"Paging Dr. Rushdie, paging Dr. Salman Rushdie..."

Here's a sentence I never thought I'd type: I watched Salman Rushdie perform an ultrasound this morning. Sometimes, in an otherwise disappointing movie experience, something happens that makes you blink and snap to attention, if only for a moment. In Helen Hunt's limp directing debut, "Then She Found Me," the main character (played by Hunt) visits her OB/GYN, played by an actor who really looked an awful lot like the famed novelist. Nonsense, I thought — Salman Rushdie isn't an actor, even if he did pop up as himself in the first Bridget Jones movie. But I waited around for the credits and sure enough, it was him.

I'm sure there's some fabulous story behind this — maybe Salman and Helen met up at some very eclectic cocktail party, and he confided a long-cherished dream? But "Then She Found Me" is sneaking into the festival with so little buzz, nobody's writing about it, so I'll just have to wonder. The movie, a loose adaptation of Elinor Lipman's very funny novel about a high-school teacher who meets her flamboyant birth mother, has been a pet project of Hunt's for many years. The end result, while earnest and often sweet, still feels undeveloped and generic; particularly a love subplot (between Hunt and Colin Firth) that we're supposed to take on faith. Hunt spends most of the movie frowning thoughtfully but sadly, as if she's realized too late that this screenplay wasn't ready. If Rushdie was hoping to have his thespian — or obstetrical — talents discovered, he picked the wrong vehicle.

Speaking of ultrasounds, Jason Reitman's "Juno" shows us one as well: performed on a pregnant teen (the very self-possessed Ellen Page) cheerfully prepared to hand over her baby to a pair of seemingly happy yuppies (Jason Bateman, Jennifer Garner). It's a self-consciously stylized teen film along the lines of "Rushmore" and "Napoleon Dynamite" and though the characters are frequently annoying as hell, they're also often very funny. "I am a sacred vessel," Juno righteously tells her friend. "All you have in your stomach is Taco Bell."

"Juno," which will be released by Fox Searchlight this winter, has some kind of oddball marketing campaign going on here, in which groups of boys in maroon-and-yellow athletic gear (which Juno's dorky boyfriend wears in several key scenes) hang out around the festival theaters, in a life-imitating-art sort of way. Word is they were handing out orange Tic Tacs earlier (another key plot point in the movie), but I missed it.

In fact, Toronto at the moment seems to be one big marketing campaign. Store windows are decorated with film reels; restaurants tout the festival (a place where I got some takeout yesterday had a sign: "Great Films, Better Food"); and the locals are ready for their close-ups. My cousin, who lives here, offered this report after meeting friends for drinks Friday night at a jam-packed bar located right at Festival Central: "All the beautiful people were all dolled up, waiting to be discovered. Seriously, I know what Torontonians usually look like. This was different: The makeup was heavy, the shirts were short and tight, the heels were high." The better to attract a movie star's eye?

More tomorrow, including Keira Knightley in "Atonement" and Werner Herzog''s visit to the end of the world.