cities to build up their transportation systems isn't solely based on cost-effectiveness. Apparently street cars fare better on factors such as liveability and economic development.

Ask that other hipster center, Portland, which debuted a state-of-the art system in 2001, where cars roll along at a more respectable 30 miles per hour.

lkusisto@observer.com

These are the months when studios trot out the films they think have a shot at getting rewarded with Oscar statues. And the crowd at Tavern on the Green—made up of executives in the movie industry, as well as critics, publicists, journalists and self-anointed film aficionados—certainly fancied itself the kind of crowd that knows just which films those gold statues might be going to.

Many stuck to the conventionally held (and reviewed) opinion that Ms. Mirren’s performance was unbeatable; others were quick to hiss that the film has been overhyped.

“If you give this four stars, I will beat you,” said one partygoer to Us Weekly’s Thelma Adams. (“I already did, I think,” she replied.) Some talk was devoted to non-festival entrant The Departed, from past festival darling Martin Scorsese, already getting the usual “This is Marty’s year” treatment. More than a few guests dismissed Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. (“It’s like sticking your hand in a giant meringue. Mark my words, no one will see it but gays and girls”), while still others griped that many of the guests hadn’t adhered to the evening’s black-tie requirements. (“I mean, he’s not even wearing a tie!”) One man who had followed the rules—his tux looked like a million bucks—poked at his plate of pasta glumly and said, “This has got to be the exact same pesto they’ve been serving for the last 44 years.”

A few days later, The Queen’s much-lauded British screenwriter, Peter Morgan, didn’t hesitate in answering whether he’d had a good time at the party.

“No,” he said. “It was absolute madness. I went there, I got claustrophobic, and I left. That’s how anybody in their right mind would have been.”

Mr. Morgan has not only The Queen but also The Last King of Scotland making its way through the festival circuit. He’s also got a stage play, Frost/Nixon, just ending a run in London, which he said Ron Howard might be making into a film. “The opening night in New York befits the city,” he said. “You feel it’s a more discerning, sophisticated and yet somehow violent experience. Just the business of getting to the New York Film Festival—I’m not a religious man, but I always privately mouth ‘Thanks’ when I arrive anywhere in New York. You generally arrive anywhere in the state of car sickness, fairly traumatized by the violence of the journey getting there.” The New York Film Festival has a proud reputation for keeping things stubbornly the same. In fact, they’ve been banking on it since the festival’s inception in 1963, when festival director Richard Roud started introducing New York City audiences to Luis Buñuel, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, and to show roughly 25 features handpicked by a distinguished panel out of thousands of submissions. The mission has remained pure, even while new North American festivals have cropped up to court the festival-goer’s fancy: the overwhelming six-movies-a-day of Toronto, the wool caps and furry boots of Sundance, the glitzy downtown circus of Tribeca.

“Do I ever feel pressure? Not really,” said New York Film Festival program director Richard Peña. “I’m sort of lucky in that way. One of the things about the New York Film Festival is that I think I’m really given extraordinary freedom and latitude to pretty much do what I want. We sell out every year, and that’s a wonderful privilege.”

This year, the festival has its usual expected exotic offerings: Paprika, a Japanese anime that is described as a “head-on collision between Hello Kitty and Philip K. Dick”; Offside, about Iranian girls who dress up as boys to watch “footie”; festival favorite (and centerpiece holder) Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver, starring Penélope Cruz; and Inland Empire, the latest from David Lynch.

But there’s also easily digestible fare on this year’s menu, too: the Marie Antoinette fashion strut; The Host, an already-popular monster movie from South Korea that had Toronto audiences buzzing; and the film adaptation of the beloved Tom Perrotta novel Little Children, starring Kate Winslet. “To be honest, I think they got a little scared of Tribeca,” said an industry veteran of this year’s program. “Wouldn’t you, if you had $4 million from Amex going down there and your budget is only one third of that? Tribeca has a premiere every two seconds and stars walking the red carpet. The New York Film Festival, they need to sort of glitz it up again. The y need movies with Sofia Coppola and Kirsten Dunst there.”

Mr. Peña insists that Tribeca is not a factor.

“Frankly I don’t think it’s really affected us. The way it could is if we were losing films and audience—and neither seems to have happened. We’re really different styles, and people see that and judge accordingly.”

As for this year’s selections, he said: “I just think this is the way the winds blew this year. There is always a sort of tension between mainstream and art cinema. I think it’s a little bit inscribed in the founding of the New York Film Festival, which in 1963 had a watershed moment when arts cinema started to go one way, creating one sort of world, with mainstream cinema going towards another way. So I think the mission of the popular is something that always lingers around our choices.”

What everyone does seem to agree on is that the New York Film Festival carries a certain class within its Alice Tully Hall walls. Because it doesn’t give out awards, filmmakers and movie studios are able to feel that just getting into the New York Film Festival is an award unto itself.

“The New York Film Festival favors quality over quantity,” said director Guillermo del Toro, whose Pan’s Labyrinth nabbed the coveted closing-night spot. “They always take a stringent point of view, a very selective eye on what they are showcasing, so it automatically becomes a great honor to be there. It’s not a festival about favorites as much as it is a discerning point of view in cinema, right now, from all over the world.” “It’s always meant a lot to me. I got in a film called Careful in 1992, and for years it was the highlight of my filmmaking career,” said Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin, whose Brand Upon the Brain!—a silent movie narrated by an in-the-flesh Isabella Rossellini and accompanied by a live orchestra and a castrato—is part of the Special Events program in the Walter Reade Theater (“I don’t see it as a ghetto,” Mr. Maddin said). “Some festivals are more important for craft versus markets and sales. But the New York Film Festival—just in pure, powerful iconography terms—is so important. It always has a great audience who are knowledgeable to the point of it being a bit overwhelming sometimes.”

“This is the first festival in America to play people like Victor Nunez and Gal Young ’Un,” said Little Children director Todd Field. “It was before independent film became a buzzword and a marketing tool. When there really was an independent-film movement—where people had to struggle and scrape to get money together and make films—it was the only place that recognized that. Before there was a Sundance film festival, there was the New York Film Festival.

“When I moved to New York in 1984,” Mr. Field continued, “my experience with movies was based on being a projectionist in a second-run movie house in Portland, Ore. I had never seen what we would consider independent-minded film, or specialty films, or even many foreign films. I was working across the street at O’Neill’s Saloon, and I met all sorts of extraordinary people—but the most important thing that happened to me is that someone said to me, ‘The New York Film Festival is on, and you need to go to it.’ And I came over here, and they were screening Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, and it completely blew my mind. And I thought, Oh my God! This exists? They let people make films like this? It was like discovering another country.”

These are the months when studios trot out the films they think have a shot at getting rewarded with Oscar statues. And the crowd at Tavern on the Green—made up of executives in the movie industry, as well as critics, publicists, journalists and self-anointed film aficionados—certainly fancied itself the kind of crowd that knows just which films those gold statues might be going to.

Many stuck to the conventionally held (and reviewed) opinion that Ms. Mirren’s performance was unbeatable; others were quick to hiss that the film has been overhyped.

“If you give this four stars, I will beat you,” said one partygoer to Us Weekly’s Thelma Adams. (“I already did, I think,” she replied.) Some talk was devoted to non-festival entrant The Departed, from past festival darling Martin Scorsese, already getting the usual “This is Marty’s year” treatment. More than a few guests dismissed Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. (“It’s like sticking your hand in a giant meringue. Mark my words, no one will see it but gays and girls”), while still others griped that many of the guests hadn’t adhered to the evening’s black-tie requirements. (“I mean, he’s not even wearing a tie!”) One man who had followed the rules—his tux looked like a million bucks—poked at his plate of pasta glumly and said, “This has got to be the exact same pesto they’ve been serving for the last 44 years.”

A few days later, The Queen’s much-lauded British screenwriter, Peter Morgan, didn’t hesitate in answering whether he’d had a good time at the party.

“No,” he said. “It was absolute madness. I went there, I got claustrophobic, and I left. That’s how anybody in their right mind would have been.”

Mr. Morgan has not only The Queen but also The Last King of Scotland making its way through the festival circuit. He’s also got a stage play, Frost/Nixon, just ending a run in London, which he said Ron Howard might be making into a film. “The opening night in New York befits the city,” he said. “You feel it’s a more discerning, sophisticated and yet somehow violent experience. Just the business of getting to the New York Film Festival—I’m not a religious man, but I always privately mouth ‘Thanks’ when I arrive anywhere in New York. You generally arrive anywhere in the state of car sickness, fairly traumatized by the violence of the journey getting there.” The New York Film Festival has a proud reputation for keeping things stubbornly the same. In fact, they’ve been banking on it since the festival’s inception in 1963, when festival director Richard Roud started introducing New York City audiences to Luis Buñuel, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, and to show roughly 25 features handpicked by a distinguished panel out of thousands of submissions. The mission has remained pure, even while new North American festivals have cropped up to court the festival-goer’s fancy: the overwhelming six-movies-a-day of Toronto, the wool caps and furry boots of Sundance, the glitzy downtown circus of Tribeca.

“Do I ever feel pressure? Not really,” said New York Film Festival program director Richard Peña. “I’m sort of lucky in that way. One of the things about the New York Film Festival is that I think I’m really given extraordinary freedom and latitude to pretty much do what I want. We sell out every year, and that’s a wonderful privilege.”

This year, the festival has its usual expected exotic offerings: Paprika, a Japanese anime that is described as a “head-on collision between Hello Kitty and Philip K. Dick”; Offside, about Iranian girls who dress up as boys to watch “footie”; festival favorite (and centerpiece holder) Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver, starring Penélope Cruz; and Inland Empire, the latest from David Lynch.

But there’s also easily digestible fare on this year’s menu, too: the Marie Antoinette fashion strut; The Host, an already-popular monster movie from South Korea that had Toronto audiences buzzing; and the film adaptation of the beloved Tom Perrotta novel Little Children, starring Kate Winslet. “To be honest, I think they got a little scared of Tribeca,” said an industry veteran of this year’s program. “Wouldn’t you, if you had $4 million from Amex going down there and your budget is only one third of that? Tribeca has a premiere every two seconds and stars walking the red carpet. The New York Film Festival, they need to sort of glitz it up again. They need movies with Sofia Coppola and Kirsten Dunst there.”

Mr. Peña insists that Tribeca is not a factor.

“Frankly I don’t think it’s really affected us. The way it could is if we were losing films and audience—and neither seems to have happened. We’re really different styles, and people see that and judge accordingly.”

As for this year’s selections, he said: “I just think this is the way the winds blew this year. There is always a sort of tension between mainstream and art cinema. I think it’s a little bit inscribed in the founding of the New York Film Festival, which in 1963 had a watershed moment when arts cinema started to go one way, creating one sort of world, with mainstream cinema going towards another way. So I think the mission of the popular is something that always lingers around our choices.”

What everyone does seem to agree on is that the New York Film Festival carries a certain class within its Alice Tully Hall walls. Because it doesn’t give out awards, filmmakers and movie studios are able to feel that just getting into the New York Film Festival is an award unto itself.

“The New York Film Festival favors quality over quantity,” said director Guillermo del Toro, whose Pan’s Labyrinth nabbed the coveted closing-night spot. “They always take a stringent point of view, a very selective eye on what they are showcasing, so it automatically becomes a great honor to be there. It’s not a festival about favorites as much as it is a discerning point of view in cinema, right now, from all over the world.” “It’s always meant a lot to me. I got in a film called Careful in 1992, and for years it was the highlight of my filmmaking career,” said Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin, whose Brand Upon the Brain!—a silent movie narrated by an in-the-flesh Isabella Rossellini and accompanied by a live orchestra and a castrato—is part of the Special Events program in the Walter Reade Theater (“I don’t see it as a ghetto,” Mr. Maddin said). “Some festivals are more important for craft versus markets and sales. But the New York Film Festival—just in pure, powerful iconography terms—is so important. It always has a great audience who are knowledgeable to the point of it being a bit overwhelming sometimes.”

“This is the first festival in America to play people like Victor Nunez and Gal Young ’Un,” said Little Children director Todd Field. “It was before independent film became a buzzword and a marketing tool. When there really was an independent-film movement—where people had to struggle and scrape to get money together and make films—it was the only place that recognized that. Before there was a Sundance film festival, there was the New York Film Festival.

“When I moved to New York in 1984,” Mr. Field continued, “my experience with movies was based on being a projectionist in a second-run movie house in Portland, Ore. I had never seen what we would consider independent-minded film, or specialty films, or even many foreign films. I was working across the street at O’Neill’s Saloon, and I met all sorts of extraordinary people—but the most important thing that happened to me is that someone said to me, ‘The New York Film Festival is on, and you need to go to it.’ And I came over here, and they were screening Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, and it completely blew my mind. And I thought, Oh my God! This exists? They let people make films like this? It was like discovering another country.”

And Mr. Baron Cohen didn’t disappoint. A little before midnight, his fiancé—the gorgeous and teensy Wedding Crashers actress Isla Fisher—smiled for photographers and slinked into the theater. Suddenly, Middle Eastern music blared as Mr. Baron Cohen—dressed as Borat—arrived on the red carpet, via an ox cart pulled by six women outfitted in dirty kerchiefs and long, sallow faces. A small pony sat in the cart just behind Mr. Baron Cohen. The crowd broke into a sloppy chant of “Borat! Borat!”

(Borat later told The Observer: “These scenes were remind me of the time American football star O.J. Simpsons visit Almaty in 1998 to be judge in Miss Kazakhstan contest. I was slight nervous that the cheerings would cause spook the womens pulling my cart and make cause them to bolt.”)

Borat, for those who have not seen Mr. Baron Cohen’s Da Ali G show on HBO, is “Kazakhstan’s sixth most famous man.” At his film premiere, he was wearing his trademark ill-fitting gray suit, gangly arms braced for a big double thumbs-up, his manic grin flashing wide beneath a full mustache that Mr. Baron Cohen has said takes a month and a half to grow. The crowd screamed and cheered. “The festival people say this is the movie that’s causing all the frenzy,” said a nearby I’m-pretending-to-be-so-bored-it-must-mean-I’m-press voice.

The Toronto International Film Festival sprawls across downtown Toronto, putting stressed-out New York publicists, shellacked L.A. industry types, regional journalists and polite-to-the-point-of-ridiculous Canadians together onto the spookily clean streets. The press and industry screenings are filled with earnest movie lovers and self-important puffsters, who can be heard explaining before the credits roll why a film is simply god-awful. Go to the new Pedro Almodóvar movie, Volver, and prepare to hear some blowhard wax poetic on historic Spanish cinema. Ditto on the wave of Latino filmmakers—and don’t even think about bringing up the Hong Kong explosion.

So just to see a bunch of screaming fans who wouldn’t recognize—or care about—the influence of Truffaut if it fell from a burning, metaphor-laden sky is a happy novelty for a film festival. And all for a movie that will be equally dismissed as a cerebral retread of Jackass territory and celebrated as a vehicle for the first truly dangerous comedy since Andy Kaufman. Like South Park’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Mr. Baron Cohen creates comedy that refuses to be co-opted by the political right, left or middle.

The character of Borat—a second-stringer to Ali G, Mr. Baron Cohen’s ethnically confused, suburban hip-hop character—is a weirdly likable one. It’s hard for even the people he sends up to resist his wide-eyed astonishment, his ebullient happiness and the flash of his uncomprehending smile. Borat is joyfully anti-Semitic, misogynistic, homophobic and racist—and brings out those same traits in many of his unwitting interview subjects, a fact that lends his comic bits a distinct edge of queasy darkness. When Borat, onstage strumming a guitar while wearing a cowboy getup, incites the crowd at a country-and-western bar to join him in a rousing sing-along chorus of “Throw the Jew down the well / So my country can be free / You must grab him by his horns / Then we have a big party!”—the viewer is always aware that behind the Borat persona, Mr. Baron Cohen is himself a Jewish man who happens to be standing in a crowd of Americans who don’t blink at singing a blatantly anti-Semitic song in the year 2006.

In both his HBO show and the film, Mr. Baron Cohen shows a remarkable talent for being able to take a bit to just over the line and then running far, far past it. Mr. Baron Cohen himself has become an elusive character, mostly choosing to give interviews only in character, and even then sparingly.

Asked by The Observer how he was treated in Toronto, Borat replied, “I was treat very luxury at this festivals, although I was humiliate that my hotel would not provide my 11-year-old son Bilak with key to room of Penelopes Cruzs. I had promise him that he could do a sexytime time with her, and he had spend three month traveling on foot from Kazakhstan with his wife and two childrens.”

Back inside the theater, the rock-concert atmosphere continued. Audience members waved mini Kazakhstan flags and craned their necks to see who was in the reserved seating. A chair marked “Samuel L. Jackson” was occupied by an unrecognizable blonde. The audience gave Borat a standing ovation as he took the stage and gave spazzy high-fives all around. He kissed both a Canadian and Kazakhstan flag and introduced his film. The movie rolled, and the audience rolled with it, roaring with laughter. A happy sort of hysteria settled in. But then came the first sputtering clank, then a shuddering groan … followed by a full film stoppage. When the lights came on, the audience was confused: Was this part of the plan?

Out from a back row Borat popped up, made a joke about the authorities using their “strongest glue” to put the film back together, and then disappeared. Time passed. Various Canadian film-festival reps made their way timidly to the stage to plead for patience. A rumor floated down from the balcony: Michael Moore, who had been seen on the red carpet in a blue sweatshirt and shorts, was up in the projectionist’s booth trying to fix the problem.

By 1 a.m., the crowd was beginning to move past restless and into pissed-off. Mr. Moore, who reportedly had gotten reacquainted with Mr. Baron Cohen in the lobby of the hotel that afternoon, took the stage with Borat director Larry Charles, who was himself a sight in his long hair, long graying beard, sunglasses and dark clothing. Mr. Moore informed the crowd that he had once worked a projection booth and that they were trying to find an extra part. The men said they would answer questions on any subject. In no particular order, they were asked everything from what was scripted in the film (answer: nothing) and if any chickens were harmed (no), to if they had seen Snakes on a Plane (Mr. Moore yes, Mr. Charles no). “I never go to bed. You can’t sleep these days if you are an American,” said Mr. Moore, in answer to a question about his being at a midnight screening. Had they seen the Suri Cruise pictures in Vanity Fair?

“Don’t you think it’s time to quit picking on Tom Cruise?” asked Mr. Moore. “I mean, come on, seriously—his crime is that he jumped on Oprah’s couch.”

“Michael has an announcement,” broke in Mr. Charles. “He’s converted to Scientology.”

“I’ll be making out with John Travolta in the lobby,” said Mr. Moore.

Finally Mr. Baron Cohen came back on stage, as Borat, pointing Mr. Moore out as “this fat man.” He apologized on behalf of Kazakhstan and did some Q&A that got the audience rollicking. (“The thing I found very surprising in Americas is that it’s now illegal to shoot at red Indians. I would like to apologize to the staff of the Poquawatomack casino …. ”) At 1:40 a.m., the final announcement went around that the problem could not be fixed, and that everyone could see the film the following night at midnight at a different theater. As boos and hissing rose, Mr. Baron Cohen looked genuinely distressed and promised the audience that he would “crush” authorities.

(“I cannot explain what happen with this projection apparatus,” Borat later told The Observer. “It was brand-new machine brought over special from Kazakhstan for this event. We do not know who fault it was—the blacksmith who build this projectors blame the candlemaker for use poor-quality wax in the lantern, and the candlemaker blame the boy who was pedaling it for go too fast and blow out the flame. They will all be execute and then tried in a court of law for this crime.”)

At the press screening with a new print the following afternoon, the mood was subdued. Many in attendance hadn’t heard about the premiere’s debacle.

“Is that a Jewish newspaper?” asked a man sitting next to a newspaper reporter. “I heard the film is unabashedly anti-Semitic.”

While the film certainly has its (hilarious) moments—the much-discussed “running of the Jew” in Borat’s native village, the sexual jokes (“Her vagina hangs like a sleeve of a wizard”)—it’s hard to believe that the intent is insult. Mr. Baron Cohen, 34, was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household, to an Israeli-born mother and a Welsh father. He reportedly still keeps kosher, and Ms. Fisher has been quoted in the British press saying that she’ll be converting before their marriage. Mr. Baron Cohen was educated at Cambridge, where he did time with the famed Footlight acting troupe while working on a thesis about relations between Jews and blacks during the American civil-rights movement, including an interview with Robert Moses. “I spent quite a lot of time, actually, at the Martin Luther King Center in Atlanta, studying and actually living in downtown Atlanta, which was an interesting experience,” Mr. Baron Cohen told Vanity Fair’s Jim Windolf in one of his few-and-far-between interviews as himself.

At the rescheduled midnight screening (which lured in Dustin Hoffman), the rain wasn’t dampening the 1,500-plus crowd’s enthusiasm. “I wouldn’t miss it,” said Anthony Chen, 23, who had kept his ticket stub from the night before.

“Last night was a bit embarrassing for Toronto,” said Jonathan Schwartz, 23.

Mr. Baron Cohen wasn’t to be found at this screening—rumor had it that he and his entourage had been out till all hours.

-- Azi Paybarah

Such an entrance. Photo: Getty Images.

Paulo Costanzo--of Road Trip, Joey and Canadian birth--was freaking out. "This is the best fucking night of my life," he screamed from his seat at last night's midnight screening of Borat. Agent and limousine liberal Ari Emmanuel lurked up in the teeming balcony.

Sasha Baron Cohen had arrived for the Borat premiere on a cart pulled by six women and a tiny pony, each of them in yokes, the women all in shtetl chic. Isla Fisher, Mr. Cohen's tiny gorgeous fiance, in a glittery tank and low-slung jeans, hid behind a nearby tree.

Inside the theater, to introduce the show, Mr. Cohen brought out the flags of Canada and Kazakhstan and kissed them both.

The film began. The first 20 minutes of Borat are the funniest thing you could ever hope to see on film. The audience was in hysterics. Then the projector broke.

Forty minutes passed; apologies from the stage. The Fox publicity staff looked positively green. The restless crowd began to chant "Michael Moore! Michael Moore!"

Mr. Cohen did some shtick and introduced "Larry Charles and some fat man." Mr. Charles—co-creator of Seinfeld and exec producer of Entourage—and Michael Moore came to the stage. Mr. Moore had been the one trying to fix the projector. This was all like some insane dream sequence. Mr. Charles was dressed in a sort of Hasidic costume. Was Mr. Moore tired, someone wanted to know? "You can't sleep these days if you are an American," he said.

Later, Mr. Moore said that he'd be making out with John Travolta in the lobby. Mr. Charles signed a kid's tardy note for the next day's school. Mr. Charles had not yet seen Snakes on a Plane—but Mr. Moore had.

By 1:40 a.m., it became clear that the remainder of Borat would not be shown. The screening was postponed for Friday night. Everyone went desperately looking for a drink.
Sara Vilkomerson

Most of the New York team, sometimes called Team Goldman in recognition of the place of employment of many of its members, had landed at Leifur Eiriksson International Air terminal at dawn. At the baggage claim, some still wore their blazers from the office the day before. And at noon, the puck dropped in Skauta Höllin, Reykjavik’s lone ring, for the first game.

Mr. Kwong was the only player on Team Toronto with Canadian roots—and even Mr. Kwong, 42, now also resides in New York, where he is the managing director of a hedge fund.

The stands of Skauta Höllin were occupied, for a stretch, by a gaggle of curious Icelandic teenagers; one wore a shirt that read “Woteva!” Another spectator was Per-Erik Holmström, of Stockholm, who is the C.E.O. of Financial Hearings Scandinavia and the founder of the five-year-old tournament.

“You see, the Americans are much more aggressive with the puck,” Mr. Holmström said. Wall Street was just then dominating the play near Reykjavik’s goal. “Whereas the Europeans are much more moving around the puck.”

Reykjavik is the third-most-expensive city in the world. Team Toronto’s New Yorkers, on break between games, ate homemade lasagna and drank $10 cans of beer. “We’re gonna leave a dent on this city. There’s only two married guys on this team,” said a banker with a receding hairline. “We’re not talking about girlfriends.” He chastised a teammate for calling home to his woman. “We’re in Iceland playing in a fucking hockey tournament. Of course it’s going to be a three-day fuckfest. No use checking in.”

The round-robin tournament—no checking, no slap shots—came to an end after 10 p.m. Each team played four games. “You definitely felt it in your legs,” said Bohdan Pryjmak, 29, a brawny Wall Street forward, who does hedge-fund support at IFS. It was, said Kenny Turano, 25, of Harbinger Capital, “an awesome day of hockey.”

Toronto had emerged as the undefeated champs. Stockholm had come in second; New York placed third. Helsinki was fourth, but had at least taken a game off the Swedes. “That is the minimum requirement,” said Tukku Finneus, 42, a real-estate analyst at Nordea Bank, Finland’s powerhouse bank. “We always must beat the Swedes.” The home turf only provided last place for the Reykjavik team.

After the games, that night, “we were out till 7 in the morning,” said Mr. Pryjmak. “Every girl there looked like Claudia Schiffer.” And the next day—which was April Fools Day—many of the New Yorkers opted for an afternoon at the Blue Lagoon, Iceland’s most famous hot spring. (It is also, essentially, a power plant.) Neal Walsh, Team Toronto’s Astoria-accented goalie, said that the pools were so cold that it made “my balls crawl up inside my stomach.”

That night, the entire international posse descended on Olvar, a beer hall with long cafeteria tables and small windows, for the awards ceremony and now-traditional karaoke sing-off.

“I know that some of you have been exploring wonders of night in Reykjavik,” said Kiell Thelmis, an executive from Kaupthing, Iceland’s largest bank. “You look tired, some of you, but it will get better when you go out again tonight.”

“You know it,” said Patrick Newell, 25, of Team Toronto. He raised his glass at teammate Tom Steczkowski, also 25. The best friends had both played hockey at Lehigh University, were fraternity brothers and worked as mortgage traders at Credit Suisse, which Mr. Newell prefers to pronounce as “Swe-ees,” in a French-accented falsetto. They are currently looking for a joint bachelor pad: Gramercy, or Gramercy-adjacent.

Their table was digesting a tasty rumor that Saturday was payday in Iceland, and that therefore Icelandic women—bright-eyed, apple-cheeked and notoriously sweet on Americans—would be out in full force.

“Last night we had a pretty low success rate, from what I hear,” said Mr. Steczkowski. He wore a white shirt under a blue V-neck and khakis.

As the men slurped beers and feasted on $20 burgers, Mr. Holmström called players to the stage to be honored. (He was not drinking. Erik Johansson, of Team Stockholm, said that Mr. Holmström only drinks once a year, during Sweden’s annual crayfish harvest at the end of summer, “to show his employees he can.”)

In all, there were 12 tournament all-stars, a six-person M.V.P. team, an all-cup M.V.P. and a handful of gimmes, such as Best Goal. “Jesus, he’s given out awards to like a third of the people here,” said Mr. Newell.

“Hockey players are the same wherever you go,” said Mr. Kwong, now on the mike, receiving his due for Best Team Leader. “Umm, the goalies are usually crazy. The Finns always wear pink shirts wherever they go.” The Helsinki team, all 16 of them, were wearing identical pink and patterned button-downs. Of the whole group, he said: “Good guys to play hockey with, good guys to drink with, good guys to party with.”

“We might have lost the tournament,” said Reykjavik’s Runar Runarsson, after accepting an award for scoring a goal by bouncing a ricochet off the post and into the goalkeeper’s back and then on into the net. “But we are definitely gonna win the karaoke competition.”

The Swedes gave a rendition of “Hooked on a Feeling,” noteworthy for its hooka-chacka-ing. The so-called Toronto team followed with “Benny and the Jets,” in which they pronounced the title phrase as “Benny and the Yets,” intended to mock the Swedes’ trouble with the English “J.”

Wall Street came in with “Livin’ on a Prayer.” Helsinki raised the bar, selecting a Finnish rap song with a break-dancing performance by their portly defensemen, Jari Heikkila. Surprisingly nimble, Mr. Heikkila deftly alternated between “the robot” and “the mime,” and ended with a backspin only enhanced by his protruding paunch.

Runar Runarsson, representing Reykjavik, his collar turned all the way up, went solo with “Born to Be Wild.” Emboldened by calls for an encore, he produced a guitar and belted out Adam Sandler’s “I Want to Grow Old with You.” He dedicated that song to his goalie.

Mr. Holmström declared a tie between Helsinki and Reykjavik. “We should have won,” said Finland’s Tukku Finneus, shaking his head. “We have a person who can backspin!”

Mr. Kwong, cocktail in hand, said he had made a lot of new friends. “Business is relationships, and when you have a relationship with someone via a common denominator like hockey, where you have this mutual trust and you’re playing against each other or whatever, then you’re much more open to doing things together. That’s what I think.”

Had the Financial World Cup, or whatever it was called, brought any practical benefit to business? “Honestly, no,” he said.

“You know the connections you make in this type of tournament,” said Mr. Holmström. “I have, for example, one of my best contacts for asking them if happening something in the U.S., and to listening also a little bit of the rumors. Because I can tell you that the rumor is the quickest form of information in the financial world.”

Toronto Team all-star David Adler, 26, a smiley, lanky brokerage analyst at J.P. Morgan, said he had arrived a day early and taken a jeep tour of some of Iceland’s more radical terrain. The jeeps kept getting stuck in the snow, at one point right on the edge of a cliff. “It was craaazy,” he bragged. Nearby, Mr. Heikkila was demonstrating “the robot” to a clutch of Finns and New Yorkers. “This guy is amaaazing,” said Mr. Adler.

Scott Turkow, a banker from New York, had gotten up the courage to sing “We Are the Champions.” This flummoxed Neal Walsh, Mr. Turkow’s own goalie. “What the hell is wrong with this kid? This is embarrassing,” he said, gesturing with his compact, muscled arms. “Try doing Elvis, sure. But not Freddie Mercury. The guy was a fucking opera singer, for Chrissakes.”

At midnight, Mr. Walsh was waiting to be served another Jack and Coke. Mr. Walsh, 34, is not in finance, but became friendly with some of the guys at the Chelsea Piers’ Sky Rink, where he is the manager. “You got any idea what it’s like to be stuck with no toilet paper after taking a shit in the bathroom?” he asked the bartender.

Wall Street team captain and Goldman veteran Michael Armilio, clad in a sleek gray pinstripe suit with no tie, was eager to find out where the party was going. “My wife is here with me, so I haven’t been going that hard,” he said.

Most of the hockey-playing bankers set out on another all-night pursuit along Laugavegur Avenue. Reykjavik’s main street is a quaint, architecturally bland promenade populated with bars, clubs, restaurants, teahouses and novelty shops. After midnight, it is alive with young people.

Michael Roscishewsky, 34, owner of the Blue and Gold bar in the East Village, had accompanied his friend Mr. Pryjmak to Iceland. He had some observations about Reykjavik’s nightlife. “It’s what drives the city. Everyone gets really drunk. The women are all drop-dead gorgeous. They’re also friendly, and aggressive.”

He told of how a player on the New York team had been using the urinal when an Icelandic woman entered the bathroom and asked if she could “shake” his member. “The women love to dance, and Icelandic men don’t seem to,” he said.

The Icelandic men, he noted, are very protective. Mr. Roscishewsky said on several different occasions men had interrupted his conversation with a woman to say, “Stay away from her. She has S.T.D.’s.” On another occasion, a man had threatened him with violence. “He was like, ‘Listen, it’s not happening. I’ve got eight friends with me, and you’re not getting out the door with her.’”

The visitors seemed to do well with the women on Saturday night. At 2 a.m., Mr. Steczkowski was seen posing for pictures at the Dublin Bar, wearing a huge hat made of bear fur, his lips pressed against a smiling Icelandic girl’s rosy cheek.

“Everyone back at the hotel seemed to have a story to tell,” said Mr. Roscishewsky.

Next year, the bankers will meet up again to play on the rinks and on the streets of Gothenburg, Sweden. “I’ll be at next year’s tournament for sure,” said Mr. Pryjmak later. “I’m planning on it.”

—Spencer Morgan

Social conservatism is on the rise; civil war is breaking out in Iraq. Closer to home, we contend with the dual threats of diabetes and luxury condominiums. Union Square has historically been a place where the populace gathered to express itself and rally for its concerns. In 1858, the goal was to demand food for the poor; in 1861, it was to support the Northern cause. In the 1870’s, 80’s and 90’s, socialist and labor union rallies were de rigueur. In 1913, thousands of garment workers took over the square; 40 years later, masses gathered for a vigil to protest the Rosenbergs’ execution.

Now people have pillow fights.

Beating one another with pillows is, after all, ultimately the purest demonstration of leisure time, the essence of frivolity. But these young New Yorkers believe that this is the stuff of civic and artistic engagement, and such activities are thriving.

The participants are in their 20’s and 30’s. Most are overeducated and underpaid. They’re Flickr-savvy. Some bicycle; many shop at Whole Foods. “They’re kind of granola, kind of anarchist,” 19-year-old Kevin Bracken, who founded New Mind Space with 19-year-old Lori Kufner, explained. “It’s not quite art and it’s not quite protest, but it attracts artists and protestors.” Those they attract also like their massive Easter-egg hunts and games of Capture the Flag and subway parties. They share a nostalgia for childhood and a lack of inhibition that might prevent others from diving headfirst into earnest play with strangers.

“The way that wearing a mask would free somebody,” Mr. Bracken said, “being involved in a massive urban event frees somebody.”

But no one not already possessed of a certain exuberant extrovertedness would show up in Union Square with a pillow. Underneath it all, the fluffy fighters fiercely believe that their brief episodes of acting out matter in some critical way, improve the city, make it livable. An earnestness bordering on the devout permeates: They are clever but not ironic, and more than a little self-righteous. If you don’t like what they do, it is because you are the problem—you with your shopping bags and your naysaying and your curmudgeonly newspaper articles.

“Political organizations have the goal to put public space in the forefront of the public consciousness,” Mr. Bracken explained. “We consider ourselves a playful extension of that. We see that public space is being increasingly privatized; billboards are eroding the visual economy of the street. In a city, you can work or you can play. We like to play.

“I think that we’re living life to its fullest,” he added.

NOT SURPRISINGLY, LAST YEAR THAT WEEKLONG CELEBRATION of altered states called Burning Man welcomed a Pillow-Fight Club into its mix of 25,000 people. Held in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, Burning Man celebrates “radical self-reliance” (read: camping) and “community.” Though not affiliated in any way with New Mind Space, it is Burning Man that epitomizes this subset of the population, serving as a sort of pilgrimage for faithful seekers of all things D.I.Y. It’s the strongest and most visible manifestation of that growing contingency of groups that briefly occupy public spaces for their own games, art events and missions.

Last month, Harper’s editor Bill Wasik touched on similar phenomena in an essay outing himself as the creator of the flash mob. In the summer of 2003, he wrote, he managed to whip a social experiment into a media sensation, causing hordes to stare at one another in the Grand Hyatt New York and worship a large-scale Tyrannosaurus rex. Harnessing the power of e-mail, he organized a group in public for the mere purpose of organizing a group in public. Mr. Wasik conceived his project as exposing the vacuity of fashion-obsessed, Strokes-listening “hipsters” everywhere and demonstrating the tendency of the young and avant-garde to “deindividuate” and follow, herd-like, the newest fashion.

Yet by defining his focus group as the hundreds of thousands of educated young urbanites with strikingly similar tastes, Mr. Wasik gave himself a little too much credit. He seems to think that his mob attracted an urban trendsetting elite, those who, with the help of the Internet, make “the same books, records, films … au courant by all” at the same time. But while Mr. Wasik’s examples—Friendster, Franz Ferdinand, even Jonathan Safran Foer—were all popular things that had brief heydays among some stylish youth, the flash mob never came close to achieving that kind of status. Mr. Wasik is correct to grasp the disposability that mass culture and manufactured “hipness” shares with the mob, but what he mistook for trendiness was in fact the mob’s own unique smugness.

Shaggy-haired hipster girls in leggings are obsessed with recognizing, and outdoing, each other, but the flash mob’s desire is to force everyone else to recognize it. Like an amoebic teenager, flash mobs and their kin insist on their difference from the norm, or life as it is usually lived, free from hundreds of synchronized wristwatches. Look at your bourgeois life! the mob screams at the appointed hour. We are not like you! Then the last grain of sand slips through the hourglass, and they disperse once more.

The flash mob did succeed in demonstrating the power of e-mail and the Internet to organize groups of strangers, and this generation’s desire to show up for the sheer sake of seeing what might happen if they do. What pillow-fighters and other such arty-crunchy performers do is introduce the element of physical play and fun. But they also don’t care who organizes the activity or, really, what it is.

“We don’t call ourselves a flash mob,” said Mr. Bracken. “Flash mobs have no purpose. That is their essence. We have a purpose. The purpose of Capture the Flag is to capture the other team’s flag. Capture the Flag has been played for decades, if not centuries. Millennia, perhaps. There have been pillow fights for as long as there have been pillows.”

Yet the real purpose of these groups is unclear. Improv Everywhere, whose mission is to cause “scenes of joy and chaos in public places,” is the project of Charlie Todd, a 27-year-old improv-theater teacher at the Upright Citizens Brigade. Since August 2001, he has led his “agents” on over 50 “missions” that are, in his words, “essentially pranks.” In late January, more than 160 New Yorkers followed their lead and rode the No. 6 train without pants. On Feb. 18, the group organized 100 people to descend upon the Strand bookstore and blast their “Nokia Tunes” and “Samsung Tunes,” among others, into one grand and annoying “cell-phone symphony.”

“I’m a big believer in organized fun,” Mr. Todd said. “Have fun for fun’s sake. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Don’t take the world too seriously. Slow down and enjoy the unusual things in your world and celebrate them.”

Although those who participate in the no-pants mission and, say, the Idiotarod shopping-cart race (an actual recent event) aren’t cut wholly from the same cloth, there is one common goal: They seek to reclaim public space for public use.

“Once you’ve played capture the flag under the Manhattan Bridge, you never experience the neighborhood in the same way,” Mr. Bracken said. “These spaces were designed with people in mind.”

And these people want to take back those spaces, take them and, by golly, have fun in them. “I had a whole lot of fun,” Gerr from Queens reminisced about the pillow fight, for example, on the New Mind Space message board. “Hopefully I can find myself in one of the many pics that were taken.” They pretend that by doing so, they are expressing a surplus energy that cannot be dominated by capitalist forces.

In interviews, Mr. Bracken and Mr. Todd both derided television and film as passive consumption, arguing that they prefer a creative, proactive experience. On the Nonsense N.Y.C. Web site, the home base of a listserve that often publicizes these types of events, the author writes: “We believe that there is more to life in New York than getting drunk at slick new bars”—suggesting that these folks are the creative types who long to escape the monotony of functional alcoholism.

But massing for massing’s sake—gathering in a crowd to perform a “funny” task for the sake of gathering in a crowd and performing a “funny” task—is no less nihilistic than sitting in the warmth and downing one of many whiskey and sodas. In fact, drinking, after all, is a social activity. There is music; there is dancing. It is the coffeehouse, where ideas are exchanged.

A mass action, on the other hand, refuses the exchange of ideas. It favors the performance of predetermined expressions of “joy” and “fun”; it demands obedience, compliance and discipline. Citizens organized into armies of the absurd decorate streets and shops with their calculated acts and circus tricks. They do not consume, no—nor do they contemplate.

“I plan everything,” Mr. Todd said. “But in terms of just these large things, the people at large, they definitely follow instructions. And oftentimes they show up for these things not knowing what’s going to happen at all.”

Those heady days when one imagined the political potential of large-scale civil disobedience, acts of “culture jamming”—everyone, get together and drive golf balls into the satellite dish on Fox’s studio roof!—have ended. Instead of satisfying political desires, we have the narcissistic pursuit of “experience.” All that remains is technology’s gift of quick and efficient mobilization, citizens all dressed up and nothing to say.

Things might have been different for picky Ingrid if she’d been approached by Neil Strauss. At the suggestion of a clever nonfiction book editor, Mr. Strauss infiltrated the subculture of über-dorks who spend their free time at pickup-artist seminars or online in chat rooms trying to break the seduction and entrapment of women down to a formula that anyone—no matter how awkward, uncool or bizarre-looking—can follow. By trading secrets and war stories, they learn to insult women subtly to undermine their self-esteem, to distract jealous boyfriends while they collect girls’ phone numbers, and to ignite threesomes through sophisticated come-ons such as “Hey, let’s all massage each other!” After several months of this perverse form of finishing school, Mr. Strauss became one of the very slickest pickup artists—or so he says—and ended up bedding what sounds like hundreds of women. How could Ingrid have resisted?

A former music critic for The New York Times who now contributes to Rolling Stone, Mr. Strauss seems to understand intuitively a certain type of narcissistic male. His writing is often hilarious and vivid (a scene in which he races through a bar with the Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss, competing with her for women, is particularly entertaining). But reading about the creepy self-help scene he “penetrates” also requires heroic suspension of disbelief: Some of the claims he puts forth sound too absurd to be taken seriously.

He tells us about the “most worshipped pickup artist in the community,” an aspiring magician named “Mystery” whose “nights out seducing models and strippers in his hometown Toronto were chronicled in intimate detail online” (and also in a New York Times Sunday Styles article that Mr. Strauss wrote last year). Mr. Strauss and a handful of other schlubs paid $500 each for a “Basic Training” workshop with Mystery; the training consisted of four nights of accosting women in Los Angeles nightclubs, with lectures beforehand and critiques afterward.

Guided by a fellow who seemed to take pride in looking like a clown on acid (on one occasion, Mystery wore “a top hat, flight goggles, six-inch platform boots, black latex pants, and a black T-shirt with a scrolling red digital sign that said ‘Mystery’ on it”), the trainees began preying on strippers, porn stars and any other large-breasted women (the prey is inevitably described as “scantily clad”). The men were instructed to approach women standing in groups, to ignore the one they found most attractive, and then to subtly demean her with “negs”—backhanded compliments such as “I like your hair, is it real?” or “you have eye crusties”—in order to undermine her confidence, all the while dazzling her friends with tricks and psychic readings. And the women were such morons that they’d fall for it: The attractive woman who’d been ignored and “negged” would follow her seducer like a zombie into a dark corner, exchange saliva and hand over her phone number.

Mr. Strauss soaked up these teachings and then went on to study with several competing seduction-cult leaders. He traveled around the world and became a pickup legend himself, complete with groupies and imitators and even a proposition from Courtney Love.

Tagging along with Mr. Strauss is amusing. Not for long, though. Most of the men in the pickup “community” are unattractive, charmless and in various states of unemployment—the sort of guys who probably still play Dungeons and Dragons in their free time. Yet that doesn’t seem to stop them from every night bringing home another Penthouse Pet of the Year. Mr. Strauss moved into a mansion in the Hollywood Hills with a whole posse of pickup artists, each of them more irritating than the next, and they started squabbling, scrapping like sorority sisters over a bottle of nail polish. It was at this point that morality crept in and Mr. Strauss came to the stunning discovery that it was all very … shallow.

The world described in The Game is both fascinating and horrifying. It’s a rubberneck experience, like passing a wreck on the highway. (Mr. Strauss produced a similar effect as co-writer of Jenna Jameson’s recent best-selling memoir, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star.) You drive on, feeling guilty and embarrassed at having overheard the fantastical ramblings of a porn-addled fratboy: “I carried her naked and dripping to my bedroom, put on a condom, and slowly entered her,” he writes, referring to one of his roommates’ sisters. Another victim, Johanna, is a “petite, mischievous stripper with big saucer eyes.” As for Tammy, “I pressed her against the shower door, smashing her breasts against the glass, and took her from behind.” One chapter is nothing more than a list of 18 women he hooked up with, and practically includes their bra sizes.

But then he sees the light, finds true love and settles down.

You’re probably expecting that the author also unveils an insightful analysis of the phenomenon he’s been studying; you’re expecting an answer, for example, to the obvious question: Why do these pickup artists seem to share such a deep hostility and resentment toward women? No such luck. Mr. Strauss prefers to sprinkle his book with the pop wisdom he’s absorbed like cheap cologne during his nights out. A typical tidbit: “[J]ust as most men are attracted in a Pavlovian manner to anything that is thin, has blonde hair, and possesses large breasts, women tend to respond to status and social proof.” This one very nearly scratches the surface: “PUAs [pickup artists] do not hate women; they fear them.”

But what I really want to know is, what are the women of Los Angeles on?

Sheelah Kolhatkar is a reporter at The Observer.