Online viewing tip.

Stephen Colbert roasts W. Via Waxy.org.

As this latest Internet wildfire spreads, you can find commentary all over, and not just where you'd most expect to. In the comments at City Pages, for example; or John Rogers: "The President was upset? Good. I hope the President was sleepless with rage. At least then he'd know how most of us have been spending every night for the last three years."

Update, 5/1: W and Steve Bridges; pretty amusing, too, though not in a stand-up-n-cheer sort of way.

Update, 5/4: Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin looks into why the Colbert videos were removed from YouTube. So... here's an alternative.

Update, 5/6: Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin on how video wound up on Google Video - with CSPAN's consent.

Udine. It's a wrap.

The following dispatch, edited in Berlin and coming to you from a server in San Francisco, comes from Moira Sullivan, now back in Stockholm after seeing a slew of films from Asia in Italy.

At the closing ceremony of the Udine Far East Film Festival on April 29, the audience awards were given to the ten most popular films. As anticipated, the South Korean film Welcome to Dongmakgol, a story about soldiers from the Korean War who chance upon a peaceful community in the mountains and are then transformed by their zest for life, was honored as most popular film of the festival. Approximately 4,000 spectators voted for the films. The complete list, the audience top ten:

• Welcome to Dongmakgol (Park Gwang-hyun, South Korea 2005).
• Always: Sunset on Third Street (Yamazaki Takashi, Japan 2005).
• Linda Linda Linda (Yamashita Nobuhiro, Japan 2005).
• Loach Is Fish Too (Yang Yazhou, China 2005).
• Nana (Otani Kentaro, Japan 2005).
• You Are My Sunshine (Park Jin-pyo, South Korea 2005).
• You and Me (Ma Liwen, China 2005).
• When the Show Tent Came to My Town (Fukagawa Yoshihiro, Japan 2005).
• Hello Yasothorn (Petchthai Wongkamlao, Thailand 2005).
• See You After School (Lee Seok-Hoon, South Korea 2005).

The Udine festival proves time after time to be a well-run, laid-back pageant. Members of the press are able to interview the visiting directors and press coordinator Ippolita Nigris Cosattini makes sure the process runs smoothly. The selection committee chooses films that do not disappoint, with something for every taste: entertainment, art house, and groundbreaking non-linear cinema. Behind the section are film experts who live in Asia, such as Mark Schilling, based in Japan, and Jessica Zafra, who lives in Manila.

The coordination body of the festival is Centro Espressioni Cinematografiche (CEC), headed by president Sabrina Baracetti, festival coordinator Thomas Bertacche and hospitality coordinators Francesco Novella and Valentina Cordelli. Acquiring good Asian films is the aim of the CEC; they explained how this year they had to buy the rights to show three films at the festival and were actually prevented for the first time from other distributors from screening films at Udine. One CEC ambition is to spotlight the films that get "caught in the crosshairs" of the larger festivals such as Cannes, Berlin and Venice. The CEC would also like to have a stronger relationship with the Venice International Film Festival and double the number of Asian films available to the Venice Friuli-Venezia-Giulia region, which has a rich infrastructure of festivals, universities and libraries. Venice Film Festival director Marco Müller, who is a European expert in Chinese literature, is in agreement and attended the festival.

The Udinese audience was delighted by the Japanese mockumentary Ski Jumping Pairs: Road to Torino, screened in the final days of the festival. A mix of digital film and archival footage, it tells the story of the development of "Ski Pairing," an Olympic event developed by quantum physicist Professor Harana. Experts called on for professional input include Dr Norman Bates of Massachusetts University. The film serves to deconstruct the running commentary by sports journalists during Olympics events and we certainly had our share of that with extensive coverage this winter. Swedish National Television ran out of money because of it all, and couldn't afford to broadcast the Academy Awards this year.

Also worthy of mention is the festival trailer directed by Lorenzo Bianchini, with art direction by Alex Nazzi, showing a martial artist brandishing a sword with a shadow warrior - a woman who removes her hood after dueling with her worthy opponent.

Udine Dispatch. 8.

Moira Sullivan spotlights films from China and South Korea screened at the Udine Far East Film Festival.

The special panel on China in Cinema was dedicated to the two actors of You and Me, directed by Ma Liwen - veteran Jin Yaqin and debutant Gong - and the director of Loach is Fish Too, Yang Yazhou. Both were very popular films at the festival. You and Me is a touching drama about the meeting of an elderly woman and young university student. Granny, a former soldier, rents an inexpensive room to Xiao Ma but they become more than landlady and tenant. Every inch of territory is debated and marked, often resulting in total exasperation yet they both continue to co-exist through four seasons. Ma Liwen said she chose the story because intergenerational meetings between women have seldom been approached in film. The treatment of the relationship goes beyond merely setting up an observant camera and many scenes, such as a video project Xiao Ma makes of Granny, are artfully arranged. The strength of the relationship endeared this couple to the audience in a profound way.

According to director Yang Yazhou, the situation in Beijing of migrant workers from Northern China - over 140 million in all - has also been rarely treated in film, though does Guo Xiaolu tackles the subject in the excellent documentary, Concrete Revolution. Loach is Fish Too is the story of the hard life of these workers. In the massive modernization of the city, inhabitants have been known to say that they leave their house in the morning only to find it gone when they return. Yang shows such events in more than one scene. The main characters are a divorcée Niqiu (Ni Ping), who has twin daughters, and a widower also by the name of Niqui (Ni Dahong). Their name refers to a low-status fish and symbolizes how they are treated. An overwhelming momentum builds on the screen from the first moments. Migrants arrive on a cattle train and are herded into the Forbidden City for hard labor such as ditch-digging. But in between all the harshness are several ephemeral scenes of warmth. One scenario involves a taking care of a bedridden elderly man. Niqui dedicates herself vigorously to the task of making him happy in his final days. Class differences are revealed through the instructions given by his daughter, adding another dimension to the plight of migrant workers. Gender relations are explored as several men try to molest Niqui and a seedy photographer tries to exploit her daughters. Loach is Fish Too stands out as a very strong and important film, with excellent editing, music, art direction and cinematography.

Udine's FEFF offered several entertaining and well-made South Korean films this week. Choe Equan's Voice, shown on horror day, departs from the conventions of the other films. Both Choe's film and All for Love, by Min Ky-dong, were the only films at the festival with minor gay/lesbian characters, albeit closeted (if you discount the stereotypes in the campy Tokyo Zombie (Sato Sakichi, Japan 2006). All For Love presents a multi-arch of interesting characters whose complicated lives and conflicting desires intersect with one another, though they are not intimately related. Examples are a landlord enticed into selling his building, which houses a movie theater and a fast food stand run by a women who loves Audrey Hepburn. In a moment of cinematic magic, Henry Mancini's "Moon River" is the soundtrack to a home video the landlord has made of his tenant. Then there are next to impossible relationships, such as a macho cop and a smart-mouthed psychologist or a wealthy closeted gay man and the butler he hires to take care of his boy. Although not all the relationships are sufficiently fleshed out, the film works.

Two high school films about gangs challenging outsiders feature some of the same actors: See You After School, by Lee Seok-Giib, and Art of Fighting, by Shin Han-sol. Through luck and a bit of smarts, a transfer student learns how to beat the bad guys and get the girl. He also elevates the status of "losers," and wins the acclaim of his classmates. The thugs who attack him become lovers, according to the end credits, which has been known to happen in the homosocial world of gang fighting.

Art of Fighting is less successful. It features the lead of Kim Ki-duk's 3 Iron, Jae Hee Song, this time as a teenager who needs to learn how to fight and defend himself - but in this film, he doesn't play golf. Byung-tae forces his "Dirty Harry" neighbor, Pan-su (a commanding Baek Yoon-shik), to help him, a man who knows how to fight with sensual and cool detachment and who teaches him everything he needs to know.

Murder Take One is an interesting cop film with a spiritual dimension. The influence of game shows and crime scene investigations are presented through a murder investigated live on TV. The opening crane shot, filmed with a "spyder-cam," vividly reveals the macrocosm of the crime scene. When the story shifts to the ground, widescale pandemonium breaks loose. This great beginning and the carefully arranged scenes that follow are ultimately winning. Even psychics have their place in CSI-type shows.

Welcome to Dongmakgol, by Park Kwang-hyun, the closing film of the festival, shows what happens to soldiers from the North and the South during the Korean War who arrive in a kind of Shangri-la. Dongmakgol is an oasis where the inhabitants don't know war. The naivety of the villagers, including Yeo-il (Gang Hye-jung, the poster girl of the film), seems odd to these soldiers familiar with the CGI-orchestrated carnage of weaponry and instruments of mass destruction. They are glad - and lucky - they are still alive, but instantly take the villagers as prisoners. Soon, though, they learn that the innocence of Dongmakgol is the right antidote for them and wind up hanging the laundry. The cinematography is excellent and the message of the film has particular significance today at a time when pacifists are considered unpatriotic.

Barcelona Dispatch. 2.

Juan Manuel Freire on Royston Tan's 4:30 and Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's Invisible Waves.

Singaporean Royston Tan has made a name for himself revealing the fringe of his country's society - particularly the side of that fringe occupied by teenagers without hope, lonesome and lost. In his second full-length film, he carries on investigating the lives of underdogs and lonely young people (though this time without the graphic violence of his previous 15: The Movie).

The first Official Section film shown at the Barcelona Asian Film Festival, 4:30 has more to do with Nobody Knows than with any young gangster epic. An 11-year-old boy, Xiao Wu, is dazed and confused and abandoned (by his mother, who has put him in the dubious care of their drunk tenant), but his pranks are rather naïve and more a product of boredom than of rebellion. The story focus Xiao Wu's relationship with his newly found "Uncle," who needs a little care and attention even more than the young boy. To depict this shared loneliness, Tan chooses a style with more connections to Tsai Ming-liang (and especially the exploration of intimacy, of closed doors, of What Time is It There?) than to MTV-style kinetics, his past tendency. There are moments when melodrama threatens to intrude, but creating powerful visual metaphors of solitude seems one of Tan's gifts.

One of the surprises of 2003 was Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Last Life in the Universe, a wonderful romantic comedy of surreal and magical aspects, photographed with an abstract aestheticism by Christopher Doyle, centering on two people, alone but not lonesome, who find mutual understanding in the worst moments of their lives. The images moved slowly, slid, they floated, and they revealed inner corners of their central characters, the suicidal Japanese man and the wounded Thai girl. What kept the revelation from being a masterpiece was an unnecesary criminal subplot (with Takashi Miike in the role a gangster, or better, in the role of himself) that distracted from the essential in this film: the process of falling in love between two lost people in a hostile world.

Presented in non-competitive Asian Selection section, Invisible Waves proves again that Ratanaruang handles personal drama better than labyrinthine crime. The director's plan here seems to be to take the gangster thriller to a dimension far from the logics of street wisdom, the genre clichés, and transform it into a philosophical odyssey with a slapstick sense of comedy. Well, at least that's an idea, because it's hard to decipher the aim of a film which floats with no direction through two long hours. Sure, it's lensed by Chris Doyle, but except for a few seas, a few skins, that doesn't really show. The story is weak, as well as the storytelling, and the results of the oblique visual style, set in frames that never capture action in a normal mode, range from fascinating to frustrating (sometimes this seems like the work of an amateur director). Tadanobu Asano's performance doesn't redeem anything, though he's proven capable of bring to their characters complex, secret depths, but here seems as strangely jumbled as the man behind the camera.

Barcelona Dispatch. 1.

Juan Manuel Freire on a festival opener.

For its opening day, the Barcelona Asian Film Festival made an offer not to be refused. Three Times is a kind of distillation of Hou Hsiao-hsien's career. Three stories in three different historical periods, all of them previously visited by the director, dealing with romance and the way politics affect personal lives - and three stories told in an almost comatose rhythm, as Hou likes to tell stories, grasping invisibleness and the importance of apparently empty moments in a melancholic style. This is Hou at his best, revising himself with rigor and giving us the best possible version of his art. This is a powerful defense of essentialism in a time of horror vacui.

The three stories of Three Times share Chang Chen and Shu Qi, who's never been a better actress than here - providing all of her characters a strong sense of vividness, a detailed humanity. The first story, "A Time of Love," set in Taiwan in 1966, follows the romance between a pool-hall hostess and an army conscript who has an unexpected crush on her. Chen was looking for the previous hostess, whom he'd met on a previous leave, but instead finds May and, naturally, is captivated. Set to two main musical leitmotivs - The Platters' "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and Aphrodite's Child "Rain and Tears" - this is a celebration of that teenage feeling of love, so vividly recreated that screen literally pours rain, and tears, and crush.

Naïve passion turns to frustration in "A Time for Freedom," set in Taiwan in 1911, where Hou almost seems to remake one of his most celebrated masterpieces, the slowcore Flowers of Shanghai. The pace is equally slow, even slower than a Codeine or Red House Painters death ballad, while the main issues are identical - the selling of sex, the prison of fate, impossible love. Shu Qi portrays a courtesan whose only possible escape from the brothel, the wealthy patron incarnated by Chan Cheng, doesn't seem to be aware of her desperation. The initially intrusive use of silent movie subtitles becomes another successful stylistic flourish, emphasizing the artifice of intercourses in a society that hides every passion and truth beneath luxurious costumes and furniture.

Finally, "A Time for Youth," set in Taipei in 2005, looks like a short version of the marvellous Millennium Mambo, that perfect depiction of the motorcycle emptiness of young modern life. A photographer and an epileptic singer are involved in a relationship which hurts both his girlfriend and her best friend. Mobiles, R&B hit singles, motorbikes, GarageBand software, everything fills the space, fills the air, but won't cure the damage in an urban landscape where emotional dependence is usually confounded with true love. This could've been written by Haruki Murakami, but it couldn't have been filmed by anyone else - not many have the strength or the intelligence to fully translate boredom into images, all open areas, without easy morals, without putting here and there any distracting elements. Too much truth will kill you.

Udine Dispatch. 7.

Back to Japan via Italy with Moira Sullivan.

Along with Yamazaki Takashi's Always, Linda Linda Linda, by the 29-year-old Japanese director Yamashita Nobuhiro, is so far the most popular film at the Udine Far East Film Festival and is sure to remain so. Some of the reasons why: For starters, it has a contemplative narrative structure and resists all attempts to be pigeonholed, though certainly critics will try. Yamashita told me that he invited the four actresses a week before shooting to share a hotel and get to know one another. You could say the film is to some extent improvisational because the way they respond to each other informs the script. The setting is a high school in the north of Japan, but Yamashita said it could have been made in Tokyo as well. The story is about a band that forms during the Shiba High Holly Fest and Japan-Korea Cultural exchange week. When the guitarist drops out, the remaining members of a band need a lead singer. They have chosen to do covers of songs by the legendary punk all male band Blue Hearts.

A lead singer is found - Song (Bae Doo-na), a Korean student who jumps at the opportunity. She has yet to make any friends at school, even though she already has one fan, the boy who sees her at the incinerator and professes his love for her. "Don't get me wrong, I don't dislike you, but I don't like you," she explains diplomatically. The impact of this subtle dialogue struck a chord with the Udinese audience. The other band members are Nozomi (Sekine Shiori) on bass, Kei (Kashi Yu) on guitar and Kyoko (Maeda Aki) on drums. You might recall Kei from Shinji Higuchi's Lorelei: The Witch of the Pacific Ocean. Yamashita signed directly following that movie. Here she gets ample room to reveal her acting abilities rather than being stuck in the hub of a sub and we do notice when she is not in a scene.

The opening scene of the film is a shoot for a video project. A young woman speaks to the camera, and someone yells, "Cut!" This is how Yamashita remembers his early film education. He said he was surprised by how little everything had changed since he attended high school and without any pretension told me he was interested in making a timeless classic. Linda Linda is a timeless classic. The plot of the film basically concerns the build-up to the big concert at the Holly Fest. We have not until now heard the band at length - in fact, they seem very secretive and shy about it, so when the lyrics include something on the order of, "We rebel against this asshole world," and "Like a rat, I want to be beautiful," you have to admire their bravery and the courage of this talented director.

Another colorful and warm, music-themed teen film screened at the festival is Nana, directed by Otani Kentaro and the story of a friendship between two girls based on a manga by Yasawa Ai. One is a rock vocalist Komatsu Nana (Aoi Miyazaki), whose boyfriend Ren (Matsuda Ryuhei) has joined another band, and the other the bubbly and self-absorbed Ozaki Nana (Mika Nakajima) who moves to Tokyo to be with her boyfriend. Things don't work out romantically quite as either planned, but their friendship grows and endures. Ozaki Nana is glad when Komatsu Nana confides some of the history of her life. "I am so happy you told me. I felt so lonely when you didn't." The timing and delivery is genuine. Another precocious line in the film is when Ozaki Nana says to Komatsu Nana, "You're really cool. I think of you more as a boyfriend than a girlfriend." But Komatsu Nana can also be vulnerable when she must decide whether or not to carry on with the enigmatic Ren. The youthful energy of this film is contagious.

New York Dispatch. 2.

David D'Arcy reviews a series of films examining various aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Tribeca Film Festival is not a showcase for motivational films, unless either you're Christo (who'll watch a 15-minute preview of Albert Maysles's The Gates) or you're in the real estate business (values of property have soared in lower Manhattan since the festival was started to breathe financial life into what was thought to be a dead area). Still, even in a festival where one of the most anticipated films is a documentary about jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, there is some room for hope, even the limited hope for moving toward peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Encounter Point, directed by Ronit Avni (and co-directed by Julia Bacha), places its hope for peace, or at least understanding, on the growing population of Israelis and Palestinians who might be expected to be the most hell-bent on revenge - the parents and families of victims of terrorism or random shootings on both sides. To meet these families is to hear withering stories of grief. The daughter of a Bethlehem politician heading to the supermarket with his entire family is shot by Israeli soldiers who say that they were waiting for three suspects driving the same color car. The student daughter of a burly IDF veteran dies in a street bombing in Tel Aviv. A young man from Ramallah is crippled by after being shot in the leg by a settler. Young men in the same room with him tell similar stories. It could be a recruiting meeting for extremists.

Robi Damelin's son, David, a soldier, is shot and killed by a sniper while posted on the West Bank. That killing, at a checkpoint near a settlement, made the sniper a folk hero among Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Along with other aggrieved parents, Damelin founds the Bereaved Families Supporting Peace, Reconciliation and Tolerance, a group sworn to non-violence. "What do you do with the pain?" she asks. Damelin's Palestinian counterpart is Ali Abu Awwad, whose brother was killed by an Israeli soldier.

Both sides know the odds they face. Jews who seek dialogue are viewed with incredulity by fellow Israelis who want revenge. Palestinians, especially those with wounds from Israeli gunfire, view Ali's initiative as a betrayal, and betrayal in the Occupied Territories can earn savage  punishment. Remember the scene in Paradise Now, in which would-be bombers filming themselves are told that filmed assassinations of collaborators are popular souvenirs.

In Encounter Point, the meetings of Jews and Arabs who barely spoke to each other before are as poignant as their testimony of the losses that brought them to that point, yet some of the film's telling moments come during a visit by Jews in the Bereaved Families to a settlement in Gaza, a visit hosted by settlers. Settlers dig in their heels, impatient with any mention of Palestinian mistreatment and humiliation, and point out that Arabs under Israeli occupation have higher living standards than in most Arab countries, to which Damelin counters that South Africans offered the same defense of their treatment of Blacks under apartheid - a valid point, but not one that extends a conversation, at least not with the Gaza settlers. You leave this film with a sense of the huge labor it took to bring aggrieved Israelis and Palestinians together, just to talk to each other, and the even greater labor involved in getting Israelis to agree that one way toward peace is a dialogue based on a shared sense of loss. The families, now numbering 500, seem determined enough, although perhaps their best hope for now is a sequel with an expanded cast a year or two down the line. The fact that the Israeli bereaved families demonstrate with signs on the street points to how marginal they are politically.

A chillier feeling comes from Dear Father, Quiet, We're Shooting, directed by David Benchetrit, another Israeli doc about opposition, this time from veterans who either served or refused to serve in the occupied territories. Conscientious objectors, including a former helicopter pilot and a former tank commander, are eloquent as they argue that the 1982 invasion of Lebanon was the pivotal time that hardened the Israeli military. For these veterans, some of them iconic macho guys who certainly don't call themselves pacifists, the 18-year mission was Israel's "Vietnam," with the bombing of cities, civilian deaths, and "targeted assassinations." Step back for a moment and avoid evaluating the "Vietnam" allusion too literally. Think of it, among other things, as an intensification of existing feuds in a Lebanon that was already ravaged by violence, and as a reflection of collapsing morale, painful divisions, and (to understate it) delayed accountability in Israeli society. Aerial footage of bombings and black and white shots of civilians seeking shelter in ruins give the Vietnam epithet some plausibility. So do orders to "shoot anything that moves" in cities that the Israelis know to be full of civilians. The very title of the film seems to be implying a question from an earlier generation asking what happened to the Israel they knew. Now we see.

For Americans, the look of the film will be familiar, with footage of a chaotic war intercut with scenes of testimony from veterans who say they regret what they did, while describing what they did in painful detail. Here some of the testimony is slightly different. Young men who served stress that it's not enough to deplore the excesses of war after serving bravely - you could  call it the old John Kerry standard. They argue, instead, that the test of courage doesn't come on the battlefield (in calling for peace after one earns one's stripes as a killer), but in the refusal to serve in the occupied territories at all. The trial of a few young men who do just that is shown. A new line of conflict seems to be drawn, although these protesters, like the bereaved families, are a tiny group.

These dissenters and objectors are all men. The more general experience of girls in uniform is also the subject of the fictional Close to Home, set in Jerusalem and seen from the perspective of girl soldiers, a first for an Israeli feature. That novelty may be one reason for its appeal at festivals like the Berlinale, where I saw it and wrote about it. (We are indeed talking about girls. The conscripts are teenagers, who are as bored and peevish as teenagers or soldiers can be.) Close to Home takes us through ordinary days in these soldiers' lives, i.e., checking identity papers of Arabs on the street at random and taking abuse from their sergeants. There's not much nobility here. Nor is there much beauty in the Jerusalem where they practice racial-profiling every day.

The soldiers whom we follow are Mirit, a sullen pretty martinet whose parents live nearby, and Smadar, a malcontent who can't find a rule that isn't meant to be broken, whether it's smoking on duty or shoplifting with a guy that she picks up on a lark. "Maybe I don't know what an Arab looks like," Smadar retorts when superiors question the log of Palestinians whose papers she checked. The petty annoyances of army life blend in with the petty humiliation of Palestinians under occupation, which become a displaced revenge for the girls who hate military service. Then, when the two girls quarrel over something meaningless, a bomb goes off.

There's nothing too special in the look of Close to Home, unless you appreciate the palette of wintry Jerusalem grey experienced by the lowest rank of girl soldiers. Yet the directors have a flair for dramatizing the subtle modulations of everyday army life and everyday teenage angst. If you've been in or around the military outside of combat, you know that life consists of long periods of boredom punctuated by rare moments of intensity. Add young crushes and young rivalries to that mix, in the context of two communities that view each other with supreme suspicion, and you've got a sense of where this is going.

(While Close to Home did break ground as a portrait of army life for young women, the army is as much a part of Israel cinema as it is a part of Israeli society. For another take on the bonding of two soldiers, this time a gay commander and his handsome lover in an outpost cut into a hillside in the Golan Heights, watch Yossi & Jagger, Israel's Brokeback Bunker.)

Udine Dispatch. 6.

Moira Sullivan reports on two Japanese subgenres. For more on The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai, see Ben Slater's recent dispatch from Singapore.

New Japanese cinema was given full attention in a series of seminars at the Udine Far East Film Festival with discussions on various genres. One of the spotlights at the festival is pinku eiga, soft-core Japanese porn. The "genre" accounted for 65 percent of Japanese film production in the 70s. Audiences decreased in the 80s and 90s and the films have now transitioned into the DVD market.

The screening of Meike Mitsuru's The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai (2005) was sold out. Meike says he's usually invited to art museums and festivals to show his films, usually made in about three to five days, with two weeks of post-production. And typically the amateur actors are not paid. Probably the main reason the film attracted a large audience is because it pokes fun at George W Bush, who becomes prey to the forces of Eros and Thanatos. Of course, it's not original, portraying warmongers as sexually frustrated: Kubrick's Dr Strangelove brings that home. Sachiko (Kuroda Emi) cites chaos theory and quotes Noam Chomsky and Susan Sontag, but one of the common criticisms of the film is that she doesn't seem to know what she's talking about. It doesn't seem to matter, because she has been shot in the head, with a gaping bullet wound to boot, and is still functioning. Sachicko seems to stumble over men in between reciting theory in the midst of chaos with sex scenes every ten minutes. She tells the men she meets she is "practicalist" rather than a "situationalist" - yet another empty reference to intellectual discourse. Meike says it comes from a Woody Allen line about "call girls," not the philosophy of Guy Debord.

The Japanese 19th century mystery writer Edogawa Rampo inspires another provocative genre presented at the festival: Rampo Noir, or "ero-guro," grotesque eroticism. Rampo fashioned his name after Edgar Allan Poe. Four directors - Takeuchi Suguru, Jissoji Akio, Sato Hisayasu, Kaneko Atsushi offer their version of Rampo's work, all casting Tadanobu Asano.

The first, Mars Canal (Kasei no Unga), by Takeuchi, is the shortest and most stunning - a crater, a naked man and the choreography of two passionate lovers. In The Hell Of Mirrors (Kagami Jigoku), Jissoji Akio tells a stylized tale of deadly mirrors that burn the brain matter of geishas at a Japanese Tea House. Detective Akeschi arrives to investigate. Akechi also appears in Jissoji's Murder on D Street (1997), a homoerotic and sado-masochistic tale of an artist commissioned to make forgeries of illustrations of tortured women. The cool style of the film is exceptional if you forget the contorted and bound images of women. But that's what makes it Rampo Noir.

Sato's The Caterpillar (Imomushi) concerns a war victim whose arms and legs have been severed and who commands his wife to further torture him for sexual pleasure. Sato provides the classic definition of aestheticized sexual violence while shedding little light on the subject. Two people clash, their passion (loosely interpreted) compels them to extremes of pain and the result is "beauty." The director with strong roots in pink told me that "Japan is our mother - we are taken such good care of in swaddling cotton that we need to crush this dependency." The explanation seems to fit Sato's work well.

With its decomposing bodies, Crawling Bugs (Mushi), by Kaneko Atsushi, is probably the most reminiscent of Poe. Tadanobu Asano plays an obsessive compulsive with skin allergies who wants to keep a stage actress all to himself after strangling her. Her body becomes an artwork situated in a kitsch aura of white lights and a gaudy flower arrangement taken from a portrait off the wall of his dermatologist. The fourth act certainly qualifies as horror when we see the real setting of this creation.

Photos of Meike Mitsuru and Sato Hisayasu © Moira Sullivan.

Weekend shorts.

"Nobody's perfect, but the Independent's Middle East correspondent's skill, originality, fearlessness and tenacity on the ground make him one of the greats," writes Alexander Bisley in the Lumière Reader. Indeed. And, as it turns out, Robert Fisk has quite a lot to say about film, too.

Nathaniel R has been hard at work at Michelle Pfeiffer Blog-a-Thon HQ.

It's not everyone who gets to write an entry titled, "My Dinner with Herzog." Tom Hall can, though.

Ray Pride at Movie City Indie: "The estimable Korean Film Council's just published three new filmmaker bios, of Park Chan-Wook, Ryoo Seung-Wan and Bong Joon-Ho, all of which are downloadable as free PDFs." Also: Ageeana in Tennessee.

Aaron Aradillas turns in another in his infrequent series of highly entertaining interviews with film critics at RockCritics.com: Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum. Via the cinetrix.

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir talks with Daniel Clowes and Terry Zwigoff about Art School Confidential. Dave Shulman meets them for breakfast and the LA Weekly foots the bill. At the AV Club, Nathan Rabin gives the film a B-.

"A recapitulation of career-long themes and tropes, Three Times finds Hou [Hsiao-hsien] in a self-reflexive mode... The greatest chronicler of our mortality, Hou makes movies that are attuned to the implacability of the past and the impermanence of the present." Elbert Ventura kicks off a trio of reviews from the Reverse Shot team at indieWIRE. J Hoberman, writing in the Village Voice, finds it "improves on a second viewing." More from Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: "[W]hile he can seem more at ease in the past than the present (witness Flowers of Shanghai and the equally sublime Puppetmaster, from 1993, both highly recommended and available on DVD), and can seem unmoored in more contemporary settings, Mr Hou nonetheless moves across time with fluid grace."

Also in the NYT:

• Dennis Lim notes that a recent batch of indies goes "beyond dutiful multiculturalism. Implicit in their mix-and-match aesthetics is the utopian notion that all of world cinema is up for grabs. They may be the first small rumblings of the globalization of the American independent film."

• "Even as more and more movies and television shows are being shot in New York, the city that turns up on the screen is far more likely to be the teeming, terrifying, exhilarating, unforgiving New York of the popular imagination," writes John Clark. The problem, if you tend to think of it that way, is that the city has lost its edge: "'As America has gotten more like New York, New York has become more like America,' said James Sanders, editor of Scenes From the City: Filmmaking in New York, 1966-2006, to be published by Rizzoli this fall."

• Hassan M Fattah: "The plot may seem mundane but in important ways, Keif al Hal is a landmark project with big ambitions. It is the first feature film from Saudi Arabia, a country with not a single legal movie theater."

• Dave Kehr on The Passenger, Fists in the Pocket and Ziegfeld Follies. More DVDs: Susan King in the Los Angeles Times and Glenn Erickson at DVD Talk.

• Stephen Holden on The Death of Mr Lazarescu. More from J Hoberman in the Voice, where he notes it is, "in several ways, the most remarkable new movie to open in New York this spring," Marisa Carroll in PopMatters and Daniel Kasman, who also reviews Three Times.

• Tom Hanks - not just some guy named Tom Hanks, but Tom Hanks - writes an appreciation of Dan Striepeke, "my makeup man for 19 years."

• Caryn James: "If pop culture satires are working in current films while political satires aren't, it's not just because Jon Stewart and other television comedians can get there first." Also, a notebook entry on Tribeca: "Five years into the festival's existence, one of the paradoxes of this New York-centric event is that many of its freshest, most startling films are political dramas and satires from non-American perspectives."

• William Grimes on why there's such a thing as a weekend.

John Horn in the LAT: "As filmmakers tell a number of stories about Sept 11 and other attacks both real and fictionalized - a rapidly growing list that includes Munich, Syriana, Paradise Now and Friday's United 93 - there's increased demand for young Middle Eastern actors. But directors and their casting agents must convince those actors that their cinematic cause is more noble than that of directors a generation ago, who routinely depicted Arabs as cartoonish, fanatical madmen."

Also: Susan King talks with Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne about Akeelah and the Bee, reviewed by Kenneth Turan. Benjamin Strong has a note on the film in the Voice, but Armond White and Jim Ridley have more in the Nashville Scene and the New York Press, respectively.

More reviews in the LAT: Carina Chocano on The Beauty Academy of Kabul, The Devil's Miner and I Am a Sex Addict; Kenneth Turan on Look Both Ways; and Robert Abele on Revoloution.

In the LA Weekly, David Chute reviews Deepa Mehta's Water, "which hitches some of the most irresistible conventions of Hindi movie melodrama to an earnest agenda of social protest." More from Priya Jain in Salon, Jeannette Catsoulis in the NYT and Bill Gallo in the Voice. Related: Ryan Stewart interviews Lisa Ray for Cinematical, where Kim Voynar also reviews the film.

"Jesus Camp, Camp Out and Summercamp! are vastly different experiences in both content and style," writes Jonny Leahan at indieWIRE.

David Byrne watches Richard Dawkins.

Back to the Voice:

• J Hoberman: "As allusive as its title, Jean-Pierre Melville's all but unknown Army of Shadows, a French resistance saga made - and tepidly received - in 1969, emerges from the mists of time in a new 35mm restoration as a career-capping epic tragedy." More from Manohla Dargis and Terrence Rafferty in the NYT, Stephanie Zacharek in Salon and Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. Related: Cinematographer Pierre Lhomme on the Leonard Lopate Show.

• Michael Atkinson on Lady Vengeance, Park Chan-wook's "most sullen and patient film, and yet it's breathless pop filmmaking, narratively mercurial, viscerally traumatic, and thematically infernal." More from Nathan Lee (NYT), Martha Fischer (Cinematical) and Tasha Robinson (AV Club).

• Atkinson on Clean, "a uniquely pungent portrait of dependent personalities and the strain they put on the social weave." And David Ng talks with Maggie Cheung. More from Stephen Holden (NYT), Stephanie Zacharek (Salon), Scott Tobias (AV Club) and Steve Erickson (Gay City News).

• Rob Nelson on Police Beat, "a film that's neither here nor there - and I mean that as a compliment." More from Manohla Dargis (NYT).

• "Tracking Shots": Joshua Land on Suite Habana, Michael Atkinson on The Lost City (more from Stephen Holden in the NYT), Jordan Harper on RV, Melissa Levine on Guys and Balls, Jim Ridley on The Whore's Son and Bill Gallo on The Sentinel and Silent Hill.

"Congratulations, Nick Swardson, you're our Bonehead of the Month." Hollywood Bitchslap lashes back at a screenwriter who's been lashing out. As if that weren't all, Erik Childress unleashes another round of "Criticwatch 2006: Critics vs Whores."

"[E]very Monday night, from 8:30 to 9, I turn my car radio to 91.7, and I don't shut it off until These Aren't the Droids You're Looking For has signed off," confesses Josh Rosenblatt. It a weekly show about - that's right - Star Wars. Also in the Austin Chronicle, Kimberley Jones reviews Screenwriters' Masterclass, "a fascinating compendium of interviews with some of the best screenwriters - American and international, big budget to no budget - working today," and Marc Savlov reviews Tsui Hark's update of his own Zu: Warriors From the Magic Mountain, Zu Warriors: "A wide-screen riot of color, movement, and sound, this is the chaos of Hark's inexhaustible creativity made real/reel, outlandish fun, and instantly, unmistakably his own."

"[W]hile Hollywood pats itself on the back for producing films like [To Kill a] Mockingbird and In The Heat of the Night, the truth is that The Intruder hit first, and hit hardest," argues Tom Huddleston. Also at Not Coming to a Theater Near You: Rumsey Taylor on Days of Heaven.

Filmbrain finally catches John Frankenheimer's 99 and 44/100% Dead, "a genuinely funny, dark, mélange of genres that was perhaps far too ahead of its time. Its postmodern refusal to root itself in a single genre, tone, or mood no doubt confounded and irritated critics back in '74."

Stephen Metcalf at Slate: "Capote is not only an American tragedy, as its director Bennett Miller has said, but an important one, and a little history can help us remember why."

"And since when has futility looked so beautiful?" Gabriele Caroti in Stop Smiling on Valerio Zurlini's The Desert of the Tartars.

Chuck Tryon: "James Longley's Iraq in Fragments is one of the more compelling documentaries to focus on post-invasion Iraq that I've seen." And he's seen a lot of them, folks.

"[W]hy wasn't he like this in 2000?" David Corn for the Nation on Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth.

At Twitch, Todd reviews Tom Mes's Agitator, "without a doubt, the definitive work on the career of Japanese cult auteur Takashi Miike." Related: Tim Lucas: "Imprint was not created to entertain, but to disturb, repulse and frighten. To those ends, it works admirably well."

At Hollywood is Talking, Jerry Brewington gets a kick out of The Proper Care and Feeding of American Messiah.

The comedy short Phone Sex Grandma is set to become a feature. Shooting starts in the summer.

Also up-n-coming:

• David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen, together again, in Eastern Promises.

• Al Pacino and Ellen Barkin, also together again, in Ocean's 13.

• Brad Anderson's remake of The Edukators, Transsiberian.

• Peter Bogdanovich's Tom Petty concert movie.

• Robert Benton's Feast of Love.

• An adaptation of Robert Greenfield's Timothy Leary: A Biography.

Roger Ebert remembers Anthony James Ryan, "Sancho Panza to [Russ] Meyer's Don Quixote." Also, Jim Emerson (he's moved Scanners!) compiles "an overview of Ebert's encounters with, and observations about, [Robert] Altman over the years."

The Telegraph's John Hiscock profiles "the new Brit pack."

Sarah Stewart asks Dominic Savage about his first feature, Love + Hate. Also in the Guardian: Peter Bradshaw on Lemming.

Stephen Applebaum interviews Sam Shepard for the Independent. And: Stars have sex, too, evidently.

Nathan Rabin interviews Matt Groening for the AV Club.

"Return of the Reluctant has obtained an exclusive excerpt of the upcoming Atlas Shrugged script, which was reportedly written by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie themselves."

Jiangtu catches the Johnnie To photo exhibit in Hong Kong last month. Via Mack at Twitch.

WFMU's WmMBerger goes zombie.

"The other day I realized that within my little online social circle, there's been a lot less mention of BitTorrent lately." Jason Kottke on YouTube and Google Video. Related: Paul Boutin at Slate.

Apple may be talking to Sony and new/old pal Disney about getting them to include iPod-viewable content on Blu-ray discs, reports iClaire at the iPod Hub.

Online browsing tip. Flickhead's Claude Chabrol gallery.

Online listening tip #1. Hitchcock/Truffaut, part 4, at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger...

Online listening tip #2. Those lovely Film Snobs on Soundcheck. Via the cinetrix.

Online fiddling around tip. New site for A Scanner Darkly.

Online viewing tip #1. Ang Lee and James Schamus at the Walker Art Center back in December.

Online viewing tip #2. A trailer and a request for donations from Robert Greenwald so he can complete his next film, Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers, by the fall. Related: Rick Jacobs in the Huffington Post.

Online viewing tips. A trailer (WMV) for Kim Ki-duk's Time. Via Twitch's logboy. And via Todd, one for The Men Who Fell and one for The Sword Bearer.

Weekend fests and events.

Both Micah at Dumb Distraction and Blake at Cinema Strikes Back are all over the ongoing Best of QT Fest (through tomorrow). Meanwhile, Jette Kernion rounds up other Austin-area goings on for Cinematical.

Lisa Rosman's blogging up a storm from Ebertfest (also through tomorrow). Via the cinetrix, who's also got the program for The Aerodynamics of the Hovering Hummingbird: Science, Cinema, and Ways of Seeing, tonight at the Millennium Film Workshop in NYC.

Over at Hell on Frisco Bay, Adam Hartzell has an excellent overview of the work of Kim Longinotto, whose Sisters in Law is playing now in San Francisco and will see successive week-long engagements in Boston, Seattle and Chicago. As it happens, we've recently made David D'Arcy's interview with Longinotto live at the main site.

"The Polish Film Festival marks its seventh annual appearance in Los Angeles with selections from Poland's recent cinema that explore themes of family and identity - both personal and national," writes Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times. "Dozens of films screen between now and Wednesday, and coming weeks will bring events celebrating the work of Krzysztof Kieslowski."

Reverse Shot Presents carries on through tomorrow; some pix.

Michael Atkinson on the New York African Film Festival (through May 4): "[W]ith so much history hitting the fan right now, the documentaries predominate."

Cannes roundup:

• IndieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez has the lineup for the International Critics' Week.

• Annika Pham at Cineuropa: "Princess, the highly anticipated feature debut by Anders Morgenthaler, has been offered the prominent Cannes platform of opening the Director's Fortnight, a major honour for Danish films, which have not had a place in the sidebar in 29 years."

• European Film Promotion will be presenting "22 aspiring and highly promising producers" at Cannes, and Cineuropa has begun interviewing them. Also: Three case studies of the Berlinale Co-Production Market.

• "Purists" likely pissed.

• And for the Hollywood Reporter, Anna McQueen on a few changes in the lineup.

Also at indieWIRE, Steve Rosen wraps the Nashville Film Festival - and Eugene: "Fourteen projects have been selected for the Sundance Institute's June Director's and Screenwriters Labs, taking place at the Sundance Resort in Utah from May 29 - June 29, 2006." More from Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay.

"And when a film is bad," Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman, "not just mediocre but jubilantly wrong-headed in every detail - it can inspire a warped kind of passion every bit as strong as the sort stirred by a masterpiece. In the coming week, the Barbican Centre in London celebrates this idea as part of a Bad Film Club season."

Also in London: Fassbinder at the ICA through May 18, and a symposium at the Tate Modern on May 12 and 13: "Anticipating the Past: Artists: Archive: Film." For the Independent, Charlotte Cripps previews the East End Film Festival, running through May 6.

At Lucid Screening, Andrew Hedden reports on seven docs screened at last weekend's True/False West in Bellingham, WA.

All is not well in the family. Dave Kehr files a third entry of reflections on the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema.

The Austin Chronicle's Marc Savlov previews Blowin' Up a Spot (through tomorrow) and the Banff Mountain (tomorrow) festivals.

Jeffrey Wells: "Worldfest is a friendly, funky-ass film festival that's mainly about smallish, hand-crafted (as opposed to machine- or committee-crafted) indie films - some of them made by or starring Texans, and others from here and there." It is also, evidently, the third oldest film festival in the nation. Through tomorrow.

Peter Cornellisen's been turning in reviews from the recent Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival at Twitch. Under consideration: Storm, Renaissance, Perfect Creature and more.

For the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Michelle Devereaux previews the Stanley Kubrick series running at the Castro April 29 through May 3.

The 9th Brooklyn International Film Festival (June 2 through 11) will be titled Enigma-9 and "engages in a rather enigmatic exploration: The quest for the most delicate and difficult questions of our times."

Michael Guillen talks with Fernando Solanas about his SFIFF entry, Dignity of Nobodies.

Cinematical's Martha Fischer turns in another review from Tribeca: Cocaine Cowboys.

achtung berlin - new berlin film award, May 11 through 17.

Michael Tully's got pix from the Independent Film Festival of Boston; so does Joe Swanberg; James Israel's got some from the Brooklyn Underground.

Ongoing: indieWIRE: Undiscovered Gems.

A week at SFIFF.

Michael Guillen's Evening Class coverage of the San Francisco International Film Festival has been outstanding, talking with with Andrucha Waddington about House of Sand, with Alice Braga about her appearances in two entries in the fest, Sólo Dios Sabe and Lower City and recounting stories told by Guy Maddin and Werner Herzog.

Susan Gerhard writes up an annotated list: "What follows are 10 of the Festival's most agitating (and we mean that in the best way) films." Also at SF360, Cheryl Eddy on the first four days' offerings.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian writes up the highlights of the second week; the SF Weekly writes theirs.

SFist reviews:

• Eve, who's been stalking Matt Dillon, on Runners High, The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai, They Chose China.

• Rita on The Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela, Le Petit Lieutenant, Viva Cuba and Lower City.

• Matt on Cock Byte: Masters of Machinima.

John M Glionna on the controversy stirred up by Eric Steel's The Bridge, which focuses - at times, literally - on people committing suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Niall McKay takes a look at some of the titles screening in the "Pocket Cinema" program, films made for cell phones and iPods. Related: Robert Avila talks with spookspeak director Katherin McInnis.

Gabe blogs at indieWIRE; more.

The San Francisco Chronicle's G Allen Johnson: "Andy Lau had the girls swooning during his whirlwind trip to The City..." Related: Jennifer Young at SF360: She actually catches him. And for Cinematical, Jeffrey M Anderson reviews All About Love.

Anne Thompson caught the Q&A with Peter Chan following the opening night screening of Perhaps Love.

A week at Tribeca.

Assessing this year's Tribeca Film Festival in the New York Times, Stephen Holden finds that "brute reality and simulations of it constitute the artistic flashpoints of a festival obsessed with history and current events and short on love stories and fluffy comedies." Also: David Carr on The TV Set.

Aaron Hillis has been updating his coverage for Premiere just about daily:

• Round 1: Too Tough to Die, Rock the Bells and Brothers of the Head.

• Round 2: House of Sand, Pereira dos Santos's Brasilia 18% and his "1963 near-masterpiece" Barren Lives.

• Round 3: Ontic Antics Starring Laurel and Hardy: Bye, Molly, "a fascinating retina-burner from avant-garde mainstay and retired film-studies professor Ken Jacobs (Star Spangled to Death)," Lunacy, "Jan Svankmajer's fifth and most accessible feature to date," and Chris Marker's The Case of the Grinning Cat.

• Round 4: Sounds of Silence "opens eyes and ears to the quandaries facing Tehran's underground music scene," Al Franken: God Spoke and Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple.

• Round 5: Crime Novel, The Free Will ("It's too soon to tell with another week of festin' to go, but thus far, The Free Will is my favorite film at Tribeca") and The Yacoubian Building.

The Reeler rounds up a batch of docs; what's more, at the Huffington Post, he's got an amusing Colour Me Kubrick story.

In the New York Press, Jennifer Merin talks with Suzanne Bauman about Shadow of Afghanistan.

Jason Silverman for Wired News: "The best war journalism puts its audience in close proximity to combat. It's hard to imagine getting closer than The War Tapes does."

Martha Fischer's got news of the fest's first sale: Backstage, "a French film that Karina described as 'good, campy fun.'"

And Cinematical's reviews:

• Christopher Campbell on Walker Payne, Lunacy, Men at Work, Akeelah and the Bee, Farewell Bender

• Karina Longworth on Rock the Bells, The War Tapes and Tierney Gearon: The Mother Project.

• Martha Fischer on President Mir Qanbar, The Promise, Viva Zapatero!, The Cats of Mirikitani, The Mist in the Palm Trees and Love for Share.

At Cinema Strikes Back, Charlie Prince reviews Choking Man, The Free Will and Day Break.

Andrew O'Hehir's got his Tribeca overview up at Salon; Steve Erickson's got his in Gay City News.

Mary Jordan "made all the right choices" when making Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, writes Scott Macaulay.

This year will be "a real test" for the market, ThinkFilm's Mark Urban tells indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez. Then, the Friday update.

Variety's got a Tribeca special going on; and so does Moviefone.

Weekend lists.

"Who are the world's greatest living narrative filmmakers, what I call the Magnificent Seven?" asks Gerald Peary [site] in the Boston Phoenix.

"Several Film Cultures ago, I offered my elite - Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Altman, Werner Herzog, Roman Polanski, Claude Chabrol — and challenged readers to come up with alternatives. Well, e-mails poured in... Some 60 more filmmakers were nominated." And there are surprises, in terms of who gets mentions - and who doesn't.

For the Brooklyn Rail, David Wilentz's "How Pink Got So Violent: A guide to Japanese female exploitation films of the 70s on DVD." Via Cinema.3Yen.com.

Tasha Robinson lists "15 Animated Films for Grown-ups" at the AV Club.

Desson Thomson in the Washington Post on movies featuring scenes in the Senate Hearing Room.

André Soares reads.

United 93.

Since reading the devastating news at The House Next Door today (I've tried to leave a comment there and have emailed Matt), I've mulled over what to do with this entry. It was going to open with Matt's latest piece for the New York Press. Given Matt's reaction, as I read it, probably the most disrespectful thing to do would be to "respectfully" rearrange the entry, choose a different image, what have you. So I've decided to leave it as I'd planned it. Nonetheless, I'd like to express again here my sincerest condolences for Matt and his two children.

"It's propaganda produced by, and for, the malleable center of the American psyche, a place where political leanings are built from Tinker Toys." Opening the New York Press cover story on United 93, Matt Zoller Seitz takes no prisoners. "Its emotional force is a blow to the skull that temporarily makes you forget any present-tense opinion you might harbor about the political and moral state of America and the post-9/11 world."

Related: Jennifer Merin interviews Paul Greengrass and Brad Liebendorfer on Larry Silverstein's "World Trade Center folly."

"Preceded by both the expected bluster and genuine relief that the film is as good as it is — and it is good, in a temple-pounding, sensory-overloading way that can provoke tears and a headache — it was written and directed by the British filmmaker Paul Greengrass, who has crossed the pond to make the feel-bad American movie of the year," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times.

Stephanie Zacharek at Salon: "I've never had a more excruciating moviegoing experience in my life, and as brilliantly crafted - and as adamantly unexploitive - as the picture is, it still leaves you wondering why it was made in the first place."

Dana Stevens, now billed as "Slate's movie critic" (yes!), is left "curiously unmoved and even slightly resentful." Also, Ron Rosenbaum explains what he means when he says, "Flight 93 has become 9/11's pony."

At Alternet, Anthony Kaufman places the film within the context of 70s-era disaster movies. And Alternet's Evan Derkacz reports on liberal bloggers' campaign (successful so far, evidently) to get marketers to run as many ads as they have on conservative blogs.

Roger Ebert calls up Greengrass - and gives the film four stars.

Reporting on the premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival: Choire Sicha in the New York Observer, Eugene Hernandez at indieWIRE, Karina Longworth at Cinematical, Josh Getlin in the Los Angeles Times, Oliver Burkeman in the Guardian (more) and David Usborne in the Independent.

Karina Longworth reports on a panel at Tribeca discussing "Visions of History and Truth."

And more from Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly, Lee Siegel for the New Republic, Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times, James Hughes for Stop Smiling, Cynthia Fuchs at PopMatters, Ray Pride at Movie City Indie, Annie Wagner in the Stranger, Christopher Kelly in the Ft Worth Star-Telegram, Cheryl Eddy in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle, Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper, Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix, James Rocchi for Cinematical, Rick Groen in the Globe and Mail, Mike Russell at CulturePulp, Peter Sobczynski at Hollywood Bitchslap, Keith Phipps at the AV Club, Peter Nellhaus, MaryAnn Johanson and, in the Washington Post, Ann Hornaday: "United 93 is a great movie, and I hated every minute of it."

NYAFF. Lineup.

Grady Hendrix:

The New York Asian Film Festival is five years old and we're still broke, still doing this by the seat of our pants, still armed with nothing but a love for good movies and our credit cards. Come celebrate five years of fun with us by watching the latest and best movies from Asia, hand-selected for your viewing pleasure. No arthouse cynicism. No trendy gloom and doom. Just futuristic motion picture entertainment set on hyperdrive and mainlined directly into your brain.

The fest runs June 16 through July 1 at the Anthology Film Archives and the ImaginAsian Theater.

Online viewing tip.

Jamie Stuart's American Express ad.

Udine Dispatch. 5.

It's back to the scary stuff for Moira Sullivan.

The truth is I was glad to have the laughs before the horror at the Udine Far East Festival, although, as some of the directors of Thursday's Horror Day panel seminar put it, horror can make you laugh or cry, depending on the day and how you feel. The day began with an art house tale, Ghost of Valentine, by Yuthlert Sippapak (Thailand 2006). "Why do I puke placenta every morning?" isn't a question from Tom Cruise but a line directly from the script. Fetuses are featured in more than one film at this festival. Will Showtime ban them all? First, there are the aborted fetuses with Miike on opening day (Imprint). Then the demonic experiments of a Philippine doctor in Rico Maria Ilarde's Beneath the Cogan and in Leste Chen's gothic tale, The Heirloom. Not to mention child ghosts with grudges in Ilarde's Aquarium and the Hong Kong horror classic, The Imp. As we move toward digital projection, it was almost touching to be watching an old copy of this film when it actually split in half at one point just before the conclusion. Another point made at the seminar is that digital production has opened up more possibilities for working with horror. But proper archival storage of 35mm films like The Imp also is crucial.

Ilarde said it best at the panel: Ringu has changed the parameters for horror, even for Hollywood. He added that since almost everything has already been done, we continue to recycle the same horror tropes. But when it comes to Asian horror, the ritualistic domain of the spirit world compels. The screening of The Imp, the 1981 landmark film billed as a Taoist Ghostbuster and directed by Dennis Yu, was a special surprise. A geomancer skilled in Feng Shui tries to rescue a young couple, Ah Kan and Yan, from a child demon that wants to be reincarnated as their newborn. Elaborate rituals and the placement of yellow markers where Ah Kan works as a security guard are all part of the process. We know something is up when a handyman hopes the child is born without an asshole. One of the first to die is "Fatso," who wears a t-shirt bearing the question, "Am I a girl?" What it boils down to, though, is that the husband-to-be has far too much yin in him, which is why he's prey to these evil spirits.

The theme of geomancy appears again in Chen's The Heirloom (the only film from Taiwan at the festival), but here a whole family has been buying fetuses for years to turn into demons - and they've gotten wealthy. Like The House, by Ng Man-ching (Hong Kong 2005), screened earlier, these relatives don't take kindly to strangers. Heirloom features Jason Chang and some excellent choreography, particularly with Terri Kwan in a production of Orpheus and Eurydice, and a surprise ending reminiscent of The Imp. That extra twist, according to Ilarde, is crucial to horror.

Choi Equan, educated at the Korean Film School and the San Francisco Art Institute, sets his homoerotic tale of suspense, Voice, in an all-girls school. The time span is a matter of days, and then a month. A depressed teacher with vocal problems initially appears to be behind the death of a young student, felled by a piece of sheet music. Or is she the undead? The magnificent art direction, although occasionally excessive, is on a par with Chen's The Heirloom.

Last up for the horror series in Udine: "Black magic, Thai style," with Art of the Devil 2, by the Ronin Team composed of seven directors (Kongkiat Khomsiri, Art Thamthrakul, Yosapong Polsap, Putipong Saisikaew, Isara Nadee, Pasith Buranajan and Seree Pongnit). In the same vein as Art of the Devil, featured at last year's festival, evil spirits take center stage, their gory deeds aimed at teenagers. This is the only film on this day of horror that really made you not want to look as the audience screams and laughs around you - and it was screened at the bewitching hour of midnight.

Photos of Takashi Miike, Rico Maria Ilarde, Leste Chen and Choi Equan © Moira Sullivan.

Los Angeles Dispatch. 1.

John Esther, whose most recent interview for us is with Eran Riklis, sends word from one of two festivals he's caught recently.

Regarded as the only film festival in the US dedicated to showcasing Indian cinema by Indian and international filmmakers, the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles held its fourth edition April 19 - 23, with entries coming from 13 countries.

Deepa Mehta's highly anticipated Water opened up the festival. Seven years in the making, Mehta's attempt to complete her "trilogy of elements" (following Fire and Earth) was met with death threats from Hindu fundamentalists who objected to the film's depiction of "widow houses." Mehta had to stop filming in India and move production to Sri Lanka.

Set against the rise of Gandhi's movement for non-violent resistance, Water offers a quick and somewhat uplifting overview of these so-called "widow houses," where widows as young as 7 live a life of austerity and self-denial in order to eventually go to heaven. It is business (masked as religion) as usual when an 8-year-old widow, Chuyia (Sarala) enters the house. She, like the others before her, believes her stay is only temporary. Somewhat incredulous of her predicament, Chuyia rebels as much as a little girl can under a patriarchal system. Mehta sets Chuyia's rebellion against the larger backdrop of Gandhi's attempt to break the barrier that suppress women and the poor.

Life was bad for wives-turned-widows in the late 1930s and 1940s India and it remained so for the Sikh women who watched their husbands - as well as other family members - killed in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots by members of Indian's government, police and media. Reflecting on those times in a way reminiscent of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich or Armando Valladares's Against Home, Harpreet Kaur's unflinching documentary, The Widow Colony, takes an unrelenting look at the riots, their aftermath and the reality that some people are above the law in "the world's largest documentary."

From 1984 to 2004, marriage was still a bad arrangement made by powerful men, as illustrated in Ali Kazimi's documentary, Runaway Grooms. A quick investigation into the fraudulent activities of Indo-Canadian men using India's tradition of arranged marriages to exhort huge dowries from Indian brides before abandoning them, this worthwhile documentary gives the obvious a fresh urgency: all women deserve the right to make their own choices.

And then there's the wife of Madhav Apte (Sandeep Kulkarni), the protagonist of Nishikant Kamat's solid first feature, Dombivli Fast. A box office hit in India and winner of Best First Feature at the festival, Madhav's wife (Shilpa Tulaskar) is willing to just get by, even as the intrinsic corruption of India's economic system grips everyone around them. Ridiculing her husband's "principles," her actions are just one of many which lead this once-honest man to violence.

Via wood s lot.

Adam Kotsko for In These Times on Slavoj Zizek's "magnum opus":

Zizek is known for his frequent use of film and pop culture, his huge range of philosophical and literary references, and his obscene jokes - all packaged in overarching metaphors involving something like a rollercoaster (or in one particularly bizarre case, a mulcher). The Parallax View includes all of these things: extended riffs on the Matrix trilogy, a section on Henry James' prose style, a Hegelian approach to sexual positions, a highly questionable analysis of anti-Semitism and a wide array of other digressions, often brilliant, sometimes plodding, with varying degrees of relevance to the topic at hand. More significantly, however, The Parallax View consolidates Zizek's work as a whole and decisively moves it forward.

Via wood s lot, also pointing to...

• The most recent issue of Janus Head, where, if you scroll down a bit, you'll find Ana Iribas's interview with Alejandro Jodorowsky, available as a PDF file.

• The photography of Misha Gordin.

• And of course, a wealth of material on the late Jane Jacobs, to which I'll add Witold Rybczynski's reflections in Slate.

Blog-a-Thon-a-Mania!

You know all about Blog-a-Thons. But have you ever seen one with a video promo? Nathaniel R's got one for the Michelle Pfeiffer Blog-a-Thon beginning tonight, with more than 20 bloggers already signed up. You can join them if you hurry and email Nathaniel.

Girish: "I'd like to propose an Avant-Garde Film Blog-A-Thon on Wednesday, August 2." What's more, you can pitch in to "help us build a resource pool of titles for people to draw from when they are making their choices."

And Walter over at Quiet Bubble proposed one on Hayao Miyazaki for May 12 through 14.

Udine Dispatch. 4.

After a day of horror, a day of musicals and a day of romance (sort of), Moira Sullivan enjoys a day of comedies.

One of the outstanding features of the Udine Far East Festival is the excellent selection of panel seminars with Asian directors and actors. The Asian Comedy panel included two Hong Kong directors and an actress: Lam Tze Chung [of Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle fame], director of I'll Call You, actress Viann Liang and Wai Ka-Fai, director of Shopaholics. Erik Matti, director of the Philippines adventure film Exodus, joined them.

Lam pointed out that the key to a successful comedy was showing rather than telling, and I'll Call You, one of the most popular films at this festival does just that. Office worker Manny (Alex Fong) does everything he can to get TV presenter Karen (Viann Liang) to take an amorous interest in him. The lengths of his desperation after several fizzled dates send him into depression; the fire hasn't ignited the way he had hoped. Manny eventually finds himself in self-imposed prison where he drowns his sorrow, serenaded by a muscle man singing Andy Lau ballads. As he recovers, Karen comes into his life for a second round and the surprise ending turns bittersweet. In fact, a subtle tragicomedy is the distinguishing hallmark of this film. Ingenuous cinematic techniques include a computer game running score board that rates Manny and Karen's attractiveness on the relationship meter. In one scene, their oblivion to the world around them as a cast of colorful characters drift by is visually stunning.

In Wai Ka-Fai's comedy Shopaholics, the ultra-compulsive shopper Fong Fong-fong (Cecilia Cheung) chances upon a therapist Choosey Lee (Lau Ching-wan) with a severe case of decidaphobia, unable to choose what he wants from a fast food menu in a shopping mall. This is something that the Vietnamese director Trinh T Minh-ha notes is ironically not a problem today. Icons of happy meals make these choices relatively easy for consumers - you simply buy the icon. Wai told me that Fong Fong-fong's fetishistic attachment to objects such as Italian designer bags is one of the phenomena he wanted to illuminate, and he does so quite well. Choosey Lee prescribes Fong- fong drugs to raise brain serum and level off the high from compulsive shopping. But she's not cured yet. On one of her shopping sprees, she meets the wealthy Richie Ho (Jordan Chan). Propositions of marriage ensue from both Choosey Lee and Richie - but the wealthy suitor has a girlfriend, Ding Ding Dong, who tries to jump off tall buildings when disappointed. Eventually they all seek out the advice of a psychologist, Dr Phoenix Luk played by the magnificent legendary singer Paula Tsui. Her office is adorned with portraits of famous therapists and centerfold is a Jung with the inscription "Personality type is destiny." Two marriages are planned but it is uncertain who will wind up with whom while Paul Anka's "I Will Follow You" is heard in the background.

Wai told me "abnormal is normal today." He finds Jung appropriate for compulsive behavior because he can be practically understood. He also revealed that among young people there is a black market for Prozac. The Hong Kong director said that humor is a good way to address this problem for a mass audience. The almost Machiavellian thirst for acquisitions and inability to choose is downright irritating but the film left me thinking afterwards. For all its obvious metaphors and clichés - and for all you shoppers - Shopaholics should be playing in a shopping mall cineplex near you.

Erik Matti's new adventure odyssey, Exodus: Tales From The Enchanted Kingdom, is a conglomeration of several stories. But don't compare it to Lord of the Rings, exclaimed Matti. The director said that humor in films from the Philippines inevitably touches upon the history of colonialism that has created a subservient mentality. "We are so apologetic when we meet foreigners," Matti told me. Exodous stars a senator from the Philippines who is also an actor, Ramon Bong Revilla Jr. Matti said he shed 20 pounds for the film - a Conan the Barbarian look-alike, he also shares an affinity with Schwarzenegger in his dabbling in politics. The low budget film was shot partially in an abandoned soap factory so that crew could build up the set, and the costumes are highly inventive to boot. To finance special effects, Matti provided profit sharing.

Exodus was a hit at the Philippines box office, a film that brings to life the characters from a theme park outside Manila. The story is about the evil Bagulbol and his henchmen who threaten the city of Bantayan. The über-warrior Exodus - part Rambo, part Conan - calls, or rather commands the four elementals (all adventure characters of the theme park), Wind, a flying Tinkerbell with claws; Water, a beautiful princess who can create rain clouds; Earth, a fearful blue Centaur; and Fire, a young boy with a swooping red wig who can brandish fire balls at will. The fifth element turns out to be Exodus, the spiritual dimension, actually a misnomer for this he-man. The film is fun, and for a moment, with the set design and costumes, I anticipated a black comedy, but alas, the film is geared for kids.

Another comedy featured at the festival from 2004 is M.A.I.D. by Yongyoot Thongkongthoon of Thailand. As the film opens, legalized gambling is being considered, but academics are worried about the social consequences. The film touches upon some of the points that Matti revealed - a subservient attitude to foreigners and strict class differences. In this case, a wealthy Thai family - the wife is European and resembles Candice Bergen - employs Thai maids to run their mansion with a rule book the size of a dictionary.

Two women are sent as undercover agents to acquire information about a gambling laundering operation - Waew (Pornchita na Songkr) and Jim-yai (Jarupus Pattamasiri), soon joined by an immigrant from Burma. The women come from poor families and the opportunity to raise their salaries is irresistible. When the work proves too dangerous, they return home. Cat soon has to dodge grenades and the other women remember why they left the poverty of their homes in the first place. Back on assignment, they work to get the bad guys, but it turns out everyone is suspect. Eventually the domesticated servants unite in this hilarious, fast-paced comedy with multitalented actors, evoking some of the insanity of Shopaholics.

Photos of Wai Ka-Fai and Erik Matti © Moira Sullivan.

Online viewing tip.

Wong Kar-wai's Big Girls Don't Cry.

Udine Dispatch. 3.

Take it away, Moira Sullivan...

The ongoing Udine Far East Film Festival continues its showcase of outstanding films with European and international debuts for the majority of the selection. Pang Ho-cheung's Isabella (Hong Kong 2006) is a story presented out of chronological order with several versions to sift through and as such the film language is rich. The setting is 1999 as Macau is being returned to China. The film is billed as a "strange father, strange daughter" story, a metaphor for the changeover, an incestuous confrontation that presents the consequences of nightlife and alcohol abuse and poverty. The plot concerns a rogue cop, Shing (Chapman To), who may or may not have slept with his biological daughter Yan (Isabella Leung) - who has looked him up after the death of her mother. Evicted from her apartment, she seeks out her father so he can help her look for Isabella - her dog! This exploration of abandonment was intriguing.

Shinobi: Heart Under Blade by Shimoyama Ten (Japan 2005) features two ancient warring ninja clans from the early 17th century who have been at relative peace for some time. It has even come to the point that a woman and man from each clan have fallen in love, the pacifist Gennosuke (Jô Odagiri) of the Koga and the brave Oboro (Yukie Nakama) of the Iga.

The Shinobi are exceptional warriors who practice ninjutsu and have unique skills such as Oboro's laser eyes that can penetrate matter. Yet the ambitious film seemed lost in a sea of budgetary concerns. The stretches are long between semi-elaborately staged combat scenes in which five warriors from each clan are commanded to fight by the shogunate Tokugawa, battles overseen by an evil Tendai priest until only one of them survives. The performances are consequently stagey. Shinobi's excesses reminded me of Shinji Higuchi's Lorelei: The Witch of the Pacific Action (Japan 2004), screened at Udine last year, another Japanese epic in which the story is swallowed by production design.

Gimme Kudos, by Huang Jianxin (China 2005) is a well-made drama about the claim of 38-year-old Yang Hongqi (Fan Wei, one of China's most celebrated comedians) that he saved Ouyang Hua, a young university student (Chen Hao) from a rapist. Yang insistently tries to get the police and a Nanjing daily reporter, Gu Guoge (Wang Zhiwen), to cite him in the papers for having done a great deed. But the task is not as easy as it seems, for police and reporters alike must investigate to see if a crime actually was committed. Getting just rewards has become Yang's top priority because his father is aging and wants his son to be honored before he dies. Indeed, his wall is covered with certificates from various institutions, most stamped during Mao's regime. Gu confronts the young woman who has allegedly been saved. But Ouyang is not interested in coming forward because, for her, an admission will change how she is regarded in society - an aspect that could have been further developed and is trivialized. Ultimately, the film deals with how this situation differs for men and women, in this regard sharing affinity with Han Jae-Rim's Rules of Dating at this festival. Instead, more attention is given to how the situation affects the marriage of Gu Guoge and his wife (Miao Pu), a cop and jealous of Ouyang. The provocative moral issues of the film situate the characters in a dead lock, yet Huang Jianxin's simplistic ending is a detour from the unexplored territory of the film.

BAFF. Preview.

Juan Manuel Freire, who last covered the Sitges and San Sebastian festivals, previews the next cinematic event in Spain.

In three days, the Barcelona Asian Film Festival will present its 8th edition, and it's the most complete and daring that the only Spanish festival entirely committed to film from the Far East - besides Mollet del Vallés' modest meeting - has ever held. From April 28 to May 7, BAFF will show around 60 films and 13 shorts programs, with projections being fêted between Casa Àsia, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) and the Aribau Club. The first film to see a projector's light, or to bring light, will be Three Times by Hou Hsiao-hsien, a great compendium of his filmography, devoted as it has been to an analysis of shades in cinema and life. And the privilege of closing the fest is reserved for The Promise, or Chen Kaige's own version of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

In between, eleven films from Japan, China, Indonesia and Thailand will compete in the Official Section for the Durian de Oro provided by Casa Àsia, which is to say: 6000 euros that the director of the winning film should invest in his or her next production. Studies of solitude in Singapore (4:30), social cinema without a political agenda (Bashing), frantic romantic comedies (Joni's Promise), meditations on modern city life (Reflections, by Hou Hsiao-hsien assistant Yao Hung-i), Thailand's own Lost in Translation (Cherm) or politically-infused epics (Gie) form a selection that covers a wide range of perspectives and issues. Multimedia artist Carles Congost, writer and film director David Trueba, film and literature critic Sergi Sànchez, actress Konkona Sen Sharma (as seen on "Page 3") and SFIAAFF director Chui Hui-yang will decide which film deserves what.

In addition are the attractive parallel sections such as the Asian Selection, an offering of some of the continent's best in recent years - Big River, Invisible Waves, A Blue Automobile, University of Laughs and Be With Me among them. The Guest Country will be India, whose imagery is the inspiration for this year's poster. The retrospective is made up of fourteen emblematic films, some of them Bollywood-ish, others more a reflection of political turmoil. There are also particular, well-selected spaces for digital cinema and anime, in a praiseworthy intent to cover all that Asia bring us, and the obligatory short programs.

All in all, BAFF 2006 is a great opportunity to discover, rediscover and enjoy Asian filmmaking. The effort to unite all these titles deserves a certain gratefulness and, going by past numbers, the festival is going to receive it. The new Asian-inspired sections in more established fests and the now-common exhibition of Asian films nowadays in commercial cinema have made the heads of BAFF turn their attention to new values and digital cinema, so the meeting should be bolder than ever before. More to come soon right here.

A Pie in Portland

DK Holm, whose Quentin Tarantino is a Pocket Essential guide packed with far more insight than you'd ever believe would fit in a pocket, whose Kill Bill: An Official Casebook rivals Barthes's S/Z as the very definition of a close reading, and whose Film Soleil we'll be hearing more about shortly, recently commented in his column at Movie Poop Shoot on a flurry of controversy stirred up in Portland by movie theater owner. Here's his summary:

Sylvia Miles once famously dropped a plate of food on John Simon, and Burt Reynolds once tackled a Los Angeles Times reviewer he didn't like while on the set of The Longest Yard, yet for the most part physical attacks on reviewers by disgruntled subjects of their critiques have been negligible. But as Portland Tribune columnist Phil Stanford notes, a local exhibitor took exception to something a critic wrote about him - and pied her. "Clinton Street Theater owner Seth Sonstein is clearly a man who knows how to deal with uppity journalists," writes the columnist. "Last week he grabbed Willy Week movie reviewer Becky Ohlsen in a headlock and smushed a pie in her face - much to the consternation of local film critics, who naturally see this as a freedom of speech issue."

That pretty much sums up the situation but, based on the flurry of links to blogs and websites debating the issue, it gets more complicated than that. Stanford neglects to mention that Sonstein filmed the pie attack, and posted the footage on YouTube. Readers new to the controversy might be surprised at what Willamette Week writer Becky Ohlsen originally wrote, which was a fairly innocuous account of a stunt Sonstein pulled on the closing night of the WW-sponsored Longbaugh Film Festival. Controversy began when news of the film's posting reached a Northwest media watchdog site, Oregon Media Insiders, at which point some 25 Portland-based writers weighed in, including Oregonian lead movie reviewer Shawn Levy, second stringer Mike Russell (who recounts his fluidic encounter with Sonstein over negative reviews he wrote films screening at the Clinton), Ohlsen's boss David Walker, as well as a radio disc jockey (who, to his disappointment, gave Sonstein airtime to tell his side of the story), several of Portland's other movie reviewers, Ohlsen herself and even her brother.

From Sonstein's point of view, he's - in the words of the DJ - "some sort of warrior for the theater or something, with all the half-ass hippie-guerrilla rage-against-the-machine type mindset that goes along with it," or a filmmaker who merely punk'd a friend as part of a film project (his introductory remarks in the film tend to contradict this, however). But from the viewpoint of the reviewers, it's an attempt to abrogate protected speech, and numerous posters to Oregon Media Insiders chart what appears to be an escalating response to the slights and snubs Sonstein says he's received at the hands of Portland's critics. Writers and commentators have made their ire over the incident well known already, including former WW film critic Kim Morgan at MSN's Movies Filter, Mike Russell at CulturePulp and Portland Tribune movie reviewer Dawn Taylor on her own blog.

Online viewing tip.

Ok, it's an ad. But it's Wes Anderson's American Express ad. Via ticklebooth.

Filmmaker. Spring 06.

"You know, all of these films are just one film, they're just different chapters, so basically it's all stuff that occurs to me. That's all it is." Robert Altman, to Filmmaker's Matthew Ross. A second favorite: "I revel in the opportunity of confusion. I allow that to develop, to happen, to grow. We all come together and use it. We're aware of what we are doing and we each do our part. If someone's not aware of what we're doing, they have to learn." You've got to love the man.

Also in the Spring issue of Filmmaker: It's Matthew Ross again, talking to another legend, Robert Towne. Here's the author of Chinatown on Los Angeles: "I suppose that it's a place that continues to have a habit of erasing itself from decade to decade, and yet it's still classically that dream factory where, since 1848, people have come here to strike it rich with gold, with oil, with real estate, with becoming a movie star, creating a religious cult, leaving old identities and old problems behind and hoping that you can reinvent yourself."

David Slade's first feature is Hard Candy, and Scott Macaulay finds him to be "an intense, hyper-articulate Brit" who happens to have found inspiration in the period when Altman and Towne were first beginning to truly flourish: "I'd been offered a lot of scripts, but this was the first thing that took me back to the roots of why I wanted to become a filmmaker, which was seeing Nicolas Roeg's Performance. Performance hit me like a brick... [Hard Candy] is a script Roeg would have done, a harrowing relationship story with many, many subtexts, with questions that can't be answered unless you answer them yourself and don't tell anybody. I think that in this climate, right now, a film that can make the audience ask themselves a question is important."

Peter Bowen meets not one but two fresh faces, Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, who wrote and directed Quinceañera, winner of both the Audience Award and the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year. This being Filmmaker, there's an emphasis in all these conversations on how of actually getting these films made (note, too, the sidebars throughout) - but especially here because, as Bowen explains, the odds weren't exactly in these makers' favor.

Bowen, by the way, also turns in report from last month's Thessaloniki International Documentary Film Festival and from the Berlinale.

Anthony Kaufman talks with David Ziegler not only about his documentary Sir! No Sir! but also about the wealth of material at the film's site: "I was aware that the main charge leveled against the film would be, 'Oh, this is just a handful of cowards and malcontents,' and we really wanted to make clear that this was a massive counterculture that permeated the military."

Also, a report on a most "unusual scenario": the producers of Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin haven't just pulled out of a deal with Tartan Films USA and TLA Releasing, they're suing the distributors and working with Strand Releasing to get out an "authorized" version of the DVD.

Mary Glucksman is here again with five first peeks at indies in production from Alfredo De Villa, Ernst Gossner, Alan Cumming, Adam Bhala Lough and Sal Stabile.

Sharon Swart reports on an odd cooperation that seems to be taking hold: Hollywood talent agencies and indie producers. Not for everyone, obviously, but for some projects, it works.

DW Leitner has a hefty introduction to low-cost HD and info on where to find out even more.

New Orleans has "a close-knit local film community largely dispersed by the storm but gradually resettling." Paul VanDeCarr meets some of them.

Mike Plante has a great, great Sundance story.

And André Salas remembers Walerian Borowczyk: "Misunderstood and wickedly subversive, he inhabited a unique place among the likes of Buñuel and Fassbinder, often dividing critics on the merits of his work."

Udine Dispatch. 2.

Moira Sullivan follows up on her first dispatch from the 8th Udine Far East Film Festival, running through April 29.

With the festival in full swing, the spotlight is now on Asian musicals. As the festival notes, we are familiar with martial arts and horror films from Asia, but musicals are less known. A special honored guest from Japan, Inoue Umetsugu (b. 1923) was on hand to report on his successful collaboration with film producers from Hong Kong - the Shaw Brothers. They brought him to Hong Kong in the 60s because he could deliver quality films quickly and was skilled at the technique of musicals. All in all, he directed 116 features and over 300 TV dramas. He told me that at 27 he lived in New York and saw all the new musicals: My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music and West Side Story and also studied jazz music. One of the films shown in the festival was Hong Kong Nocturne (1967), a film about three sisters who perform with their father, an old style magician. Due to his embezzlement of their salaries - he even tries to persuade one of them to perform nude - they strike off on solo careers as vocalists, entertainers and dancers. More than once they are forced to choose between career and love and are actually encouraged by the men in their life to give up their relationships in order to fulfill their passion for show business.

Inoue told me that he believes it is a filmmaker's duty to help to effect change in society with films that provide socially relevant content. In this case, gender equality is one of the progressive themes he chose to explore and believes the subject was not only important in Japan and Hong Kong during his career but universally. He noted how films in Hollywood that addressed civil rights had helped to change public attitude in the USA. "Maybe I am saying too much," he chuckled diplomatically. But the thematic subtleties of his films say it all.

Another Japanese director in Udine who agrees that the presentation of gender equality is important in cinema is Yamazaki Takashi, whose film Always won 12 Japanese Academy Awards this year including best picture, director and script. Kozo Shibazaki won the cinematography award, utilizing a 1950s color process similar to Tohoscope, the Japanese equivalent of Eastmancolor. The director told me that women are powerful in his film and "the way things turn out in [his] new film is found in the palms of their hands."

Judging by the audience response, Always is so far the most appreciated film in Udine; several standing ovations were given to the director in attendance for the European debut of his films. But he noted that there was one online critic who didn't like his film. Perhaps the popularity of Always makes these kinds of critics feel their importance is diminished, speculated Yamazaki. Well, the Udine public loved Always and the Japan-based film expert Mark Schilling, who has been invited since almost the beginning of the Udine festival, said this was the first film he recommended to this year's festival.

Always is based on a popular 1973 Saigan Ryohei manga that Yamazaki loved as a boy. Fans are pleased with it. Yet a faithful representation of the manga wasn't his goal. He also revealed how he tried to strike a balance with CGI effects and natural environments, and in this regard, the director has succeeded. His background is in graphic art and he told me his previous sci-fi films escaped the scrutiny of highbrow critics - as he explained sci-fi is not considered "cinema."

Always is set in 1958, the year that the Tokyo Tower was built - a symbol of Japanese economic rebirth after World War II. Yamazaki's film is rich with a myriad of imaginative touches. The story takes place in a Tokyo neighborhood and shows how technological advances such as the television set and the refrigerator helped to fulfill dreams. Neighbors crowd around the home of the Suzuki family, the first to acquire a TV set, and watch a boxing match. Shibazaki skillfully enlarges the match to full screen, visually recreating how early TV spectators felt. But Yamazaki reminded me of the dark element to technological development in his film, for example, the local ice merchant run out of business with the advent of refrigeration.

Among the many colorful characters in the film is Chagawa Ryunosuke (Hidetaka Yoshioka), a children's magazine illustrator who dreams of becoming a famous novelist. Hiromi (Koyuki), the local bar owner, asks him to look after an abandoned boy who turns out to be a huge fan of his work. Koyuki soon becomes Ryonosuke's flame, who, like the writer, is beset with financial worries. The growing resistance to women selling themselves like feudal geishas is alluded to more than once in this vision of 1958 Tokyo. Entwined with this theme is the emotional recovery of Japan from the war reflected through new family structures. Shinichi Tsutsumi, whose elocution is delivered in the manner of a traditional Samurai, is head of Suzuki auto repair, and Ryunosuke's childhood friend. Misrepresenting his enterprise as a large company in a job ad, he hires a young girl from a poor family in northern Japan to work in his small shop, and she soon becomes a part of his family.

Perhaps the only reservation I had with Always is its tendency to sentimentalize - especially with dramatic music, although the film score also won a Japanese Academy Award. However, even without all the violins, some of the scenes managed to capture the intricacies of the plot and might have helped that online critic come to terms with its superb craftsmanship.

Photos of Inoue Umetsugu and Yamazaki Takashi © Moira Sullivan.

New York Dispatch. 1.

The Tribeca Film Festival opens today, runs through May 7, and David D'Arcy previews the opener and three featured docs.

The attacks of 9/11 begat the Tribeca Film Festival as a cultural event that was supposed to draw civilians back to Lower Manhattan after the smoke cleared. Conceived when landlords, businessmen and politicians wondered whether the economy of this neighborhood had been killed by the attacks, it has since grown into something permanent. It took longer for that to happen than for real estate values near Ground Zero to bounce back - less than a year, for the real estate - but in five years, Tribeca has become more of an institution than anything else that was planned down there.

I'll join the chorus in attributing the cinematic success of the event to Peter Scarlet, who has applied his mix of discernment and catholicity to a program that resisted it at first. It looks as if Scarlet's influence is here to stay, and I'm saying that as someone who believed that the San Francisco International Film Festival under his direction was the best film festival in the United States. Remember, before Scarlet came in, Tribeca was the cinematic equivalent of arena football. For all of you film nerds, the sports allusion isn't a compliment.

Today's program is broad and varied, and if you really want celebrities, they are there, too. Just check the schedule. Oddly, Tribeca's opener, United 93, doesn't have a celebrity to speak of. If you've seen Bloody Sunday, you know that Paul Greengrass's talent is for reconstructing dramatic historical events in all their detail on the screen (although Brits might say that Greengrass's sympathies in that earlier film were strongly pro-Irish). The 9/11 story that Greengrass retells in United 93 takes us from routine to cataclysm. The hype that's been heralding it stresses how disturbing it would be to see these events again, or how disturbing it would be for aggrieved family members to have to relive them. (But wait a minute - haven't the prosecutors at the Zacarias Moussaoui trial in Washington replayed those events ad nauseam, in front of the families, complete with a heart-tugging appearance by Rudy Giuliani, "America's Mayor," as a witness?) The other pre-release conventional wisdom is that the film would be too violent and gruesome. Given what Greengrass was trying to film, i.e., killings, what other kind of film could he make?

In fact, Greengrass could have done what the television and cable networks (and the politicians) did, and turn the horrors of 9/11 into the Reichstag fire for the Bush administration, an event that mobilized the country's fear and its appetite for horror and instant revenge into war against a regime that had nothing to do with the attacks. It didn't take long before the Fox-watchers seemed convinced that, as Art Spiegelman likes to point out, "all the high-jackers were Iraqis, except for the ones who were French."

Beyond that, Greengrass could have also avoided ever showing a dead body on the screen. Remember the "falling commas" leaping from the towers that were shown in every country besides the United States?

With United 93, hyped as the "appropriate" film to premiere at Ground Zero, New Yorkers will get a reality check, or something close enough to it. Within a carefully, plausibly designed production, actors who are not stars (and often not actors) play out a story that we know fairly well. We certainly know the end - an airliner bound for a target in DC crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, thanks to passengers who stormed the cockpit. As a drama on the screen, we get a bit more. The rank and file in air traffic control do what they can, the government high-flyers who are supposed to make decisions don't do what they could, and ordinary airline customers reach into themselves to do what they never could have imagined under appalling circumstances. The tension comes from their race to achieve what they can before United 93 goes down.

The acting in United 93 is solid, which is what you would expect if you had seen Bloody Sunday, Greengrass's reconstruction of the pivotal massacre of 1972 that turned the open wounds of Derry in Northern Ireland into open violence. Greengrass uses actors, whose faces you don't know, to play the faceless armies who make everything in daily life work - almost everything. The performances are just about seamless, even the performance as the Air Traffic Control boss by Ben Sliney, who played that same role on 9/11.

What you don't get here in this inaction movie is explanation and introspection on the part of the characters. The camera observes the facts as a lot of people who were taken by surprise saw them, with numbness and fear. We also see the high-jackers - at least one of them with hesitation in first class; others with bull-headed determination. We don't learn much more about them than what we can see on their faces. The passengers who fought back, whose conversations we do hear, are indeed real heroes, minus the sanctimony. Officials above the management of Air Traffic are just what they were back then, absent. I do have to wonder whom Cheney would have shot if he had been in a position to fight back.

A film like United 93 is ipso facto incomplete in its ambition to recreate a limited number of crucial moments, so it's a stroke of savvy programming at Tribeca to end the festival with Michael Winterbottom's The Road to Guantanamo, which made its world premiere at the 2006 Berlin International Film Festival. If the war on terror began with government retreat, the waging of the war as seen by Winterbottom involved false arrests and lies (lies being the gift that keeps on giving. Just listen to Cheney's aides try to explain in an innocuous lie this time around that he was looking over papers when a photograph shows him fast asleep during last week's official Chinese visit.) In case you don't know the script already, three men who enter Afghanistan while traveling to Pakistan get caught up when the US throws a net over the town that they are visiting. They are wrongly accused of being terrorists, which they deny. Bound and blindfolded, they join the army of "hardcore" prisoners in the war on terror. After two years of confinement in Guantanamo, evidence is produced to show their innocence, to the great shame of the US and the UK. Who knows how many other innocent men were and are there? Our government isn't telling. I'll have more about Guantanamo in a later dispatch. Suffice it to say that the film confirms Winterbottom's status as one of the filmmakers worth watching today.

It's no surprise that even Tribeca, which gets some $5 million of its annual budget from Bush-acolyte and 2008 Republican presidential aspirant George Pataki (the governor of New York), has a clear anti-Bush agenda. This is New York City, after all. Part of the film coalition questioning and satirizing The Decider (as W now likes to call himself) is Al Franken: God Spoke. Directed by Chris Hegedus and produced by her husband, DA Pennebaker, this doc-on-the-run follows Franken through the creation of Air America and the misbegotten 2004 Kerry campaign, which he served generously. Franken is the son of a comedian-manque, whose own story also figures in the film. (Is that why he seems to have no allergy to attention?) Franken seems to have given Hegedus and her team full access, the one element which Pennebaker maintains is essential to making a doc. He has a line for every occasion - often a funny one - and a welcome disdain for good taste in confrontations with his God-fearing adversaries. Choice moments in the film come when Franken does a Henry Kissinger impression for Dr K himself when he encounters the Bomber of Cambodia at a party that he crashes during the 2006 Republican convention. Flummoxed by Franken's wit, the wit-impaired Bill O'Reilly suggests that he's deranged. It would have been interesting if Hegedus and her team asked people outside political circles if anyone really believed that. For all the triumphs of the one-liner, the Democrats still lost with John Kerry (who banned staffers from telling "why the long face?" jokes). The doc ends with the next potential lap in Franken's political journey - a US Senate seat representing Minnesota. Franken pleases his fans by reaching into his scatalogical bag of tricks in a speech to  a local crowd, and by linking himself to one of the most humane voices in American politics, the late Senator Paul Wellstone. Can he win if he runs? Remember, Minnesota was the state that elected Jesse Ventura governor. There's the sequel.

Another doc not to miss that addresses The Decider's failures of judgment is Who Killed the Electric Car?, the inquiry into the demise of a vehicle developed by General Motors that proved to be too competitive with the sputtering internal combustion engine that's been GM's bread and butter for a century. (Bush now supports hydrogen cars, which would cost a fortune to make and even more to fuel.) In response to California regulations passed to fight pollution, GM produced an efficient and elegantly aerodynamic car, the EV1, that ran completely on electricity that was provided at fueling stations - now in ruins - that were built all over the state. Leased to consumers and celebrities from Mel Gibson to Tom Hanks - to ensure that GM could eventually take the cars back - the vehicles were reliable and quiet, and they didn't pollute. They could also go from 0 to 60 mph in 7 seconds. Yet, without trying too hard, GM claimed it couldn't make enough money on them and recalled the cars from drivers who had no legal choice but to hand them over. Then GM shredded them into confetti.

It's all in the film, much of which was culled from videotapes shot by EV1 owners, who kept vigils on the parking lots where their recalled and very drive-able cars were stockpiled for junking. At every stage, Republican politicians in Washington sided with the company. Remember, Andrew Card's job before he became The Decider's chief of staff was top lobbyist for GM. This doc is a valuable case history about the "free market" and the real enemies of entrepreneurship. See it, and then try to keep a straight face when you read about the Bush energy plan.

San Francisco Dispatch. 1.

And now, after the previews and interviews, we kick off a series of reviews from the San Francisco International Film Festival with this first dispatch from GreenCine's Craig Phillips.

Mostly by complete coincidence, the first four films I've seen at the this year's SFIFF have all been Spanish language films - but each leaves its own indelible impression.

A startling elegy for Mexico, News From Afar (Noticias Lejanas) is director Ricardo Benet's striking debut. The film is constructed in a way that may be off-putting for American audiences accustomed to more straightforward narrative, and it does take a bit of time to adjust to figuring out whose point of view the story is coming from or where we are in time (I later found myself re-editing the first act in my head), but the film is very much worth sticking with. The story follows a 17-year-old boy (David Aarón Estrada) who returns to his home village, which is nothing more than a series of ramshackle adobes in the middle of a bleak salt flat, as his memories drift back to the childhood tragedy that altered his family forever - and to what happened when he left home for the ciudad grande (Mexico City). It's by turns touching, tragic, funny and, on occasion, shocking. The acting (with a cast made up in part of amateurs) is a little stiff at times and the writing sometimes labored (with a bit too much reliance on voice-over), but Benet smartly reveals details slowly over time, and the film finds its footing as it moves along. News From Afar, which looks sharp and colorful, works as both a sad nod to Mexico's crumbling infrastructure and as an ode to loss - a family's, and a country's.

Sólo Dios Sabe also journeys down those Mexican roads toward Mexico City, but in an entirely different fashion. Director Carlos Bolado, co-director of the superb documentary Promises, has created a highly watchable mess of a film, buoyed along by the two charismatic leads - Alice Braga (City of God), niece of sultry Brazilian actress Sonia - she looks like combination of a young Barbara Hershey, Jessica Harper and her aunt) and Diego Luna (Y Tu Mamá También), who plays passionately love-obsessed about as well as anybody. It's a road movie, beginning in San Diego (where Braga's character teaches college) to Baja Mexico (where she becomes stuck after losing her passport), then off to Mexico City in the company of Luna's character, who tricks her into accepting his offer to drive her to Mexico City so she can get her passport.

Their journey eventually finds them in Brazil, with their characters experiencing much anguish in between. Sólo Dios Sabe is ultimately done in by its own melodramatic histrionics - in fact, the film is essentially an old-fashioned romance disguised under a cloak of modern cinematic flourishes - with a few too many of those unnecessarily detracting from, rather than adding to, its success. On the other hand, Braga is so mesmerizingly gorgeous, Luna so perfectly empathetic even after behaving badly, and the travelogue portions of the film - particularly a side trip to a ceremony in Bahia as Dolores confronts her mystical roots - so fascinating and beautifully photographed, that one almost forgives the film's overreach. Almost. Still, it's a road trip worth taking - you'll probably be engaged as often as you find yourself rolling your eyes at all the melodrama.

Montxo Armendáriz's Obaba is set in Spain's Basque region, where the titular (fictional) town serves as a sort of Basque Twin Peaks - if not quite as surreal. In a sense, the locals create the atmosphere based in part on their own imaginations. A young student travels to Obaba for an assignment in which she must videotape a location and its people, then edit her footage to make a story out of it - regardless of whether or not the story is actually true. However, while there she discovers there's a sinister side to the town's history, centered around the one-room school and the children of one particular class (not to mention a curious crop of endangered lizards), and the film then shifts from her perspective as she discovers more about the mystery, to each of the central players in these secrets of the past, to their own childhood POV and back again as adults.

What's less important yet more engaging than the central mystery is how the film becomes a study of story itself and of the ways people attempt to manipulate the past. What I mean is* the film's exploration of putting together a story from the scraps of the past we're given, as players in life's narrative. The film doesn't cry out to be longer than it is per se, but it does at times feel as if a few crucial pieces of the character's histories are missing. Armendariz's Silencio Roto, about Spain in the early days of Franco, is an underrated near-classic; Obaba is not quite up to that level, but it's a provocative work nonetheless.

The most pleasing of the four films here, Marcelo Piñeyro's El Método (The Grunholm Method, adapted by Mateo Gil from Jordi Galcerán's play), will make you want to double-check your resume. It's an extremely enjoyable and perverse exercise in psychological gamesmanship. It will inevitably put Americans in mind of Survivor and The Apprentice - not to mention The Mole - as potential job applicants are thrust into an office and a series of often cruel tests as they attempt to become the last one standing while also trying to sniff out which of them, if any, are the company's plant. Paranoia, backstabbing, and often hilarious debates ensue.

The film's more farcical scenes - including a memorable sequence set in the lavatories - are more successful than its attempts at broader political commentary. The cast, uniformly excellent, includes: Eduard Fernéndez, who's also in Obaba - there playing a mentally ill and vengeful former student, here perfectly cast as a sweaty and ultmately rather loathsome lawyer/jobseeker who still manages to garner some sympathy; Eduardo Noriega is most famous in the States for starring in Open Your Eyes and Piñeyro's Burnt Money, and he's a likable presence here; Najwa Nimri, whom I remember from the beautiful film Lovers of the Arctic Circle and also a popular singer in Spain; and Natalia Verbeke, who I've liked ever since Jump Tomorrow, as the receptionist (or is she?) Montse. If the ending doesn't completely satisfy - again, it doesn't connect as much as it'd like to with the larger geo-political picture unfolding outside - the bulk of the film is both gripping and lascivious fun. And it features the creepiest computer monitors this side of Japanese horror.

[*a reference to a line in the film the main character repeats]

Who we are, what we do.

As it's become clear over the years that GreenCine is more than just an online rental outlet, we're asked more and more often, So what is GC, then? The answer to that is only going to grow more multi-faceted and interesting over the coming months and years, but because Daniel Nemet-Nejat has put the right questions to him over at his site, 40 Years in the Desert, director of content acquisitions Jonathan Marlow lays out the current state of that answer about as clearly as can be. For now.

Shorts, 4/24.

"The intervening decades have done little to diminish its worrying, subversive power," writes Neil Norman as he prepares to meet Kevin Brownlow to talk about It Happened Here. "It is hard to believe that Brownlow, now a distinguished film historian and the planet's most accomplished film restorer, was just 18 when he began making the film."

Also in the Independent, David Thompson on what seems to be a revival of silent film: "[I]n the 1910s and 1920s, when making moving imagery was so much newer, there was a readier grasp of beauty."

Variety's Nick Vivarelli reports on Italy's 50th David di Donatello film awards, where the big winners on Friday were Nanni Moretti's The Caiman and Michele Placido's Crime Novel. Via Martha Fischer at Cinematical; more at europeanfilms.net.

Ross Johnson takes a peek at Craig Brewer's followup to Hustle & Flow, Black Snake Moan - which is not about nymphomania, Brewer insists.

Also in the New York Times:

• Jere Longman reports on how the families of those who died on Flight 93 are reacting to United 93; Paul Greengrass "felt it was urgent to gauge the feelings of every family, while asking himself a tough question: 'Does what they want accord with how I see it?'" Related: Ed Gonzalez, the New Yorker's David Denby, David Edelstein ("Greengrass doesn't need to sensationalize. The film is more powerful when he un-sensationalizes") and Newsweek's David Ansen: "[T]he movie's strength—its wrenching realism—is also its limitation." And this: Lewis Alsamari, an Iraqi actor who plays the lead hijacker, "has been refused entry into the US for the movie's premiere."

• ST Van Airsdale (The Reeler) asks Michael Hong about ImaginAsian, "an ambitious ethnic brand that has expanded from a low-powered television channel to a vertically integrated media empire in less than three years."

• Alan Riding talks with Cristi Puiu about The Death of Mr Lazarescu. More on the film from Ed Gonzalez in Slant.

• The piece for the Sunday Book Review on Lee Server's Ava Gardner: Love is Nothing is by Peter Bogdanovich who, naturally, met her and, of course, says so in his very first sentence.

• Virginia Heffernan: "[I]f [Ricky] Gervais made only podcasts for the rest of his career, I'd keep downloading."

Peter Conrad heads out to "the ragged outskirts of London" to check in on the making of Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of The Magic Flute and finds it'll be a lot darker than Bergman's. Also in the Observer, Philip French on Ballet Russes and Mark Kermode: "A cursory glance at the list of cinematic stinkers which have taken their lead from PCs, Xboxes and PlayStations reveals that there has never been a half-decent movie based on a computer game."

"Everyone seems to have forgotten that Britain used to produce the best cinema," writes Agnès Poirier, arguing, oddly enough, that the two British entries in the Competition at Cannes only highlight what's gone wrong.

Also in the Guardian, John Patterson retraces the connections between The Godfather and the real mob. And: "Late Wenders has been all about ripping off his own work and his increasing conservatism... Fassbinder just burned out and died, but Wenders got a life sentence." Ouch.

For some actors, less is more, and Joe Queenan considers the varieties of "well-remunerated male terseness."

Zach Campbell rediscovers some notes on Walarian Borowczyk.

Girish on Jem Cohen's Chain: "The single biggest strength of the film is that it does not come across as a heavy-handed, screechy condemnation of the 'chain-world' in which we live."

Acquarello thinks through the work of Trinh T Minh-ha.

Darcy Paquet at Koreanfilm.org: "Debut director Shin Han-sol's The Art of Fighting is a different sort of action film, one that largely avoids impressive displays of physical movement, and instead focuses on the gritty, sensual aspects of fighting."

"With Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Park Chan-wook delivers more virtuosic but empty flash," writes Ed Gonzalez. Also in Slant: Nick Schager on Akeelah and the Bee and Gonzalez on The Lost City (more on that last one from Agustin Gurza in the Los Angeles Times). And DVDs: Jeremiah Kipp on Damnation and Gonzalez on The Intruder, Fists in the Pocket and Aeon Flux.

For Cineeuropa, Dorota Hartwich reports that Peter Greenaway will shoot part of his Rembrandt film, Nightwatching, in Poland.

At Cinematical, Richard von Busack reviews The Fallen Idol, Carol Reed's adaptation of Graham Greene's novel.

Another Great Movie: Roger Ebert on The Long Goodbye. Meanwhile, Jim Emerson surveys reaction to his list of "101 Movies You Must See Before You Die."

There's a new issue of Shock Cinema out and, while there isn't much online, there's a bit to found if you scroll and poke around. Plus, there are all those "Shocking Links."

For the Sydney Morning Herald, Bernard Zuel profiles Tom Compagnoni, who made the W-Lennon mashup, Imagine This, noted a while back. Via Chuck Tryon, who also reviews Letter to the President, "an overview of the political and social history of hip hop from its formation in the Reagan era through the 2004 election (the film was completed before Hurricane Katrina), specifically focusing on the socially conscious hip hop artists and their response to various forms of social injustice, including police brutality, the Iran-Contra affair (and its relationship to the crack epidemic), censorship, racial profiling (driving while black), and the prison-for-profit programs that essentially use prisoners as free labor."

Jason Kottke: "An Inconvenient Truth opens in the US on May 24... do yourself a favor and seek it out when it comes to your local theater."

Shimes ranks the best movie Ws for the Cinemarati.

Online summer reading tip. Gene Youngblood's Expanded Cinema. Via Arthur.

Online viewing and listening tip. Nick Rombes finds the roots and aftermath of punk.

Online viewing tip #1. IFC's SXSW: Behind the Badge.

Online viewing tip #2. Antoine Bardou-Jacquet's video for Air's "How Does It Make You Feel." Via Fimoculous.

Online viewing tip #3. Corey Boutilier talks with AKA Tommy Chong director Josh Gilbert.

Online viewing tips. Jerry Lentz's "Earth Day Week-long Marathon" of videos.

SFIFF, 4/24.

At the San Francisco International Film Festival, Brian Darr has seen Regular Lovers - "I did not expect it to approach a Bela Tarr level of challenge (and reward)" - and See You in Space, "a slightly cultured film that's about as aesthetically un-challenging as they get."

Michael Guillen has "a chat with Chris Paine, the director of Who Killed the Electric Car?, interviewee Chelsea Sexton, gas conservation expert Wally Rippel and executive producer Dean Devlin."

SF360's got pix, a blog roundup and Johnny Ray Huston's interview with Guy Maddin.

Cartography of Ashes drew "not only film festival fans but also art students, history buffs, members of the San Francisco Neighborhood Emergency Response Teams, and firefighters," reports Rita at SFist.

Tribeca, 4/24.

With the Tribeca Film Festival opening tomorrow and running through May 7, indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez talks with programmer Peter Scarlet, who says he was drawn to New York by the "commitment by co-founders Jane Rosenthal and Robert DeNiro to 'break the mold of what festivals are.'"

Karina Longworth introduces a Movie Club of sorts, Cinematical's version of an email exchange on a topic at hand, this one being, naturally, Tribeca. Christopher Campbell and Martha Fischer, who've been furiously previewing the fest's offerings, take stock of what they've seen so far.

Cinematical's most recent Tribeca previews: Christopher Campbell on The Heart of Steel and Martha Fischer on Freedom's Fury.

In New York, Logan Hill breaks Tribeca down by the numbers.

Fests and events, 4/24.

Dave Kehr wraps the 8th Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de cine independiente: "My personal favorite from the festival was La mancha de sangre (The Blood Stain), a 1937 Mexican film directed by Adolfo Best-Maugard, who had been Eisenstein's assistant on the ill-fated Que viva Mexico!"

For Hollywood Bitchslap, Peter Sobczynski previews Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival (April 26 through 30).

Michael Tully at the Independent Film Festival of Boston, wrapping today: "Day four brought another hearty dose of cinematic goodness."

At MNAC, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest, April 26 through September 1: Films by Josef Dabernig.

Tim Basham posts a last batch of reviews from... SXSW. If it really is never too late, maybe I'll finally get around to a wrap-up as well.

Summer previews.

"Coming soon to every theater near you: more of the freakin' same!" At least Time's writers know what they're up to in their summer preview as they break down the season by title and the titles down, too: For each, they consider "the challenge," "what's new" and "the buzz."

Via Bob Sassone at Cinematical comes Entertainment Weekly's summer preview. Gary Susman's checklist: "Why we can't wait," "the premise," "source," "the backstory," "burning question," "come for" and "stay for," all for ten hopefuls: Clerks II, Cars, The Devil Wears Prada, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, Little Miss Sunshine, The Break-Up, X-Men: The Last Stand, Snakes on a Plane, Superman Returns and The Da Vinci Code.

You'll remember that David Poland's preview, launching his "20 Weeks of Summer" series at Movie City News a while back, is more comprehensive; this week, David looks back at how last year's summer movies - and his predictions - fared.

At Cinematical, Erik Davis asks, "Which summer blockbuster do you feel will turn out to be the most disappointing?"

Online browsing tip. James Israel's "Movies I Will Never Ever See Based On The Stills."

Alida Valli, 1921 - 2006.

Italian actress Alida Valli, who starred in films by Alfred Hitchcock and Luchino Visconti, has died at the age of 84.

The BBC.

Now. First, explore an amazing site. It's in Italian, French and German, but navigation should be easy enough.

For more, see Istria on the Internet and Classic Movies.

Updates, 4/24: John Francis Lane in the Guardian and Peter Nellhaus.

Udine Dispatch. 1.

Moira Sullivan, whose most recent dispatches have come from Göteborg and Créteil, opens this year's series from Udine and the 8th edition of the Far East Film Festival. For more on Imprint, see, too, Saul Symonds's recent dispatch from Hong Kong.

Miike Takashi knows why the Udine Far East Film Festival is one of the most popular festivals of Asian cinema in the world. It's about the audience and the films, not the market and money. The unedited version of his latest film, Imprint (Japan, 2006), was shown at a special screening at midnight on opening night. Takashi told us that he was happy to work on the Masters of Horror series, and the fact that it was censored in the USA doesn't bother him. He was able to make the film as he wanted. If it weren't for the censorship, he knows the film would not have drawn so much attention.

By the way, the scenes cut from some versions have to do with aborted fetuses. The distinguished director said that he tries to break down the wall that we build to protect us from our fears. He even humorously encouraged us to take our children to see Imprint. Although he did admit that he was reluctant to have his mother see it, so he understands the strength of these walls. It may be hard to figure out the iconography of Takashi's films but he suggested that if we want to do some homework, one of his favorite and most autobiographical films is Young Thugs: Nostalgia (1998), the story of a young boy growing up in a dysfunctional family who puts his fantasy world to good.

Takashi noted that he likes to mix American culture with his films. In Imprint, set in the 19th century, an American journalist, Christopher (Billy Drago), tries to discover how, Komomo, a woman he loved, has died. But he's a heartless soul, as revealed in the opening scene, when wishes a female corpse he spots in the water good riddance. Drago's delivery is wooden and theatrical, which is one of the disturbing elements of the film. A woman Christopher buys sexual favors from (Youki Kudoh) tells the story of his lost love, so sexuality and horror are intimately entwined from the beginning. Theme of the film: Why do people want to know the truth? Better yet, why do people want to see needles pushed under someone's cuticles? Like many in Udine, I had to ask myself why I wanted to watch this. But Takashi delivers. Imprint is rich in gothic horror detail, with magnificent costume and makeup. Be prepared for long torture scenes with a smiling woman with precision tools who is brutally cold, on the scale of what we witnessed in Audition (1999). Imprint also reveals some of the imaginative world of The Great Yokai War (2005).

The opening film of the festival was Han Jae-Rim's Rules of Dating (South Korea, 2005). I recall a seminar last year at last year's festival on the excellent relationship between the DP and the director in Asian films. In this case, the cinematography by Yong-su Park is exquisite - often better than the story. The opening scenes feature an admirable visual style with students running in a playground. The lead characters Hong (Park Hae-il) and Yu-rim, (Gang Hye-jung), a student and her advisor, initially seemed to have very little chemistry so it was hard to get into the film. In fact, Yu-rim serves as almost a caricature of a woman. But Rules of Dating grows on you, showing the hierarchical order in the South Korean school system and how gossip has a gender pecking order. The provocative plot twist on the subject of date rape and sexual harassment compensates for whatever deficiencies the character development imposes on the work.

Singapore Dispatch. 1.

Ben Slater, whose new book, Kinda Hot, tells the remarkable story of the making of Peter Bogdanovich's Saint Jack, sends a first dispatch from the Singapore International Film Festival, running through April 29.

Traveling to attend a film festival is very different from going to one taking place where you live. In a strange city, you're there for a single purpose - you happily eat, drink, talk, walk, and breathe cinema. Time is broken down into viewing slots, sleep loses priority, food is fuel, conversations never stray beyond what's good or bad. But when the film festival is on your doorstep, the experience has to sit alongside the necessities of daily life. Chores to do, work to be done, loved ones to spend time with - and about 130 feature films (not to mention more shorts) to try and get your head round. It's schizoid living for two weeks during the Singapore International Film Festival (SIFF) as I try to balance my real life and my festival life, and the classic festival feeling of panic is only heightened by the split. Am I missing all the good stuff?

Every year I look at SIFF's program and find it more uncompromising and challenging than the last, and that's double-true this year. Rising rentals and competitive local distributors have forced SIFF to shift away from tried and tested festival hotties and focus on the (relatively) unknown and unshown. This pays off with discoveries and revelations for the truly committed and the hardcore, but definitely leaves many local cineastes wondering where the big guns from Cannes, Berlin, Toronto and Venice have gone. Instead, they targeted the Don Askarian retrospective - and the Armenian émigré's remarkable, symbolic tableau developed devoted disciples in Singapore.

The festival flagged up its "Secret Life of Arabia" focus by making Kiss Me Not on the Eyes, by Jocelyn Saab, the opening film, paired with a short by Malaysian auteur U-Wei Bin Haji Saari, My Beautiful Rambutan Tree in Tanjung Rambutan. Saab's film opens strongly with a pulsating montage of Cairo life, great music and a taxi full of feisty women - but later settles into a predictable dialectic between sensuality and the restrictive laws and customs of conservative society. U-Wei delivers a dark tale of spoilt, upper class children, an accidental death and the supernatural growth of a tree - I'm sure it was allegorical, although I didn't really "get it."

The Arabic program balances fictional features and documentaries (including a worthy tribute to Michel Khleifi, who also provided the fireworks during the accompanying seminar). One stand-out is Erik Gandini and Tarek Saleh's Gitmo: The New Rules of War, a chilling but relentlessly compelling investigation into interrogation techniques and office politics among the high brass at Guantanamo Bay. Confession: I watched Gitmo at the festival's office video/DVD viewing area, a valuable resource, but with a constant flow of guests and the attractions of whatever your neighbour is watching, it's easy to get distracted - even so, Gitmo had me riveted.

As others have noted, The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai is actually a new edit of Horny Home Tutor: Teacher's Love Juice, and belongs to the genre of Japanese soft-porn known as Pink. I am no expert on these (although maybe I should be), but I seriously doubt most Pink movies have as many weirdly embedded geo-political references. A sex worker (Emi Kuroda) accidentally acquires a clone of George W Bush's finger and she finds that it's just as horny to penetrate her as it is to destroy the world. Turned into a speed-reading genius by a bullet to the head (more penetration), Sachiko finds herself on the run, and her journey (to an Osama-style cave hiding a doomsday device) involves a dizzying number of sexual encounters. Initially, the audience laughed it off, but by mid-point, after a rape, the seduction of a teenage boy and more rough sex and masturbation, we had shifted into a fatigued silence. Read as an audacious, excessive sexualisation of "the war on terror," Glamorous Life presents one possible response to the Bush administration's affect on all our "democracies."

Another is of course, Manderlay (one of very few Cannes 05 hangovers at the fest), which I finally caught, and surmised that much of the critical shit-storm surrounding it was unjustified and weakly argued. People seem to get very hung up on Von Trier the egomaniac (and anti-American) and refuse to simply watch the films. It's rarely acknowledged that he's a brilliant (albeit calculated) storyteller - everything unfolds with a precise and deadly logic. In dealing with race, power, money, sex and democracy, it's a risky, uncomfortable ride.

Back in the viewing room, I checked out the double-bill of actor Tadanobu Asano's dreamy debut featurette, Tori, and the documentary that accompanies it, Sorano (almost twice the length of its subject). I'm a huge Asano fan, and felt pretty disloyal fast-forwarding through parts of both these tapes. Tori is made up of five short segments, including some digital animation, a graff/skate clip, a dance film, a traditional stand-up comedy routine and a strikingly odd samurai vignette. It's certainly sincere, but it's also a forgettable mish-mash of styles and interests. In Sorano, a psychiatrist attempts to analyse both films and the creative team - a fruitless exercise. The best insight into Tori's shortcomings: Asano confesses that he doesn't know how to "perform" as a director and just agrees to everything his team suggests.

The main newspaper in Singapore, the Straits Times, is too busy manufacturing election fever (the ruling party, the PAP have not been out of power since independence) to recognize that the festival is happening, other than reporting on the surfeit of local films this year. The most anticipated, Royston Tan's 4.30, is the festival's closer, so I'll deal with that in the second dispatch, but I did catch Kelvin Tong's Love Story, a low-budget Chinese-language feature financed by a scheme fronted by Hong Kong megastar Andy Lau. Heavily inflected by Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, it muses on love and art while switching across a series of non-linear romantic encounters between its blank-faced writer protagonist and a parade of improbable females. It's ultimately too stiffly artificial and self-conscious to achieve the sexy, poetic melancholy that it's aiming for, but Tong's biggest mistake is to literally dis-locate his film. Love Story unfolds in an anonymous urban void, a Mandarin-speaking nowheresville, which denies the film a chance to breathe or be real.

The opposite is the case for the collection of "New Malaysian Shorts" (which could have easily been called "Love Stories"). They are all imbued with a vital sense of place. This may be down to the fact that they are part-collaborations between the same close collective of Kuala Lumpur-based filmmakers (James Lee, Wong Ming-Jin, Tan Chui Mui and more), who pitch in to act in, shoot and produce each other's works. All filming is on miniDV (with James Lee usually behind the camera, and Tan Chui Mui frequently in front of it) and there is a sense of pushing hard within very tight limitations. Newcomer Azharr Rudin's hour-long Amber Sexalogy is a sextet of vignettes dealing with the start, middle and end of a relationship and not necessarily in that order. It's too long, but the final single-take episode (a seemingly unrelated encounter during a walk to the train station) is a superb coda to all the failed romance. Wong Ming-Jin's It's Possible Your Heart Cannot Be Broken pulls off the difficult trick of being both laugh-out-loud funny and poignant. James Lee's two mini-stories of disconnection, A Moment of Love and Sometimes Love is Beautiful, are quietly devastating. The night ended with Tan Chui Mui's South of South, a real change of scene (a period piece set on the coast seen through the viewpoint of a child), which concludes on an image of extraordinary beauty.

Weekend shorts.

"To see [Killer of Sheep] again today - on those rare occasions when one can see it - is to be reminded of just how much American movies in general, and African-American movies in particular, have suffered for not having [Charles] Burnett as a regular voice at the table," writes Scott Foundas.

Also in the LA Weekly's people issue, Ella Taylor profiles "the thinking critic's go-to girl for quality cinema," publicist Laura Kim and a "prince among independent film publicists," Mickey Cottrell; Dave Shulman celebrates Jack Black; Steven Leigh Morris calls up Ed Asner; Caroline Ryder meets Larry Clark; and Libby Molyneaux jokes with Sarah Silverman.

What were those recent riots in India actually about? In Spiked, Alexander Zaitchik explains: "Understanding what happened in Bangalore last week starts with understanding Rajkumar's seminal role in the local Kannada-language film industry, based in the southwestern Indian state of Karnataka."

Wednesday was Angie Dickinson Blog-a-Thon Day, and blast it, there was too much going on around here to catch up with it. But here's the weekend and time to take in the appreciations from Dennis Cozzalio and Flickhead, who seem to have launched this one after spotting this, Steven Carlson, Brendon Connelly, Richard Gibson, Michael J Hayde, Inisfree, John McElwee, Peter Nellhaus, Pete Roberts and That Little Round-Headed Boy.

Philip Lopate went to San Francisco to talk about Mikio Naruse and Michael Guillen was there to take extensive notes.

"While viewing the clips comprised during Monday night's Gala Tribute to Jessica Lange at Lincoln Center," writes The Reeler, "I started to wonder if Lange might be the American actress most taken for granted - the one we know is out there, whom we know is good but whom we just expect to churn out one tight, powerful performance after another."

At PopMatters, Violet Glaze celebrates "a fantasy of release from stifling circumstance via the intervention of an unpredictable and superhuman visitor whose mere presence destroys the status quo in an orgy of divine chaos... oh, wait, did I say Fight Club? I meant Mary Poppins."

Jeffrey Wells: "I finally finished reading I Wake Up Screening: What To Do Once You've Made That Movie (Watson-Guptill) last week, and it's one of the easiest-to-get, best written, most thoroughly sourced books ever written about how to get your indie movie seen (and maybe even distributed!) once it's more or less finished." Also: "The advance buzz about M:I:3 being awfully damned good has turned out to be true, I'm afraid - as shallow but very expensive action films go, this is about as good as it gets. But I would hold up on the talk about Philip Seymour Hoffman stealing the picture from Cruise."

Lee Marshall for Screen Daily: "After his compelling Red Brigade psycho-drama Good Morning, Night, Italian auteur Marco Bellocchio returns to the hermetic, dreamlike mode of The Hour of Religion with his latest effort, The Wedding Director, in which a leading arthouse filmmaker is talked into shooting a Sicilian matrimonial video." Also, Jonathan Romney on Yoon Jong-bin's award-winning debut feature, The Unforgiven.

The Hollywood Reporter's Anne Thompson talks with Andy Garcia about his directorial debut, The Lost City, "a Cuban love song set in the 50s of his childhood that took 16 years to get made."

"The documentary Nobelity is a 'what can we do to help?' movie, and as such, has an unusual distribution plan." Jette Kernion explains at Cinematical.

Andrew O'Hehir in Salon: "I won't pretend there's some uplifting vision or spiritual epiphany offered at the end of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu - such things lie outside its range - but something about the film's relentless clarity, its enormous cast of damaged but profoundly believable people, and its accidental panoply of human dreams and desires, is almost as exhilarating as it is depressing." More from Stuart Klawans in the Nation and, at Film Comment, Mark Cummins's talk with director Cristi Puiu.

"[W]hat started out as a Q&A almost immediately became an A&A, as the two directors compared notes about movies, motherhood, aging in Hollywood and their experiences directing prime-time television." The Washington Post's Ann Hornaday gets Nicole Holofcener and Mary Harron chatting. Related: Rick Klaw, whose grandfather was Irving Klaw, talks with Harron for the Austin Chronicle.

Reviews in the New York Times:

• Manohla Dargis on Sir! No Sir! (more from Armond White in the New York Press), American Dreamz (a film currently being discussed ferociously at Libertas; more from Stephanie Zacharek in Salon, Michael Agger in Slate, Christopher Kelly in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times, Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times, Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle, Kim Voynar at Cinematical, Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat, Tim Robey in the Telegraph, Victoria Segal in the New Statesman, Mike Russell and Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian; for the New York Press, Jennifer Merin interviews Paul Weitz; so does Jeffrey M Anderson), Mongolian Ping Pong and Metal: A Headbanger's Journey.

• Stephen Holden on Somersault (more from Andrew O'Hehir in Salon, Carina Chocano in the LAT and Marcy Dermansky) and The Sentinel (more from Grady Hendrix at Slate and Roger Ebert).

• Jeannette Catsoulis on Standing Still.

• Nathan Lee on Stolen.

• Laura Kern on The Last Dispatch.

The Guardian runs a summer preview. Also:

• Peter Bradshaw on Silent Hill: "Maybe it's the kudos acquired by screenwriter Roger Avary in his association with Quentin Tarantino that has allowed him to write this unbelievably boring horror-thriller at such testicle-shrinking length." (The LAT makes a point of not having a review, but Roger Ebert's got one; so does BtoFU at Twitch) And Hell is "an exhilarating, poised movie, if a little showy and melodramatic." More from Anthony Quinn in the Independent and Antonio Pasolini.

• John Patterson: "I'm inclined to think a lot of the problem with United 93 comes from the American media's lack of familiarity with the essentially British quasi-documentary tradition that informs the film."

• Skye Sherwin sees "a new wave of experimentation in the teen movie genre."

• Danny Bradbury: "Video jockeying is with us, but is it a new media revolution or simply empty irony? And - perhaps more important - will movie studios get the joke?" Related: Steve Friess at Wired News on "this year's hot political advertising trend: animated attack ads designed to be spread virally through blogs and email."

  Brian Logan on the spoof doc It's Nice Up North.

• Laura Barton meets Daniel Johnston.

"I thought it was a good marriage to see Guy Maddin make a film on Roberto Rossellini written by me, a surrealist," Isabella Rossellini tells Kaleem Aftab. Also in the Independent, Geoffrey Macnab: "[Peter] Lorre's virtuosity is not in doubt. His misfortune, once he decamped to Hollywood, was that the qualities that had made him so utterly distinctive as Beckert [in M] were too often mobilised for cheap shock effects."

Paul Harrill has a longish talk with Joe Swanberg and two of his collaborators, Chris Wells and Kevin Bewersdorf, on the winning LOL.

Lance Weiler, director of The Last Broadcast and Head Trauma, joins the esteemed Indie Features 06 band.

The Arrow for Arrow in the Head and JoBlo.com: "A bunch of us got to interview [Takashi Shimizu] on the Grudge 2 set in Japan and although an obvious introvert, there was a strength and artistic vibe that emanated off the guy that I found quite endearing." Via David at Cinema Strikes Back.

Kevin B Lee interviews Caveh Zahedi for Slant. Related: Sam Adams reviews I Am a Sex Addict for the Philadelphia City Paper.

"I didn't give any stars to Basic Instinct in 1992, but 11 years later I selected it as one of my 1000 favorite films," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader, reviewing Basic Instinct 2 and taking issue specifically with Manohla Dargis's review for the NYT.

In the LAT, Kevin Crust reviews the "deliberately enigmatic drama" Erosion and Kenneth Turan reviews The Syrian Bride, "a wedding narrative laced with more Kafkaesque moments than romantic joy." Related: John Esther's interview with director Eran Riklis at the main site.

Mack hears that Peter Chan's next project will be a remake of the 1973 Shaw Brothers/Chang Cheh film, Chi ma. Also at Twitch, new reviews from Todd: Starcrash, Midnight My Love and The Art of Fighting.

David Gritten in the Telegraph: "We learned this week that Japanese film audiences are watching Terrence Malick's The New World with an updated version of the 1950s fad Smell-O-Vision: machines in cinemas waft scents of flowers and herbs over them at key moments. This device would have been ideal for Paul Mayeda Berges's film Mistress of Spices, which is largely set in an aromatic spice shop. It needs all the help it can get."

Back to the NYP and Armond White: "The sociological problem of sustaining a livelihood while pursuing personal dreams is such an elegant, seamless part of Kinky Boots that only the film's gender politics seem contrived."

DK Holm at Movie Poop Shoot on what's "missing from Hard Candy, as well as from the score of other pedophile films released in the last 10 years (in fact, if you want to fund an indie film, write about child abuse). The Kevin Bacon film The Woodsman, Mysterious Skin, L.I.E., and 12 or more others all dwell on the attraction of adults for children (usually men for boys), but rarely explore just what it is that drives the compulsion, what quirk in the psyche creates it, what need it satisfies, and what the vocabulary of this particular sexual language consists of."

Waggish on 4: "[Ilya] Khrzhanovsky is so aggressively creative that I would trust him to adapt a Celine novel; I think his visual - and moreover, his physical - senses would mesh."

Acquarello: "Channeling the zeitgeist of the French new wave, The Koumiko Mystery assimilates Jean-Luc Godard's enraptured clinical deconstructions of the feminine mystique (as well as a penchant for structuring these ruminations within the framework of noir) with Jacques Demy's achingly nostalgic evocations of elusive, romanticized longing into a whimsical, organic, and fractured, yet quintessential Chris Marker exposition on culture, identity, contemporaneity, and strangerness."

At the House Next Door, Matt Zoller Seitz introduces a few choice snippets from Durgnat on Film.

Cahiers du cinéma: Emmanuel Burdeau and Eugenio Renzi on V for Vendetta and Inside Man.

Andrew at Lucid Screening on what happens "whenever European directors point their camera towards America: their films tell us as much about these directors they do about us. Antonioni's America is one of total alienation; von Trier's is one of total violence."

Joanne Laurier on Before the Fall (Napola: Elite für den Führer): "[Dennis] Gansel's darkly rich film is serious and honest." Also at the WSWS, David Walsh on Caché: "[Michael] Haneke is sincere in his concerns, but his apparent belief that he can treat coldness with coldness, disconnection with disconnection, is false."

Stop Smiling runs an excerpt from Nile Southern's interview with Chris Hegedus.

"What is it about Julia Roberts that reduces grown men to such goops?" asks James Wolcott.

Anthony Kaufman on Gabriel Sherman's New York Observer piece on the slow and painful demise of the Village Voice: "[F]ilm-lovers will take note 'the film-review budget has been cut by two-thirds,' and freelancers like myself have been essentially written out of the budget completely."

What's plaguing Canadian cinema? "[T]he Byzantine world of English Canadian film financing," explains Paul Gross in Macleans, "a surreal maze of auteur dreams, bureaucratic nightmares and ritualized failure." Via Ray Pride at Movie City Indie.

You won't believe the MPAA's take on recent popularity of Korean cinema. Neither can Grady Hendrix, and he heard it straight from the horse's... Well, meanwhile, Bob Tourtellotte is reporting for Reuters that MPAA head "Dan Glickman now wants to help independent filmmakers, in a seismic shift in thinking from his predecessor."

Covering Bollywood in London is a lot different than any other cinematic beat, as Time Out's Anil Sinanan explains.

"Global Green USA and Brad Pitt announced [yesterday] that they are teaming up to sponsor a design competition to provide an opportunity for talented architects, urban planners, designers, ecologists and students to put forward a creative yet practical vision for New Orleans neighborhoods."

Well, it's about time. Double Indemnity. Two discs. R1. August. Brendon Connelly.

For Die Zeit (and in German), Michael Naumann talks with Jeanne Moreau about François Ozon's Time to Leave.

Online listening tip #1. The IFP's "Distribution Now... Distribution How?" panel with directors Jay Duplass (The Puffy Chair) and Caveh Zahedi (I Am a Sex Addict), producer Susan Leber (Down to the Bone), and moderated by Filmmaker editor Scott Macaulay.

Online listening tip #2. DVD Talk editor Geoffrey Kleinman does just that with Eli Roth.

Online viewing tip #1. "What would get me back to blogging?" asks mrdantefontana at PCL LinkDump. "Christina Lindberg of course!"

Online viewing tip #2. Stanley Milgram's Obedience.

Online viewing tip #3. Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing: Pirate Baby's Cabana Battle Street Fight is "a screen-movie made from a side-scrolling Mac Classic game that never existed, but should have."

Online viewing tips #4 and #5. The trailer for Dai Sijie's Les filles du botaniste. Via Todd at Twitch, where logboy's found one for Johnnie To's Election 2.

Online viewing tips, round 1. Shorts by Brick director Rian Johnson. Via Coudal Partners.

Online viewing tips, round 2. Sesame Street clips at foldedspace. Via Listology.

Weekend fests and events.

"In the upcoming weeks, something extraordinary will take place," writes Jean-Michel Frodon in Cahiers du cinéma. "From top to bottom, the most comprehensive museum of French modern art, the Centre Pompidou, will be entirely taken over by the cinema." There are three parts to this event; one of them is Travels in Utopia, designed by none other than Jean-Luc Godard. Frodon then goes on to outline "a vast and complex movement of diverse exchanges between the world of cinema and that of museums."

Meanwhile, for the New York Times, Elaine Sciolino checks out Paris au Cinéma, a "celebration of the city's century-long love affair with the movies, the show takes the visitor through the history of films shot in and about Paris, through film clips, photographs, costumes, posters, drawings, documents, postcards and memorabilia from more than 250 feature films." Related: Rion Nakaya is in Paris (via MS Smith) and Dennis Cooper presents "Some highlights from the immediate future of Paris."

Filmfest DC opened on Wednesday and runs through April 30. Critics at the Washington City Paper preview over 30 of its offerings, recommending in particular "several of the previewable films, notably the documentaries Beyond Beats and Rhymes: A Hip Hop Head Weighs In on Manhood in a Hip Hop Culture, East of Havana, Letter to the President, and The Long Haul of AI Bezzerides and the fiction features Live-In Maid, My Uncle Killed a Guy, Netto and Passion." And Chuck Tryon recommends Iraq in Fragments, Three Times and Favela Rising.

IndieWIRE would like to make an announcement: "The New York Times and Emerging Pictures, the New York-based digital cinema network, will for the first time present "indieWIRE: Undiscovered Gems." The eight-month-long film series is based on indieWIRE's annual list of the top 15 films from major festivals around the world that have yet to find a theatrical distributor, and is presented in association with the California Film Institute. The series kicks off in late April with Jem Cohen's acclaimed feature Chain."

Also, Kerem Bayrak looks back on the 25th International Istanbul Film Festival and Kim Adelman presents "profiles of ten comedic shorts that killed in Aspen." Many viewable online, too.

The Nashville Scene's Jim Ridley highlights a "(baker's) dozen stand-outs" of the Nashville Film Festival (through Wednesday).

Blake at Cinema Strikes Back: "Incredible New Best of QT Fest Poster Released." More Austin area cinemania: Jette Kernion in Cinematical.

Susan King in the Los Angeles Times: "This Friday, the UCLA Film & Television Archive kicks off The Word and the Image: The Films of Peter Whitehead with three dazzling documentaries: 1967's Tonite Let's All Make Love in London, 1965's Wholly Communion and 1967's The Benefit of the Doubt." She also previews the 4th annual Indian Film Festival (through Sunday) and the Newport Beach Film Festival (through April 30).

At Slant, Keith Uhlich previews the 13th New York African Film Festival (actually, the stretch running April 26 through May 4 at the Walter Reade).

The Reeler drops in on the Brooklyn Underground Film Festival, running through Sunday. And today he reminds locals that the fest "has its shit together and you absolutely should go."

Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Press: "[Roscoe 'Fatty'] Arbuckle, whose career is being celebrated with an appropriately massive, 50-film Museum of Modern Art retrospective April 20 - May 15, was one of the most notorious exemplars of the fat man as funny monster." Also, at some festivals, parties are more important than programming, notes Tony Phillips.

Science fiction "is undergoing a protracted process of redefining its relationship with the mainstream," writes Charles Shaar Murray in his preview of Sci-Fi-London (April 26 through 30) for the New Statesman.

In the Phoenix, Jim Sullivan recommends catching Not a Photograph: The Mission of Burma Story at the Independent Film Festival of Boston, where Michael Tully is blogging even now.

Mark Pfeiffer's got the lineup for the Deep Focus Film Festival (May 4 through 7 in Columbus).

In the Independent Weekly, David Fellerath and, in the Philadelphia City Paper, Sam Adams look back on the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.

"Quarterly, the Filmmakers Saloon (which features drinking, as opposed to the Screenwriters Salon, which doesn't) meets up at the Northwest Film Forum to obsess over film trivia en masse, instead of, you know, blogging about it." reports on the April 13 gathering for the Seattlest. Related, and via Vince Keenan: William Arnold in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on the local screenwriting scene.

Tribeca, 4/21.

"New Yorkers are terrified of missing anything, and they take their movies seriously, but there is no way even the most dedicated film aesthete in a great pair of running shoes could take in the whole festival. Choices must be made." So, in the New York Times, David Carr offers a "User's Guide" to the Tribeca Film Festival, opening Tuesday and running through May 7.

Film Comment is running editor Gavin Smith's review of fest opener United 93 ahead of the release of the May/June issue: "[I]ts moral stance is that of a somber, uncompromising anti-spectacle. [Paul] Greengrass's film is many other things besides: a cathartic act of bearing witness, an experiment in therapeutic reenactment, an anti-procedural, a meditation on the agonizing limits of communication - and a memorial."

At the IFC Blog, Alison Willmore rounds up more reviews.

Cinematical's most recent Tribeca previews:

• Christopher Campbell on Shadow of Afghanistan, The Blood of My Brother, Beyond the Call, Day Break, Windows and When I Came Home.

• Martha Fischer on The Shutka Book of Records and Mentor.

• Karina Longworth on Kill Your Darlings.

At Boing Boing, Xeni Jardin puts in a word for Journey Into Sunset, a doc premiering at Tribeca which follows Don Cheadle and his family as they look into the lives of the night commuters of Uganda, children who hide each night to avoid being kidnapped by the rebel army.

Marc Kandel opens the first page of Hollywood Bitchslap's Tribeca Diary.

SFIFF, 4/21.

Brian Darr assesses the state of the San Francisco International Film Festival (through May 4) and previews Carlos Saura's Iberia and Peter Chan's Perhaps Love.

For the San Francisco Chronicle's G Allen Johnson, Sa-Kwa "finds the Korean actress Moon So Ri at the top of her game."

Besides a profile of fest director Graham Leggat, SF360 runs Robert Avila's preview of Palestinian filmmaker Rashid Masharawi's Waiting's Susan Gerhard introduction to the International ReMix project.

Cannes, 4/21.

"In public remarks today, organizers surveyed the fest lineup and insiders began buzzing about some of the anticipated titles." Brian Brooks opens indieWIRE's Cannes coverage.

In the Guardian, Charlotte Higgins celebrates the two British entries. Australia's happy, too, notes Pip Bulbeck in the Hollywood Reporter.

Cineuropa's Fabien Lemercier notes what all will be going on in Cannes besides the screenings.

Anthony Kaufman notes that Andrea Arnold's entry, Red Road, "is part of Lars von Trier's experimental The Advance Party group project, 'which will see three different promising writer-directors make three different features all using the same actors playing the same characters.' [Variety] The other budding auteurs in the series are Dane Mikkel Norgaard (The Old Firm) and Scot Morag McKinnon (Worms)."

And Matt Dentler notes that Richard Linklater has not one but two films at the fest: Fast Food Nation in the Competition and A Scanner Darkly the Un Certain Regard section.

Discussion of the lineup carries on here, but also at Nick's Flick Picks and Twitch.

Lists, 4/21.

"[Sigourney] Weaver's range as an actress has always impressed me enormously, and I think it's at least the equal of her Map of the World co-star Julianne Moore's; Weaver couldn't pull off the tiny emotional calibrations of a Safe, perhaps, but nor could I imagine Moore summoning the sheer fortitude, the regal poise, or the haughty, acidic outrage to do Weaver-like justice to any of the underlisted." Five films follow, featuring Tim R's favorite performances.

The Guardian has nominated 50 literary adaptations as the best ever. Voting will be going on next month, though what sort, exactly, remains unclear. But the discussion is already underway.

The site doesn't seem accessible at the moment, but when it is, Rogerebert.com editor Jim Emerson has posted a list of the "101 Movies You Must See Before You Die." For now, Film Experience has a peek.

Noel Murray writes up a list at the AV Club: "Your Tax Dollars at Work in 10 Classic Movies."

And via Movie City News, Garry Maddox lists the seven deadly sins of cinema etiquette in the Sydney Morning Herald.

SFIFF. Preview.

With the San Francisco International Film Festival opening tonight and running through May 4, Hannah Eaves and Jonathan Marlow discuss a few of the films in the program.

Marlow: We have the advantage of having seen some of these films at other festivals.

Eaves: Not as many as usual this year. Maybe that's just because I didn't go to Rotterdam or SXSW this year.

Marlow: You missed that Australian dreck, Look Both Ways. I'll have a chance to walk out of it again.

Eaves: That's not a good way to start this thing.

Marlow: It's true, though. There isn't as much overlap as you might expect. Guy Maddin's My Dad is 100 Years Old played in Rotterdam and will appear in San Francisco, although we have the advantage of having Guy here to present the short and a few others. The Sun screened at Rotterdam but I didn't particularly care for it. As for things that I missed at IFFR, I am looking forward to seeing Regular Lovers.

Eaves: What about The Wayward Cloud?

Marlow: I don't remember if it played there or not. Tom Luddy loaned me a preview DVD of the film but it stopped playing after the first fifty minutes. Based on the remarks of others that have seen the whole thing, I'm not sure if I'll see the rest. I was entertained by the bits that I watched. It's not greatly different than Tsai [Ming-liang]'s The Hole, except for the pseudo-hardcore sex, of course. You're falling asleep. This conversation doesn't appear to be too exciting for you.

Eaves: I have a cold. Besides, it's late.

Marlow: It's not that late. What about The House of Sand? I know that we've both seen it.

Eaves: This isn't going to be the moment for any sparkling criticism. I didn't like it at first but it grew on me. By the end, I was even choked up. It's a film that should be seen in a cinema.

Marlow: I liked it better when it was called Woman in the Dunes. Despite my snarky comment, I would have to agree with you. It starts rather slow but builds nicely into a rather impressive multi-generation story.

Eaves: Perhaps more Chekhov's Three Sisters, but at some point they wake up to themselves and stop longing for Moscow. Okay, it's not much like Three Sisters. I'd be interested in talking to the director about the relationship of the story to the geography and history of Brazil.

Marlow: Our pal James Longley will be visiting with Iraq in Fragments. I suspect that he'll have to clear more space on his mantle for another award.

Eaves: That film only seems to get more relevant as the year progresses.

Marlow: Hopefully Bill Morrison will make an appearance when his latest short screens in the "Fugitive Prayers" program. Perhaps we can finally put our feud to rest. Besides, I want to congratulate him on his excellent performance in Mutual Appreciation. Why isn't that screening here? I don't suppose it matters if we mention all of the special presentations since those are getting plenty of coverage elsewhere. Besides, I will be out-of-town for nearly all of them. I'll sadly miss Werner Herzog's The Wild Blue Yonder. I've heard great things about it.

Eaves: I've heard mixed things about it.

Marlow: I'll believe what I want to believe. At least I'll be flying back from New York in time for the screening of Heaven and Earth Magic at the Castro. New score by Deerhoof! Thank you, Sean Uyehara!

Eaves: They're so great live!

Marlow: We'll see. I have to admit that even the so-called "Late Show" programs are interesting this year. Executive Koala, from the brilliant director of Calamari Wrestler. The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai should be entertaining.

Eaves: I want to see what Tilda Swinton will come up with for the "State of Cinema" address. And what she'll be wearing. I'm also interested in the screening at the fire station.

Marlow: [reading from the program] "Cartography of Ashes marks the 100th anniversary of the 1906 earthquake, recounting the destruction of several city intersections in the quake's aftermath. This new 30-minute film will be projected outdoors onto a firefighter's training tower." Sounds super pretentious. Of course, it could be great.

Eaves: Yes, it does sound pretentious but I like the description of the film. I'm also looking forward to the "IndieAsia" program that Roger Garcia curated. They're all North American premieres.

Marlow: Clouds of Yesterday looks particularly grand.

Eaves: I don't know if these comments will be particularly helpful.

Marlow: Perhaps we should end it here for now. Perhaps other folks will add their own comments below...

Cannes. The lineup.

So you already knew that Ron Howard's The Da Vinci Code would open this year's Cannes Film Festival (May 17 through 28). Well, Tony Gatlif's Transylvania will close it.

In competition:

• Bruno Dumont's Flandres.
• Nicole Garcia's Selon Charlie.
• Xavier Giannoli's Quand j'étais Chaunteur (When I was a Singer).
• Pedro Almodóvar's Volver.
• Andrea Arnold's Red Road.
• Lucas Belvaux's La Raison du plus faible (The Weakest is Always Right).
• Rachid Bouchareb's Indegènes (Days of Glory).

• Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Iklimer (Climates).
• Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette.
• Pedro Costa's Juventude em Marcha.
• Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth.
• Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel.
• Aki Kaurismäki's Lights in the Dusk.
• Richard Kelly's Southland Tales.
• Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation.
• Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley.
• Lou Ye's Summer Palace.
• Nanni Moretti's Il Caimano (The Caiman).
• Paolo Sorrentino's L'amico di famiglia (Friend of the Family).

Also included in the official selection but screening out of competition are United 93, X-Men 3: The Last Stand and Over the Hedge.

Midnight screenings: John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus, Johnnie To's Election 2 and Su Chao-pin's Guisi (Silk).

Nashville Scene. NFF.

April, the cruelest month? Not for film-lovers. Even as, any moment now, Cannes will unveil its lineup, festivals are popping open all across the country. Just scroll up and down the entries here.

The Nashville Film Festival opens today, too, and runs through April 26. Nine critics have compiled the Nashville Scene's guide, blurbing "more than 50 features, documentaries and programs" and advising us to keep an eye on the alt-weekly's blog, Pith in the Wind, for more as it happens.

Sight & Sound. 05/06.

Once again, Sight & Sound offers a full house online, two features and three reviews from the new issue, though none of them have anything to do with the cover. The dose of France comes not in the lovely form of Emmanuelle Béart but in Robin Buss and James Bell's double on Dominik Moll's Lemming. Buss traces French relations with Hitchcock while Bell talks with the director.

Charles Gant talks with Julien Temple about Glastonbury after assessing his career: "early fame; cocksure hubris; humiliating catastrophe; years of creative and commercial struggle; and now a satisfying third-act resolution with work that finally makes sense of his peculiar talents."

The reviews:

• Someone's missing a byline. Freudian slip? Basic Instinct 2 "is psychoanalytic fable rewritten as pulp fiction. Perhaps that's why it's so ludicrously entertaining."

• Ali Jaafar on Paradise Now and its reception: "The personal is made the political in the most emphatic manner."

• Ryan Gilbey: "[François] Ozon's compulsion - it's one of his defining characteristics, in fact - to root out sensual properties in unlikely places is more than usually evident in Time to Leave."

IFFBoston. The Guatemalan Handshake.

As the Independent Film Festival of Boston opens today (and it'll run through Monday, April 24), we offer a little background on two of the films the fest is featuring in the form of Jonathan Marlow's interviews with their makers. At the main site, you'll find the one with Chris Sheridan and Patty Kim, whose Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story screens on Saturday and Sunday. All the secrets of that story are kept secret in that conversation.

The same can't be said, exactly, of the chat that unfolds below the jump here. A few moments prior to the world premiere of The Guatemalan Handshake at Slamdance, Jonathan had a freewheeling and not nearly as tight-lipped a talk with writer and director Todd Rohal. You might not call what comes up spoilers necessarily, but if you get a chance to see the film on Saturday or Monday in Boston, or anywhere else on any other evening, you might want to see to that first. On the other hand, I haven't seen it, and the chat's only whetted my desire to.

You've made some short films before you made this, your debut feature, premiering here at Slamdance. Tell me about these short films which I have not seen.

I have four short films - three made in Ohio and one made in the Baltimore area. The first film I ever made, when I was eighteen or nineteen, was called Single Spaced. It's sort of a combination of film noir stuff and John Waters. It played in the Hamptons Film Festival, the first festival I ever got into, and we won a $2500 prize right off the bat.

On your first film.

Yeah.

And that was your first festival?

Yeah. And I was like, "Shit, this is easy!"

"This is for suckers! I could do this forever..."

I made more than the budget back, you know? Then, of course, never again. I made another film after that which was a really bizarre kind of thing about a living head that's in a bag and this guy gets paired up with him to work together...

Like a buddy-cop movie except one of the buddies is a head in a bag?

Yeah, exactly. It was about these two guys who get paired-up and one of them never does any work and the other one gets blamed for it, sort of like Laurel & Hardy, but just totally depressing.

When did you make your first film?

That was 1996, I think. I'd done video stuff and all that. Then I did a thesis film for school called Knuckleface Jones. Basically, the premise of it was that I was going to make a film for which I would be the only audience member. That would be my favorite thing in the world, that no one else would probably enjoy. Because I had made these other films and they got varied reactions. Any time you make something, everyone reacts to things differently. It just seemed like this is how you'd approach something and see what happens. I did and it became a favorite of a lot of people and it played a lot of places all over.

No $2500 prize, though.

We got a grant from the Princess Grace Foundation. I think they would want it back if they saw what I did with it. It's a little out there; not offensive, but it's just got some weird language in it. It had Piper Perabo, who was in Coyote Ugly. It was her first film. She always pops up on these internet things as being in this film and no one knows what it is, but we met a lot of people through that one, left school and kept going with it, and that film got me a lot of work actually.

Then I decided, "Ok, I need to make another short." Before I started to work on the feature thing. I made one more short outside of the school environment to make sure that I'm seeing all these things that I would be otherwise overlooking from doing something in a more comfortable environment at school. That film was called Hillbilly Robot, and it played at SXSW.

I haven't seen any of these shorts. But they must be brilliant.

[laughs] They're bizarre. They're different.

Through those four shorts, were you starting to develop a style of how you wanted to approach filmmaking? Clearly, with Guatemalan Handshake, you seem to be taking traditional genres and finding a way to completely subvert and invert them. It sounds, at least from your description of your first two films, that you were doing much the same thing. "Let's do something that people understand and then throw at them something they won't understand at all."

Yeah. From the concept stage, though, I'm not able to think like that. I think if I was, I'd be able to come up with ideas more quickly, but instead, it starts in a totally different way. I wish it was more like that - "Yeah, I'll take this genre and flip it over, take this movie, base it on that and switch it around."

What was the starting point for this feature then?

For this, I wrote a bunch of short, short stuff. I'd sit down every night and say, "Okay, by the end of tonight I've gotta write, like, one page, one paragraph," whatever. Little short things that are complete, that I would present to anybody as a full piece or a description of a photograph. Actually, looking at Harmony Korine's A Crack Up at the Race Riots, if they gave that to kids in creative writing programs in school - there are so many good exercises that you could come up with in there.

So you've got a full stack of ideas, these little stories, and I had to figure how those all worked together and how those characters fit together. That took revising the draft three or four times.

How many individual stories make up what became The Guatemalan Handshake?

I don't know, because they all started to come together, and then a new draft would fit those together. I can't really remember where they began.

Do you develop the characters first, or do you develop the plot and then put characters into it?

I guess it would depend on where that story started. A lot of it would be written for some people who are in it. I've been writing stuff for some of them to play for four years, then calling them up and saying, "I've got something for you." I've meet a lot of different people that way, or just seeing them on the street and just talking to them about it, you know, asking if they'd ever do it.

For instance, the Will Oldham character - did you write that character specifically for him?

I wish I did. I really liked him and actually some of his music helped inspire some of the stuff in the film. I thought of asking him to be in something, but it was for a totally different part that was cut out of the film in an early, early draft. I never thought of him for the role he has and it was just stupid; I think he's great. I didn't know who we were going to cast, and I kept looking at people... I was looking for somebody who had a totally original new look and then thought about him for a different role, just a small walk-on thing and he wrote back asking, "Well, do you have anything a little more substantial that I could do?" I thought, "Yeah, why don't you do this?" And he said, "Sure." And he came on and it just worked.

How long was he on the project? How many days did you shoot with him?

We shot for a month total and he came for about a week and a half and just stayed with the crew in the houses. We were going to give him a hotel and he said, "If you guys are staying together, there's no reason to treat me differently." So we gave him a room in the house. He's really funny and goofy, had a lot of ideas and got mad at me when I had this one idea for a song I was going to use. He was like, "Do not, do not... everything else is fine, but do not use that song." He would constantly bring it up...

Really?

It was a Southern Culture on the Skids song about atomic power. I found this version they had and we were going to do this whole opening number with that and it was gonna be this total kick off to the film. "Do not even consider that," he said. "They are the most disgusting band."

So you honored his wish.

Well, it made sense! It just did. With our final soundtrack, I had this huge iPod list of music I thought could fit with the film and it wasn't nailed down until the whole thing was done. It wouldn't have fit and that entire scene would have been cut. It was just ridiculous to consider that song.

So how about the character of Turkey Legs? Is that something that developed in the same short story process?

It did, yeah. Originally it was a little boy who kept jumping in front of cars, getting hit by cars just to make friends and meet people. We met all the kids in this entire town basically, and we found all the other kids for the film that way, but we just couldn't find somebody that was right.

Where did you shoot the film?

This town was called Dillsburg, Pennsylvania, outside of Harrisburg.

Out of all the young actors that you looked at, this girl was the best of the bunch? Did you restructure your ideas about the character when you changed to role from a boy to a young woman?

Actually, I went to see the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players one night and the girl drummer in the band, the daughter, was just - it was just amazing seeing someone outside of a school element. She was going through this home school kind of thing, traveling on the road. She made total sense, so I talked to her dad and he was like, "We make our income (on) tour and we can't go to work for free for like a month to shoot this thing, but it sounds like a lot of fun and we can write a song for you."

So then I said, "Let's go look for some other folks, some other girls." We started casting and this one girl came in and she made sense. She was wearing a shirt with snakes all over it. She would just sit in this chair and talk, and talk, and talk, and I wouldn't have to ask a question and she would just talk in this quiet tone and I thought, "Yeah, let's do it."

Was she always considered to be the narrator of the project?

I didn't want a narrator for the film, but there was so much back-story and so much important stuff that we could have turned the film into a four-hour thing. It just had to be told upfront. It was important just to have a film that you could get into and go with and not spend so much time with this whole other film. It kinda worked like a sequel to a previous script I had written.

Oh, I see. You could still do a prequel to this film...

It would be totally boring. Her narration is more for the sake of getting you into it.

At what point did you select the iconic automobile that is featured in The Guatemalan Handshake? This one stylistic element of the film is a kind of anchor for everything else that happens in it because, not to give anything away, there's a lot of car exchanging going on. Is this your car? I mean, I know it's your car...

I found it on the side of the road in Ohio. I'm driving from one town where my parents live to my friend's house on the other side of the state, and it was, like, 2am, and it was out in front of a RadioShack in the middle of this really small town. I stopped and looked at it and immediately started doing research and found that there were only a couple thousand of them on the road. It was invented by this guy in Baltimore, which is near where I'm now living, so I looked into it and thought, "Yeah, this is the perfect kind of thing."

I've just been kind of obsessed with that weird automobile kind of stuff. I think if I had a lot of property I'd be one of those guys that had twenty cars out front even though I really don't know how to work the cars or anything. So I found this guy and he was trying to get rid of it and he talked a lot about it and explained a lot of stuff to me and kind of showed me how to wire it and all that stuff, and then we got it and basically started writing it into the film immediately. I just knew it was a great image, you know, this bright orange thing and the green...

So all the cars are that color? Oh no, no.

They had a variety.

They had a red and a light blue. I mean, it was the late 70s.

It's a very odd design. Not just the fact that it's an electric car, but because it's very strangely shaped.

It's a mid-prototype. They mass-produced them for a while and shipped them all over the country, but if they'd been able to go on a few more years, I'm sure they would have turned into something pretty amazing. It's seems like it's halfway there.

It's like it's the front of the car and nothing else. So immediately it made sense that Donald would be driving this car, and it would be a car that would be fetishized by his father. The story keeps folding in on itself and you keep learning more about the characters as it develops, which means essentially that your audience has to be smart and that may be challenging for some people. I'm not saying that audiences aren't intelligent. What I'm saying is that we, as a culture, have been taught to expect that films need to be made at a fourth grade level. I was immediately taken with the film because it expects the audience to participate. You have to follow it, because if you walk away from it and come back, you may not have any idea where you're at.

Yeah, I hate that it's gonna be a hard film for people to watch, but if they watch it a few times... then that sucks, too; you know they have to buy two tickets or something. The story is so simple and sort of dumb, sort of basic. This guy leaves and it's obvious that he left because he's in the most terrible situation. Maybe he's not such a great guy, but if you were ten years old and you were living with this situation, you would have absolutely no idea what was going on until you start figuring things out. And nobody's gonna tell you directly, so you figure this out as you go along, and that's what I wanted it to be like as you're watching the film. She [the narrator] is getting little bits and pieces from these people and she's putting it together as it's going on, but it's so complicated to figure out who these people are and what's really going on, especially when you're just thrown into this mix. But that's the whole point of the film, I guess. Once you are able to figure things out, it does make sense and makes a simple plot much more complicated that way.

Except for the dog.

How it comes back to life?

So the dog comes back at the end. "Wait a minute, no - we know the dog is dead."

That's because you've got this other character that's working inside this film, which is like an additional story, a parallel story going on that's not related to any of the characters in the film, and every time she's on screen, it's through her point of view as well, so we're seeing all this stuff that's going on that makes sense to her in the same way that it makes sense to the ten year old, Turkey Legs. But when we see this older woman, it's basically, you know, what happens after you die. Do you realize that your gone? Because this woman is actually gone, but we're watching her last few thoughts before she disappears as well...

So, in a sense, the story is the Turkey Legs story. All the characters occupy the same world so none of them are out of play. Although, in any story like this, The Addams Family or whatever, you always have the anchor, that character who's the normal one and, in this case, it's kind of the daughter of the so-called Guatemalan immigrant, the derby driver, who aspires to be a derby driver as well. She's kind of... well, I hate to say the sane one because she's really not any different than anybody else, but she's kind of the older sister figure for Turkey Legs in a way. I mean, she's the closest link to the narrator because the story is simple but constructed complexly. How difficult was it to write it that way, so that it would come across in a satisfying way from beginning to end, so you don't lose the audience, so they don't go, "This is nonsense"? But, at the same time, did some of that come out of editing? Were there changes you made in the editing process that cleaned it up a little bit?

Yeah, because pacing was so, so, so important and difficult and there are scenes in there that I wasn't sure were - I mean they work really, really well, all the scenes themselves, but you put them all together and you hit the two-hour mark with the cut and it needs to be ninety minutes. Because of that frustration factor, that's kind of what came out of editing. So many things that happened in production lengthened a shot and that extra fifteen seconds you're adding just takes it to the next scene to make it seem like it's ten minutes too long. But otherwise, it sticks to the script exactly. Even the ending, how it cuts back and forth from scene to scene to scene... Does that answer your question?

You just tightened things up and made scenes a little shorter here or there to get it down. It is just the natural result that, during the shooting, time expands. It's just a question of trying to compress it again.

We had this huge, long opening with too much narration and great, great shots. The thing was, we didn't want to do wide establishing shots of an area, ever. There was never to be shot that would be like, "Here's a mountain side." It needed to have something else going on, so you'd have to meet another character for a second for those sequences to feel like, "Now we need to take a break and see the landscapes." But let's figure out these landscapes through the people that are in it, so we have these little breaks that are the kid in the wheelchair, the baton thrower, that kind of stuff. Constantly feeding us information, even though it seems completely irrelevant; they serve as the little breaks between that.

One of my favorite moments is from their childhood, the Spank Williams character that Cory [McAbee] plays, and you did a great job evoking that period. The little scene where they're watching television, that's really fabulous, and also his stunt is pretty impressive. So, now that again, was itself its own self-contained story point that got worked into the whole or...?

I think I wrote that story by itself and it ended up that was the last thing written into the script. Originally he was supposed to be this eight-foot-tall black guy, but then Cory kept writing, "Is there a part for me in the film?" And I thought, "It just seems great, we'll give him a mustache." So we changed that around, and the story just kept rewriting itself. I think it might have been an entirely different film if I hadn't brought that in.

Yeah, it comes out of nowhere, really. So, how did you know Cory originally?

I met them in Maryland when they brought American Astronaut around and Skids, who's a projectionist here, introduced me to his stuff and an old professor of mine told me about The Ketchup and Mustard Man, and finally, I saw that stuff and I was just crazy about it. I met him and Bobby [Robert Lurie] who's the other half of the Billy Nayer Show, and I was like, "My job is creating DVDs and doing design," and it was just like, "Can you just do an American Astronaut DVD?" So I sat down with them and did stuff.

Really, okay. So you did the shorts thing and you did American Astronaut.

Yeah.

Ok, I didn't make the connection.

So I'd go out and shoot some shows with them and things like that. We're trying to work on a live DVD down the road.

That would be smart.

I think I just hit it off well with both of them. I think Cory liked the sensibility, which was like, "Everybody's working for free on this film, I'm gonna work for free for these people over here." It's like this trade back thing. Cory's interested in that, so he was like, "Yeah, let me come out and do this."

Yeah, he does some physical stuff; he does the man on the moon, the cowboy thing. When he does the run for the jump I'm like, "Yep." Cory just moves his body in a way that... he's like a cartoon almost. It's really unreal.

That whole sequence, there's like a fifteen-minute cut of it. It works so well as its own short film, but in the middle, it needed to be trimmed down. He did some of the funniest stuff. There's actually a landing target that he has on the ground with these balloons on it and we have him looking at it and checking the distance and calculating everything and then practicing how he's going to land.

That'll be an extra at some point.

He's just phenomenal in terms of what he comes up with. It really felt great to work with somebody that would just be like, "What if I do this, this and this?" It does great stuff for us.

In Will Oldham and Cory McAbee, you have musicians that act, as opposed to actors that also write music. Was that important, knowing you have folks involved that have these other skills that could they could bring to the project rather than casting full on actors?

Yeah, I didn't want to have name-names in the film. One, because it would bring on all kinds of union issues, and two, if I make a film, it's gonna be completely coming out of nowhere. It has to be completely different and feel very real. If Nick Nolte is standing in the middle of a scene, everyone knows who that is. It's like shooting in New York City, it's too familiar. I wanted it to seem like it was taking place in an entirely different country.

So it was kind of a debate, putting them both in there. But Will hasn't been in a lot of stuff, and if you get him doing something different, that'll be fine. So having him and Cory there, and them being musicians, too, they understand performance in a different way and aren't so concerned about how their lines are coming across. They have a different sensibility about how they present themselves in front of people, especially Will, coming up with a new persona every year. So that just seems to work, finding musicians to do quiet smaller parts, or even loud insane things. You just know their performance will be based on how you've seen them live, and that's a good way to go about casting.

There's a sequence in the center of the film shot in black and white and there's a little musical interlude. Was that one of the iPod pieces that had been selected or was that something that was written for the film?

Yeah there was this Moldy Peaches song...

Oh, that's the Moldy Peaches song.

Yeah, and the guy who shot the film, my friend Ritchie, gave me this CD. Listening to it, I thought it would make a great sequence, so I put that down and it had all these different scenes that would go in between their singing. I talked to Will and Sheila, who played Sadie, the other character in that scene that sings with him, and we changed the lyrics up so they reflect the movie a little bit more. They went to a used bookstore and came back with lyrics. I have no idea what they really refer to, but to me, it made sense because it was things I saw around town and things that happened to them, personal things, things they thought were funny and that made sense for the back-story of their character. We shouldn't know, really, what their jokes are, but it's a very intimate moment.

So do you perceive that there will be things in the film that audiences will react to in a way that is not the way that you intended? For instance, the fact that certain parts of the story are unresolved. Or that you have the aspiration for Sadie, who is pregnant, to be a derby driver?

I question every single bit of it. Because now that I've seen it however many hundred of times, sometimes I'll look at it and think it makes absolutely no sense and wonder how anyone could sit down and watch this. I try to clear my head and wonder how this is gonna look to somebody for the first time. But to me, that's what I wanted. I wanted you to walk into it with the expectation that you're seeing this "doc" about drug smuggling, you don't know what the title means and the trailers are throwing you one way and our post cards another way... I definitely worry that people aren't going to like it.

If it were a Sundance screening, for instance, audiences would be less kind to it because they expect to be spoon-fed and here they really don't have any idea what to expect.

With it being Slamdance, you're still bringing in a lot of the same people and a lot of the films that have come out of here are very similar, I think.

Well, that's the biggest difficulty with Sundance, and I suppose it will happen increasingly with Slamdance as well. People make films that fulfill audience expectations of what a film that would go that route would be and those are the worst kinds of films.

I really wanted to like The Station Agent. I really wanted to like it. But I wondered, "Why didn't you take a least one more step forward in this film?" Instead of just keeping us in the same place and changing around the elements you're using. Just something a little bit more. We can make little steps in progress in terms of how we watch films.

When I saw American Astronaut here, now three years ago, I was shocked because I never would have imagined that a film like that would play here. And then it became clear: "Oh, it went through because Cory's short had played here." So there was a kind of history; it wasn't as if it were out of left field. But like your film, it requires a lot of the audience, and most audiences just can't give that. They can't give themselves up to the film to become part of the story and let it work.

It's so unrealistic. No one would ever do that.

But that's what a movie is for. If all a movie was about was recreating reality then there would be no need for them. And so movies that are only to reproduce reality, their surroundings... Like the opening night movie here at Sundance, which you have not seen, Friends with Money, is the epitome of everything that's horrible about American films. "Let's get a bunch of boring people together and sit them around a table and have them talk about their inconsequential problems as if they're really important and nothing of what these people are saying is of interest." Imagine you go out to dinner and there's somebody at the table next to you that just is talking about how horrible their lives are. "Look, there are horrible lives in the world and yours is not one of them." Now imagine that for two hours.

That's my nightmare.

Well, it wasn't two hours but it felt like two hours. So your film creates a world and asks the audience to accept these characters and those characters are true to the world they live in. They do all the things they would do in those conditions. Nothing rings untrue about anything that any of those characters do.

I don't want to say it changes how you look at reality. I think the film is really based in reality, definitely in terms of how these people are reacting - much, much, more realistically than other films probably here at Sundance.

Well, that's why, with the woman with the missing dog, there's more honesty in her performance and the way she's dealing with this grief - when we see her at the Chinese restaurant eating everything off the menu - there's more honesty in that than in any of these films that aspire to be real. Even though it's maybe hyper-real or whatever, maybe it's beyond what any normal person would do, people will do that. They react to things in different ways and everything that she does is consistent. She never breaks from that thread. And I think that's where audiences will react favorably to the film. Because it's consistent in its construction. It never deviates. I think when people try to make films like what you've done, when they do it poorly, they just go off. "I'll just keep throwing things in there and just be wacky for it's own sake." And that never feels real. So a lot of that is obviously writing and rewriting and working through the story and the way you photograph it. You shot it in 35mm and few people at this festival do that anymore. Is it screening on film?

It is. It's our first print and it's not the best print.

But you're insistent on showing it in 35mm. You shot it in 35mm. You finished it in 35mm...

I had a big ordeal with that here.

Would they rather not show it in 35mm?

They wouldn't because they have to pay for the projectors and it actually ruined my relationship with a bunch of people. I arrived and people were like, "You have to be a nice person to these folks." They called and said they'd like to show the film. I said, "Great. You know we're going to have a 35mm print," and then, she's like, "Well, we're not going to have 35mm projection." Okay, I can't show it. "You're going to throw away your premiere because you want to show it on film?" And I said, "Unfortunately, yeah."

The film will stand on its own, so I think you're taking the right stance on it.

I felt very, very honored to be accepted into anything. The rejections for this one will be plenty. To turn it down was the hardest thing. It was a decision that was made on the phone immediately, and she said, "We'll have to use an alternate." I'm like, "Go with an alternate, I apologize. The copy I provide you, if you don't have the means to show it, there's nothing I can do about that." So we went back and forth and I became a big jerk. And then they ended up having four other filmmakers come this year with 35mm prints.

Oh, well, there you go.

I think everyone was kind of behind that, but there have been a lot of shortcuts and I think it's so easy to put it on film when a lot of people are putting it on a DVD player and showing it. I'm not sitting there everyday working on it. And now we have this print and it's not perfect.

Your DP, had you worked with him before on these other films?

On the short films, yeah.

So you're very comfortable with him.

Yeah, he's a good friend and a very funny guy and knows his stuff and the crew loves him. I had worked as a DP on a couple of films, TV stuff and so it was very easy for us to sit down and have all these films behind us.

With a film as complex as this, did you find it necessary to storyboard everything?

Yeah, our storyboards are kind of like sketches, but often I would just make a shot list. I would know the location. I would know what was there and the elements involved.

Normally in a film, when something is repeated that I've seen already, I usually get frustrated and say, "God, this movie is only this long, you don't need to show me this again." But in this case, I did not make the connection that the guy at the roller skating rink was the same guy at the power plant until you show it again. "How did I not notice that? How is it not clear to me that these are the same people?" So, how did you do that!?

There's so much that goes on in that sequence, you're still trying to figure out and get your bearings.

It's so early, too. And it's so bizarre. The actions during all of that are so weird. But it makes sense when you see what he does at his other jobs. He's a very odd character. At what point in the writing stage did you develop that character? Because he's as important as Sadie is to the whole arc of the film.

I don't know at what point he came up. He was a friend of mine, so I was always writing the character for him. He's one of the funniest people I know. He's not a very funny person in the film; he's a very depressed sad, sad guy who puts the raw into the deal. It must have been when I wrote the original script, when we had Will's character all through, but when we removed that, there needed to be - in order for someone to move on what would you do after this guy disappears and you realize you're pregnant, you're moving on and you start looking for other people and there's this rebound relationship thing, but it's never, ever going to work. It's so ridiculous, and I guess that's how that came about. He needed to bring to this other character that there's hope that there are other things down the road, things that can happen and that there are a lot of other people out there, but this isn't the one. For both of them, it's just never gonna work and that's just sort of the funny bit. We just want to see that bit of the relationship.

In an early screening - we were showing a rougher cut - somebody said, "All the arcs for these characters are incomplete." No one gets what they want, no one wins anything until the guy in a stool gets up on his car at the end and takes his shirt off and celebrates. Every other time he tries to take it off, everybody's like, "No, no, no don't take your shirt off and finally he rips it off and everybody's lovin' it. He's got this full arc; he's the only character in this film...

Well, Sadie, even though she doesn't find Donald, she wants to be a driver and her first time out, she wins the $2500 prize at the first film festival she's in.

Yeah. Like fifty bucks and a free pizza.

But she gets a trophy. They both accomplish something, and even though they're clearly not going to be a couple and nothing's going to come from the two of them together, they have that one moment of intersection and they're going to go off and do whatever they're going to do. Well, I've blathered on enough about your film.

I don't know what people are going to say about this film. I know that there are a few people that are big fans of it already, and they're getting it around to the right people, but I think there are other times I could show it and people wouldn't understand why they should watch this or why I would make it.

Do you think it's easier to work within this space of comedy rather than trying to do a straight ahead drama, particularly for independent films?

I think if you're doing something funny and at the same time saying something serious, it's going to come across a heck of a lot louder. If you're trying to do something dramatic and everyone is talking and having these revelations that are right on the dot, they're useless, you know? I think it is the way to do it, and all my favorite films have that without being outright copies. Like Napoleon Dynamite, which I love, but that movie works as a complete comedy; there's nothing else going on in there. I think the best dramas are the ones that are just as funny. For me that's what works best. I'll just stick with that.

SFIFF. Leggat.

Two years ago, Jonathan Marlow presented a "Five-Point Plan" for a "seemingly necessary remodel" of the San Francisco International Film Festival. As he noted a year later, at least one of those points was realized (not necessarily as a direct consequence of a mere GreenCine Daily entry, of course) when Roxanne Messina Captor stepped down as Executive Director of the San Francisco Film Society. As summer turned to fall, Graham Leggat, even as he was hurriedly wrapping up a zillion duties in New York, was named as her replacement and, as Johnny Ray Huston puts it in this week's San Francisco Bay Guardian, though you may think "right coast" when you hear the name Graham Leggat, "he's considerably more connected with the film community in San Francisco than those who'd recently come before him."

And he's got plans for the city. Big plans. As he tells Jonathan in the following interview, he believes San Francisco, thanks to its geography, history and culture, is primed far more than most American cities to benefit most from a year-round, city-wide presence for the Society and its festival. Until then, there are more immediate concerns: the 49th SFIFF opens tomorrow and runs through May 4.

Your background is clearly in communications, however your predecessor was not known as a great communicator. I suspect that you probably don't want to address the Roxanne Messina Captor issue because you don't really know her.

Never met her.

Fair enough. I was extremely critical of her performance as the former Executive Director of the San Francisco Film Society. Did you ever meet Peter Scarlet [former Executive Director of SFFS; current Executive Director of the Tribeca Film Festival]?

I've known Peter for a number of years. I had a chat with him in New York before I came out here.

Did he try to talk you out of taking the job?

[Laughs] Not at all.

In a sense, this is your return to the west coast. You went to school at Stanford, as I understand it?

That's right. I did Modern English and American Literature and an American Studies degree at Stanford. Graduated in 1987. I went to Syracuse and did an MFA in Fiction writing with Toby Wolff, then spent six years in upstate New York in Syracuse and Ithaca. I worked and taught very occasionally at Cornell and worked at Cornell Cinema and the art museum [Herbert F Johnson Museum of Art], in programming, publicity, publications and editing. As you say, my day job over the last ten years has been in communications, but I've been doing a number of things at the same time - programming, editing, writing. I am still a columnist for the Daily News in New York. Then I had a very broad portfolio as Director of Communications at the Film Society Lincoln Center. I was the publisher of Film Comment and I oversaw marketing, website design and special events. I did some programming. I wouldn't want to be pigeonholed as merely a publicist, that wouldn't really tell the truth.

That was an oversimplification on my part. Your background, prior to your work experience, was obviously in English.

I worked as a journalist for a few years. I have a novel due out next summer and we're just about to sign a contract with NYU Press for a book on contemporary international filmmakers, a Film Comment book that I'm involved in. We think it will do really well, actually.

When did film enter into the equation? When did you decide to pursue film passionately?

Obviously I've watched a boat-load of films since I was little. The movie theater was both an enjoyment and a refuge during high school and college, both for consolation and celebration, like it is for many young people. I watched a ton of stuff and a lot of my film education came at the Varsity in Palo Alto and the Roxie and the Surf and all the great movie houses that were around here in the mid-1980s.

My actual professional hook-up was an article I had written for the Ithaca Times, sort of the equivalent of the SF Weekly or the Guardian. I headed Cornell Cinema, which was then, and is still now, one of the top-ranking college film societies in the country. That's really where it started. I had not really found a home in the professional world until that point, in part because I was still in graduate school. I had, at that point, two children, so I had an odd path through my 20s. It wasn't until my early 30s, when I was offered the job at Cornell Cinema, that I had hit on the metier that really spoke to me and I've been at it ever since.

How did you gravitate towards the American Museum of the Moving Image?

When I went to New York City in the early 1990s, the first job I had was working freelance at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. That temp job ended and I heard about a position at AMMI. I went and interviewed for it but I didn't stay there very long. I jumped within six or seven months because something better came along immediately at the Museum of Modern Art. Once I got to the Modern, I really felt at home. It's a world-class program, great people, fantastic exhibition.

I went from being the publicist of the film department to running the communication department as a whole. I opened the Fassbinder retrospective in 1997 and the Jackson Pollock show in 1998, along with other amazing shows. I oversaw everything by the time I was done there, in terms of communications, and that was great. But then I just got fed up with a couple of things and started looking around and I was lucky enough to have a spectacular job tailored for me by the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

The museum world and the non-profit film world are really two quite different organizational cultures. Frankly, I prefer the film side to the museum side, not that I didn't have a great time. If you've ever worked or been in a museum you'll know that it has a very specific sort of feel to it, particularly a big, corporate museum. I had a great time at the Film Society. I wasn't looking to leave and then this extraordinary opportunity came up, to come out here.

It seems that you were somewhat destined, eventually, to run a film festival or something of that sort.

It's nice of you to say so. About ten years ago, when people asked me what I wanted to do, I did say that I wanted to run a world-class film society or film festival. There had been some talk of that at Lincoln Center. You always have to think of succession. I have been looking forward to this opportunity and was hoping that it would come along. There are only a few places that would have lured me away from New York. San Francisco is definitely top of the list.

There's an overlap in there that we didn't address. You were program director at GenArt.

I was the founding program director for three or four years. That was really interesting to me because it's obviously the complete opposite in terms of organization from what I was doing at the Museum of Modern Art. I can't think of two more disparate things and that's probably why I liked it. Those guys boot-strapped themselves up from nothing. What was really instructive was how they found corporate support for what they were doing and the way in which the social network aspect of film-going was emphasized at GenArt.

Do you know the festival? In brief, there is a premiere and a party every night. There is a perception that it's just an excuse to drink and troll for dates but that's a silly notion. What I took away from it was the way in which film-going is a social experience, where film exhibition has to identify a primary social group and give them a rich experience. It doesn't mean only social groups that coalesce around theatrical experiences. These days, a festival or film society has to speak to other social groups, those who are interested in the written word, in online communication, in viewing experiences via different platforms, such as DVDs or Video-on-Demand. The false construct of the classic theatrical experience versus online or DVD experiences is a bankrupt one for me. I think we have to speak to all those groups and use them to feed each other.

I know that in your columns in Filmmaker and the New York Daily News that you're very interested in the intersection of video games and cinema.

Yes, I'm interested in convergent media.

You were one of the earliest to write about Machinima as well.

I did the world theatrical premier of the first season of the Blood Gulch Chronicles, by the Red vs Blue guys. I've done other programs around motion graphics, the web and other aspects of film/game stuff, including one recently with Ubisoft at Lincoln Center. At the International this year, we'll have a program called KinoTak where we will be looking at the way in which different platforms influence aesthetic and narrative strategies. We're also creating alternative viewing experiences and different social groups around those viewing experiences. We'll be looking at cell cinema and iPod cinema, webwork, film/game stuff, DJ/VJ and also what we're calling International ReMix, where rights-free footage from the films in the festival will be available for download and collaging by anybody with online access.

So you're asking for the audience to start mashing-up footage?

That'll also have an international component by some of the next-generation internet possibilities that are opening up in San Francisco.

This leads us, largely, to where you want to take the 49th edition of the festival.

We want to follow the trajectory of media innovation, on the one hand, to see where it leads us in different forms and different audiences. We want to examine and present new media innovations. We have the luxury of being able to trace those to classic media strategies. The offerings of new media are often spectacular ideas but, at bottom, they often result from classic strategies. We want to offer new work but we also believe we're grounded enough in cinematic tradition to be able to present it and connect it to previous cinematic breakthroughs. We hope to get the best of two worlds.

People have always been interested in innovation in cinema from the earliest days. In addition to that, we obviously want to play to our strengths - the discovery of new talents, the celebration of mature talents in world cinema, local work and documentary work, in particular. We just want to do an increasingly good job of that across the range of different programming strengths.

As I recall, you were also considering new venues for the festival.

We're going to have a track of what you might call sub-theatrical satellite venues. I don't mind if it's forty people in a backyard watching something projected on the wall. I'm interested in collaborating with underground places. I just think that's fun.

Have you explored many such spaces in San Francisco?

I have some ideas. We're still in discussions with people, so I don't want to break out the roster just yet, but we have a short list of ten or twelve places that we'll narrow down to partner with, depending on their interest and logistics and so on.

So this is something that will evolve over the next several years, I presume.

We started this year's festival with the idea being that, during our 50th anniversary and beyond, we want to be city-wide. This is the first festival [in the Americas] to reach that milestone and the city provides a unique opportunity to do this sort of thing. New York's too big for that. You could be city-wide and still cover only a space of a few blocks, but San Francisco is both big enough and small enough to make a major impact around the city without over-extending yourself.

One of my many criticisms of the festival since Peter left was an over-reliance on the Kabuki as a venue.

You may have that criticism again for the festival this year.

I suppose that it's going to take some time to change your commitments to certain venues. Certain contracts are already in place. I realize that the dates are set and your hands are somewhat tied. In other words, I'm cutting you some slack this time.

That's good to hear.

One year of immunity is all you get. I'll try to be kind.

You will see any number of new ideas this year. Some of them will be in nascent form, some of them will be rather developed for the 06 festival, but I think you'll be able to see, pretty clearly, where my heart lies. I'm interested in innovation, I'm interested in incubation, trying things in the festival and, if they prove successful, shifting them into other parts of the year to build out year-round programming.

I'm interested in, for lack of a better word, hybrid-forms. Showing art cinema in a backyard [a la the origins of Canyon Cinema]. Having VJs work in the Palace of Fine Arts [a la RESFEST]. These are just examples of getting different audiences involved with each other. I don't like the idea of narrowness or clubby-ness and I don't like the idea of exclusivity. I like the idea of having work of the best quality, absolutely, but I don't believe it's just for a few thousand people. I believe its for as wide an audience as possible. I'm very interested in inclusivity and outreach.

The concern here is to develop a new audience for the festival and not discourage the existing audience?

In sort of classic terms, that's how you put it. It's not a strict sort of cynical marketing, "demographic targeting" thing. I just think, "the more the merrier."

The former Executive Director was very active in claiming that festival attendance around the country was down, which was essentially a lie. It helped to justify what was clear to audiences, that attendance at SFIFF was dwindling. The event in the past few years had an air of exclusivity. It seemed to pander to the folks that finance the festival, that is, sponsors and donors, and became less of a festival that's for the people who want to see films.

I can understand that. I think the festival took some body-blows last year. I think it was an unusual constellation of events and it did rough up the festival a little bit. It is often a question of balance. 80 percent of your festival can be great, but if there's a disproportion somewhere and, in addition, you have some technical problems - power outages, projection problems - and on top of that, your membership structure has been fouled up a little bit so your core audience has been alienated... Then, on top of that, you don't have a variety between Hollywood and world cinema. Those things sort of wracked the festival. From what I've seen from just looking over the programming, I think it's been very strong, and some years it's been fantastic. 2002 and 2003 were very good years. I think 2004 and 2005, there was just some bad luck and maybe some bad strategy.

Should we expect, with your past involvement with GenArt, that the parties will get better?

Here's hoping.

One thing that's interesting about San Francisco, as a person who relocated here myself...

From where?

From Seattle. The thing is, in New York, the museum really supports cinema as art. San Francisco doesn't have such an institution. SFMOMA doesn't really give much attention to film.

PFA [Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley] would be the bastion of that kind of exhibition.

I agree. Unfortunately, it's unlikely for people within the city to travel to the East Bay. It is very depressing that the local press doesn't really cover anything that happens outside of the seven-by-seven, either. The Rafael Film Center does plenty of wonderful things, the Stanford regularly shows great films, the NAZ in Fremont, and obviously, the PFA, as you mentioned. This is probably why I've been so critical of the Film Society for the past several years. It has a unique opportunity to step-up and fill this void. You've mentioned that you're looking to do year-round programming...

You can't really make the kind of splash that the Modern does in New York or the Rafael or PFA without a home. You can't just parachute into the city, as it were, for two weeks out of the year and give the people the opportunity to worship at the altar of art cinema and pack up and leave for the rest of the year. Imagine if you were a Christian missionary, for example, not that we think of ourselves that way...

There are parallels.

In the various Amazon tribes, you can't get them interested in your mono- or polytheism and then leave and then have to come back the next year and do it again. So we absolutely, unequivocally, need a year-round home. Not only for the Film Society and our offerings but also for many of the other festivals that are nomadic as well. We would like a film center that's home to us but also a presenter or sponsor of the other high-end offerings in the city. Without that home, our efforts will be harder to inculcate that sense of a citadel or a celebratory center for art cinema.

I would imagine that your predecessor would argue that putting the festival together by itself is a rather expensive endeavor and trying to do anything beyond that would be difficult. My question is, how do you pay for it all?

Certainly, a big festival like this is a lot of work but I don't feel like a Film Society can proceed into the future with one offering.

I won't disagree with you there.

I feel you get more done right, the more offerings you have, the more attractive you are to donors, sponsors, members, audiences, etc. So we have to plan carefully and we have to move carefully to lay those assets in place. And of course, you ramp up your staffing and general operating budget and so on. Two years from now we're going to be doing much more stuff, we're going to have a much bigger staff.

So how you raise money for those things? Well, a capital campaign is one thing that people are always easily willing to get behind and really galvanize those interests, so if we found a buying or building opportunity for a theater, I know the money could be found. There's no question in my mind. In that capital campaign, you raise for an endowment, you raise a cash reserve, and you staff up based on that. You just grow the organization.

You were involved in the capital campaign for the Film Society of Lincoln Center?

The new film center, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, is due to be finished in 2009 or 2010. Yes, I helped with that.

This sort of talk was probably quite attractive to the board of the San Francisco Film Society. Where would you ideally want such a venue to exist in the city?

That's a good question.

It's a trick question, I guess.

There are a number of prospects. Some of them are potentially available in the short-term, and we had bigger ambitions. It will take a large capital campaign. It would take five to six years clearing it with the city. It's possible that we could leap-frog from one location to the next until we have our ideal film center. I don't want to sacrifice one prospect for another; I want to keep all of my options open.

Obviously, you want to be in the best possible location. You want to be in a central location that's well served by public transport that also has good parking for people who want to drive. You want a place where you can make a splash architecturally, where you can build big enough to be able to do as many things as you can for as many people.

Your expectation is that it's a place where you will have to break ground? There isn't an existing building?

Finally, that's probably the case. In its final, mature form, it may take eight to ten years to get to the opening of that facility. In the meantime, there are other more modest opportunities. Whether it's a single screen neighborhood theater or a sharing of a multi-screen facility.

Finally, I think, any meaningful significant facility has to have its own dedicated home, enough scalability that you can play an experimental film to a 70-seat house or you can play a major international or American film in a 300 or 400 or 500-seat house, or go to an even bigger one like the Castro or the Palace if you really need to blow it out. There are plenty of opportunities in San Francisco for rentals, for four-walling.

In the short-term, where do you think you will have to grow the organization? Regarding the programming team and the support staff, are there immediate changes you feel will happen either leading up to 2006 or directly thereafter?

We've made a few seasonal positions in membership and marketing into year-round positions because we need to take better care of our members and we need to reach audiences more assertively than we have in the past. It's not that we didn't want to, it's just a question of finances. Also, we want to do more for filmmakers who visit and for local filmmakers, so we have to do more with hospitality. Operations needed an extra person, which we've hired. I've put more money into programming, so ideally we get more of the films that we really want and more of the filmmakers associated with them to come.

The desire is always there. People love coming to San Francisco, but sometimes we just don't have enough money to do that. I want to be able to do that and some of the newer programming tracks have new budget lines so we can get them off the ground. We'll also put a little more money into materials so that the catalog can better showcase what we're doing.

In what way will that be?

We've been constrained by the number of pages that we put in a catalog, which means that you run the risk of homogenizing a little of your content because you can't devote enough pages to something specific - you have to run it in with something else. That's been a difficulty for us. The reception of the festival will be better and I think people will have more points of entry for the festival if we are a little clearer about what exactly is on offer. Rather than, say, having a section called "World Cinema" and a section called "Documentaries," in which 80 feature films are programmed without subsections. It makes it very difficult for people to see where the trends are, where the focuses are, where the strengths are. We want to disaggregate some of those sections a little, break them out, or at least, within "World Cinema," be more explicit about what's new or what's on offer this year.

To do that, you want to carry that presentation throughout your materials. We're going to add pages to the program and we're going to have a redesign. That way you can see that there are seven Japanese films in "World Cinema," and that's unusual because Japan has not, in the last three or four years, been represented that way. There seems to be an unusual strength in Japanese film this year, so we need to show that explicitly in the program.

There's more digital independent work out of Asia, from Thailand to Korea. So rather than just plugging those things into "World Cinema," into one rubric, we want to be able to break that out, and to do that, you have to have a little bit of context for what you're doing. The materials explain the festival. Presenting the festival to people needs to be more expansive, and when it's more expansive, it costs more money.

So you're ending up with a program that's the phone book equivalent of the Berlinale catalog.

They're bigger than us and Toronto's bigger than us. The festival probably needed to get over a certain hump last year and didn't for a certain variety of reasons, so it was not received as well as it should have been. Now we have to invest in it and allow it to grow a little more. It has so many virtues and yet you can conceal your own strengths in something as simple as design or the naming or shaping of the program. There was a perceived pandering to this or that when, in fact, a lot of the problems could conceivably be addressed by simply making all the strengths of the festival more visible and see that it's not held up by one strand. In fact, there are several pillars of strength for the festival - and balance between them that creates the alchemy that people love.

That's a necessary evolution of the way the festival is packaged.

Exactly. When we say "packaged," just like in terms of marketing to new audiences, we're not thinking about it in the cynical fashion. We're just trying to reveal the essential shape of it and allow people to understand and appreciate its value more.

I would say, if for no other reason, that another major weakness of SFIFF in recent editions was a certain "color by number" sense to the festival. There were certain events that were established and it was just filling in the blanks. "We need this, we need that," and there was no real evolution in the thinking about what the festival could be.

Yes, and no one felt that more keenly than the staff. The misperception is that if one makes that criticism of this or another festival, the misperception might be that the staff is on autopilot, when in fact, in this case, the staff were in many ways as frustrated by things last year as anybody. They've been dying to stretch their legs a little more. Working capital is the thing that allows them to do that. I have my work cut out for me. Me and the board. We have to raise money to allow us to grow. Already, there's money coming in.

The additions to the program will seemingly require either an expansion of the programming team or a restructure in the years ahead.

The programming team was in transition for a couple of years. There were some young guys who were, I wouldn't say "learning the ropes," but they were early in their careers. I'm very encouraged by their ideas and their essential strengths. I think what you'll see is that people will find their voice, program-wise, this year. I have a programming bit, too, that I hope will amplify our strengths. I come out of this world where the festival hopes to make a splash. It has made a splash for years on end. I hope that I can add to it both administratively but also programmatically.

I'm looking forward to it.

It's obvious that you've given a great deal of thought into the landscape of San Francisco and to our festival, so I appreciate your observation of us. I know just by talking to you that you understand how a festival is constructed and many of the decisions that have to be made. It's not a monolithic thing. It's the result of many different decisions and pressures and influences. You've obviously anatomized a lot of what we do.

Yes, but not always in the best of ways.

In fact, I don't mind the criticism at all. What I object to is somebody who objects but doesn't understand how something is put together. I can't imagine that you would make that mistake. I can tell that you brought a wealth of experience and analytic thought to it, so I consider criticism from you and others to be a form of cooperation.

SFBG. SFIFF.

Like presidents, festival directors get honeymoons. It's only fair. Relatively late last year, Graham Leggat was tapped to head up the San Francisco Film Society, meaning he's also now overseeing the Americas' longest-running film festival, the SFIFF. The 49th edition opens tomorrow and runs through May 4, and as you'll see in an upcoming entry, Leggat's got plans so big we're really only likely to see the first effects of them next year, when the fest hits the big Five-0. For now, even the San Francisco Bay Guardian is more than willing to cut Leggat - and the fest itself - some slack. Johnny Ray Huston:

The SFIFF has gotten a bum rap lately - scrape away the public image of a fest like last year's and you'd find an excellent, deep, if sometimes overly solemn, array of movies. San Francisco suffers from no shortage of film festivals, but its oldest still has a depth and breadth others can scarcely match, and Leggat's arrival gives SFIFF a much-needed boost of energetic, idea-driven intelligence. Now, when it turns 50, perhaps it can go toe-to-toe with the near simultaneous Tribeca fest helmed by ex–SFIFF executive director Peter Scarlet. Programming wars ain't pretty, but they're sure to yield some drama.

So the SFBG writes up over 20 highlights of this 49er plus:

• Dennis Harvey: "The first musical to open the festival in 20 years (1986 had Absolute Beginners) is Peter Ho-Sun Chan's lavish Hong Kong confection Perhaps Love, a Jacques Demy-meets-Moulin Rouge exercise in decorative, sentimental self-consciousness." Notes on Seijun Suzuki's Princess Raccoon, Tsai Ming-liang's The Wayward Cloud, John Turturro's Romance & Cigarettes and Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion follow. Huston's related piece: "One of the first thoughts I had while watching The Wayward Cloud was this: Matthew Barney can eat Tsai's shorts."

• Cheryl Eddy calls up anthropologist Sam Dunn to chat with him and co-director Scot McFadyen (another is Jessica Joy Wise) about Metal: A Headbanger's Journey. Also: "Believe the hype: British import The Descent is the scariest movie since The Blair Witch Project, thanks to a killer premise, flawless pacing and casting, and writer-director Neil Marshall's unconcealed love for the horror genre. Here we present a flowchart of The Descent's predecessors and influences."

• B Ruby Rich talks with Sarah Watt about her award-winning Look Both Ways.

• Max Goldberg on Philippe Garrel's Regular Lovers: "In its reconsideration of the chaos that was 1968, the film is, in part, a response to Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers; there was a time when European art cinema mattered enough for this kind of exchange to turn heads, but such is not the case in today's film culture."

• Jonathan L Knapp on Harry Smith and his 1962 film, Heaven and Earth Magic: "He was an American original, an artist difficult to categorize and impossible to ignore."

City Pages. M-SPIFF.

The Minneapolis-St Paul International Film Festival opens tomorrow and runs through April 30, and Rob Nelson opens the City Pages cover package with a list of all the reasons it might not have this year. In short, human frailty, politics and that eternal festival bugaboo, money. Evidently, it came down to the wire. "Would a beleaguered board and an almost entirely new staff be willing and able to mount an M-SPIFF in record time?" asks Nelson. "[I]ncredibly, yes."

The fate of a single movie theater might seem like a sideshow in all this, but as Paul Demko explains, a single financially strapped organization, Minnesota Film Arts, is trying to keep both the fest and the Oak Street Cinema afloat.

But onto the films. The City Pagers have picked out twelve to highlight in their roundup, and Minnesotans are likely to have a particular interest in Al Franken: God Spoke since, to hear him talking to Nelson, it really, really does sound like he's going to run for the Senate in 2008.

Caroline Palmer previews "'Childish Films,' a program of live-action and animated shorts, as well as a few features," and Emily Sohn talks with Ali Selim about his first dramatic feature, Sweet Land, which closes the fest.

Also in this issue, Jim Ridley on The Notorious Bettie Page.

Voice. Tribeca.

"What have Robert De Niro and his producer Jane Rosenthal wrought?" asks J Hoberman as he introduces no fewer than 40 blurbs on 40 films the Village Voice staffers and contributors have selected as the most promising in the lineup for the Tribeca Film Festival (April 25 through May 7). "The festival is a triumph of branding," continues Hoberman, "but has it found its niche? Like the city it celebrates, Tribeca has proven resilient, but like New York, it's far too sprawling and abrasive to ever attain the grooviness of SXSW or the exclusivity of Telluride. Marketing - yes. Market - we'll see."

Dennis Lim talks to Peter Scarlet, the festival's "behind-the-scenes architect," and it's interesting to see so many of the same issues sparking debates at other festivals are brought up here as well.

Lim also reviews the film Hoberman says so many of his friends are afraid to see, the opener, and... "I can attest that the film nobody wants to see is worth seeing. At the very least, United 93 - as the most literal representation yet of that unimaginable morning - will hopefully ignite a meaningful debate about the ethics and politics of 9-11 commemoration."

Also in the Voice this week:

• Hoberman on American Dreamz, which "should really have been funnier."

• Bill Gallo on Sir! No Sir!, "a potent mix of outrage, residual anger, and sorrow that speaks not just to the legacy of our misadventures in Vietnam, but to the entire uncertain future of a nation at war."

• "Tracking Shots": Elliott Stein on the series, Rediscovering Roscoe: The Careers of 'Fatty' Arbuckle; Hoberman on Rivette's Out 1: Spectre; Michael Atkinson on Stolen and Mongolian Ping Pong; Melissa Levine on Somersault; Jim Ridley on The Wild; and Luke Y Thompson on Scary Movie 4.

Firecracker. 17.

"Thai movie posters are quite unlike the posters we are used to seeing in Europe and the United States," writes Neil Pettigrew in the new issue of Firecracker. "The artists who painted them took a medium that is essentially a mere advertising gimmick and transformed it into an art-form."

The other features: Mike Atherton revisits Seijun Suzuki's "delirious 1967 classic," Branded to Kill, and Erika Franklin's interview: "At 70 years of age, enigmatic and low-key, Cirio H Santiago is not only sprightlier than counterparts over fifteen years his junior but, incredibly, he continues to make at least two films a year and has to date directed and produced around sixty films - all shot in English, filmed on location in the Philippines, created specifically for international export. He says, 'That's what I do - I make 'American' films for export - that's what I've been doing for the last forty years.'"

The reviews:

• Nick North: "The style-heavy gangster noir A Bittersweet Life marks out director Kim Ji-woon as a filmmaker of impressive versatility and sustained invention, following as it does fast on the heels of Kim's sophisticated but twisted psychological horror A Tale of Two Sisters, smart satire of the working man (with a dash of wrestling) The Foul King, and his deft and delicious black comedy debut The Quiet Family." Also, the "spectacularly mounted though somewhat overlong" Gojoe, "Ha Yu's powerful coming-of-age drama," Once Upon a Time in High School, Yoji Yamada's "impressive" The Hidden Blade, Katsuhiro Otomo's "frustrating" Steamboy and a pair from Hayao Miyazaki.

• Atherton on three late-70s kung fu films. Also, the "overly familiar" Karas: The Prophecy, Snuff Bottle Connection, "a classic fighting flick that still holds its own," and The White Dragon, "a simple comedy romance with martial arts elements."

• Robert Williamson on Tony Takitani, "rich in style, imagery and meaning, and features a remarkable performance from Issey Ogata as Tony."

• Andy Heskins on King of Beggars, "[e]ssentially a dry run for Kung Fu Hustle only less inventive."

• Kim Woods is disappointed with Stanley Tong's The Myth, with Jackie Chan.

Shorts, 4/18.

"[Cartoon] Brew reader Chris Olson found an old issue of Popular Mechanics with a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Pinocchio, and he was kind enough to make scans of the article for other Brew readers to see. The PM issue (volume 1, no 73) was released in January 1940, a month before the film was released." Via Brendon Connelly.

"[I]t would be totally inaccurate to suggest that this is my first Jewish play," Mike Leigh tells Linda Grant in the Guardian. They're talking about Two Thousand Years, which opens, by the way, with a character reading an article in the Guardian. Leigh: "I don't think you can pull out any play or film from my canon that is not Jewish in its view of life and all its tragi-comic aspects."

Also: Amina Taylor talks with Jamie Foxx about his music. And: "Woody Allen jilts Paris for London."

"I approach the task without consciousness or deliberation." Tim Lucas's been thinking about the process of reviewing lately.

In the New York Times, Dave Kehr explains that, while there's no actual "complete" version of Mr Arkadin, Criterion's got a "captivating package" nonetheless (more from Susan King in the Los Angeles Times); and Lorne Manly: "As the recent coupling between the Smithsonian Institution and Showtime Networks continues to roil the documentary film world, more than 215 filmmakers, television executives and academics have signed a letter demanding that the Smithsonian, a publicly financed museum, not only reveal financial details of the joint venture but also abandon it."

Will Gong Li be in Tim Burton's Believe It, Or Not, wonders Mack at Twitch. Also: Todd reviews Christoffer Boe's Allegro, Peter Martin on Elevator to the Gallows and Sophie Scholl: The Final Days and X translates a great swath of a Film 2.0 interview with Son Jae-Gon (My Scary Girl).

"Which horror movie scarred you for life?" asks Looker. "Do tell."

Silent Hill director Christophe Gans picks seven favorite horror films. Also in the Los Angeles Times, Peter Lunenfeld reviews Broken Screen: Expanding the Image, Breaking the Narrative: 26 Conversations With Doug Aitken and Patrick Goldstein on the United 93 brouhaha: "Instead of asking 'Is it too soon?' I wish people would say, 'What took so long?'"

And Greg Krikorian and Andrew Blankstein: "Film director John McTiernan pleaded guilty on Monday to lying to the FBI about hiring Hollywood private investigator Anthony Pellicano to wiretap veteran film producer Charles Roven in the summer of 2000." Also, Deborah Netburn's 10 McTiernan factoids and again, the LAT's Pellicano file. Commentary: Nikki Finke.

Kimberly Peirce will direct Abbie Cornish in Stop-Loss; Tatiana Siegel in the Hollywood Reporter: "Penned by Peirce and Mark Richard, the story centers on a soldier who returns home from Iraq to Texas and is called to duty again through the military's 'stop-loss' procedure. The soldier then refuses to return to battle."

Lu Chuan's Mountain Patrol: Kekexili gets the three-angled Reverse Shot treatment at indieWIRE.

Mark Cuban spoke on a variety of topics on Monday night as part of John Pierson's University of Texas at Austin Master Class series and Matt Dentler took extensive notes.

Caveh Zahedi makes the mistake of taking Anthony Lane seriously; fortunately, he's got friends leaving comments urging him to lighten up and enjoy the ride. Related: The IFC's Alison Willmore points to AJ Schnack's breakdown of the Caveh-Cuban run-in. And of course, Caveh responds. More commentary: Ray Pride at Movie City Indie.

Fests and events, 4/18.

The Reeler's got info on the Video Blog Explosion evening at the Museum of the Moving Image on Sunday. Featured: Rocketboom, DriveTime and Vimeo.

"Still developing its identity like any five-year-old, the Tribeca Film Festival (April 25 to May 7) has grown significantly since its humble birth," writes Aaron Hillis [site] in a preview of the fest's offerings for Premiere.

Cinematical's most recent Tribeca previews: Martha Fischer on Brasilia 18% and Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus; Christopher Campbell on Golden Venture and Al Franken: God Spoke.

Dave Kehr offers a few "first impressions, after a busy opening weekend at the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema."

Daniel Cowles at SF360: "When producer Tommy Pallotta comes to the San Francisco International Film Fest May 2nd toting a 20-minute sneak preview of A Scanner Darkly, director Richard Linklater's adaptation of the late science fiction writer Philip K Dick's novel, he may feel like an Olympic torch carrier nearing the finish line."

At indieWIRE, Brian Brooks looks ahead to Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival (April 26 through 30 in Champaign, IL), Tamara Schweitzer to the 37th Nashville Film Festival (April 20 through 26) and Eugene Hernandez looks back at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.

Jeffrey Overstreet posts a Flickerings alert: "If you can find a more challenging film festival for the head, the heart, and the soul anywhere in the country, tell me about it." July 5 through 8 in Bushnell, IL.

Via Grady Hendrix, China View: "Chinese screen star Zhang Ziyi on Friday confirmed she is to be a judge at this year's Cannes Film Festival." Meanwhile, at Cineuropa, Anne Feuillère notes a few confirmed and a few possible Belgian Cannes candidates.

SFist's Rita: "[W]e had a great time at the kickoff screening for the Balboa Theater's ever-popular Reel SF series, where the theater presents classic movies set in San Francisco."

Shorts, 4/17.

David Remnick: "An Inconvenient Truth is a brilliantly lucid, often riveting attempt to warn Americans off our hellbent path to global suicide. An Inconvenient Truth is not the most entertaining film of the year. But it might be the most important."

Also in the New Yorker: Anthony Lane on American Dreamz and I Am a Sex Addict, a new story by Martin Amis (up soon, I'm sure), Hilton Als on a revival by John Guare's 1977 play, Landscape of the Body, Steve Martin's "New Page Six" and Tad Friend: "Aaron Sorkin, the creator of The West Wing, has written Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, starring Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford as a creative team that's called in to rescue the network’s signature live sketch-comedy show. Tina Fey, the SNL star, has written a show called - for now - The Untitled Tina Fey Project, starring Tina Fey, of all people, as the head writer at the network's live variety show. Her pilot features Alec Baldwin as the network's meddlesome new 'VP of development for NBC/GE/Universal/Kmart.'"

"So to interview Nick Broomfield in the Nick Broomfield style, I have to start my piece before the actual interview," begins Carole Cadwalladr. Also in the Observer, Lynn Barber talks with Sam Taylor-Wood about the exhibition Sam Taylor-Wood Still Lives (and its title).

Via Ray Pride at Movie City Indie comes Martin Hickman's report in the Independent on how McDonald's is preparing - with a "council of war," no less - for Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation. They were evidently caught off guard by the success of Super Size Me and do not want to be again.

Bruce Schneier, author of several books, among them, Beyond Fear: hinking Sensibly about Security in an Uncertain World, announces "the (possibly First) Movie-Plot Threat Contest. Entrants are invited to submit the most unlikely, yet still plausible, terrorist attack scenarios they can come up with." Via Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing.

The Gothamist's Jen Chung and Alternet's Evan Derkacz follow the buzz surrounding Giuliani Time.

Chuck Tryon actually agrees with conservative blogger Jason Apuzzo on one point: that Scott Martelle is asking the wrong question in his Los Angeles Times piece on United 93, namely, is America "ready"? Naturally, though, Chuck disagrees with Apuzzo when he plugs in an "absurdly simplistic binary between 'patriotic movies' and what he calls 'movies in which America loses.'"

Also in the LAT, Richard Verrier talks with Haskell Wexler about Who Needs Sleep?

"Every season, theatrically unseasoned American movie stars ignore the advice of agents and managers and accountants and, touchingly, expose themselves in 'legit' theater," writes David Edelstein in New York: "It's patently unfair to pass judgment publicly on an actor in a first preview—although at these prices... (Tickets were going for $100 a pop, and mine cost $250 through a broker.) But it's fair to say that Julia Roberts did not seem like a natural onstage." Also, American Dreamz.

Acquarello: "In his optical experiments with light, reflection, and refraction that transform everyday images into fluid and deformable art objects that redefine the medium of film as a traditional canvas, [Patrick] Bokanowski shares a visual affinity with Aleksandr Sokurov's murky and expressionistic in-line optical distortions in films such as Mother and Son and Oriental Elegy that, like the works of aesthetic forefathers such as Pieter Brueghel the Elder and Caspar David Friedrich, evoke the primal, spiritual landscapes that haunt our consciousness and give form to our waking dreams."

A few finds in the latest issue of Springerin:

• Romuald Karmakar's Die Nacht singt ihre Lieder was, for the most part, unfairly maligned when it screened at the Berlinale in 2004 and, either by choice or necessity, he hasn't tackled a project on a similar scale since. But Rainer Bellenbaum finds that Between the Devil and the Wide Blue Sea, "his second study of the electronic music scene, stood out among the many documentaries on musical topics shown at the last Viennale."

• Christian Höller attended the Viennale as well and focuses in his piece on the 60s, reviewing Ralph Arlyck's Following Sean, Philippe Garrel's Les amants reguliers, Richard Crawford's Captain Milkshake and Milton Moses Ginsberg's Coming Apart.

• Zeljko Blaçe finds Berlin's "the local video culture... extremely potent in innovating forms and formats as well as establishing new paradigms with regard to the production, presentation and distribution of digital video." Specifically, "the young scene of pornographers that, in typical Berlin style, is strongly connected to art and politics and plays with the role of alternatives within its genre."

• Marc Ries on the four elements of Arye Wachsmuth's Interior Memory.

Ben Davis in Artnet Magazine on Drawing Restraint 9: "The film has a deliberate, epic pace, and is full of memorable imagery. It is also massively, unintentionally funny."

Browsing BOMB: Jonathan Lethem and Noah Baumbach, Rachel Kushner and Miranda July, Jim O'Rourke and Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Michael Wilson attended the magazine's 25th Anniversary Gala and files an entry in Artform's diary. Snaps of Cindy Sherman and more.

It's not that Jeff Bridges makes flops, exactly, argues David Thomson in the Independent. "No, it's rather that he prefers to make off-beat pictures, ones against the grain - difficult, doubting pictures, ones that are quietly attached to an archaic principle: that, once upon a time, movies were determined by the pain of grown men and women soaked in years of sadness and experience, and fairly sure that a similar crowd of pained people existed, to be referred to as 'the audience'."

Tom Giammarco at Koreanfilm.org: "At the time of its release, most people dismissed Yellow Hair as simple pornography due to the sensationalized menage a trois scene. That is unfortunate because there is so much more going on in this film than gratuitous sex and nudity."

Fresh reviews at Slant: Nick Schager on Sir! No Sir! and Scary Movie 4 (related: screenwriter Craig Mazin on dealing with success) and Ed Gonzalez on Repulsion and Somersault. DVDs: Jay Antani on The Chess Players, Keith Uhlich on Mother and Son, Fernando F Croce on The Second Circle and Ed Gonzalez on Unveiled.

Daniel Kasman: "The smartness of the construction of Mutual Appreciation is all the more affecting because it easily hides beneath a veneer of naturalism."

Reverse Shot's robbiefreeling previews James Marsh's The King.

"Filmed over a three year period by three directors and a cast and crew of more than 150 people, L'Inferno is a forgotten curio and one of the first movie epics," writes Ray Young at Flickhead. "More than once, L'Inferno had us thinking of the sway it may have held on Der Müde Tod and the Nibelungen films."

Nick Davis: "I wouldn't be surprised at all to learn that Peter Greenaway is not the child of two humans, but the offspring of a building and a painting, born on the hottest day of the year in some very, very chilly place."

In the New York Times:

• Alessandra Stanley on The Armenian Genocide: "The powerful hourlong film will be shown on most of the 348 PBS affiliate stations. But nearly a third of those stations decided to cancel the follow-up discussion after an intense lobbying campaign by Armenian groups and some members of Congress."

• Janet Maslin reviews Lee Server's Ava Garner: Love is Nothing.

• Laura M Holson on a videogame player: "While No. 8 may seem low in an industry obsessed with No. 1, LucasArts got there selling a fraction of the games its competitors did."

Brad Stone introduces Newsweek readers to 24 Hours on Craigslist, "a rich, pointillist depiction of life on the site." In Time, Joel Stein tells the story behind "Lazy Sunday," while Lev Grossman surveys the viral video phenom.

Online viewing tip. "Manchester Passion is a contemporary retelling of the last few hours of Jesus' life using popular music from the cream of Manchester bands." That much you've heard about. Now you can watch Jesus singing "Love Will Tear Us Apart." Via Greg Allen.

Fests and events, 4/17.

The exhibition Soul Cinema: Black Films and Black Stars (1919 - 1963) opens Tuesday at the Museum of Afro-American History in Boston; writes Leslie Brokaw in the Globe: "The 37 posters... were selected by the museum from a massive collection of black film posters, lobby cards, and ephemera held by John Kisch, who runs the Separate Cinema archive." Also via They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, Gerry McCarthy in the Times of London on the 1926 silent film, Irish Destiny and Hadani Ditmars in the Globe and Mail on Atom Egoyan's production of Beckett's Eh Joe.

Brian Darr: "In preparation for tomorrow's launch of the Balboa Theatre's Second Annual Reel San Francisco series of films from a diverse range of genres and time periods, all made in and/or about Frisco, as well as the Celluloid San Francisco book event at the Public Library next week, I present a list of some of the titles I think of first when I think of Frisco and film."

Michael Guillen's San Francisco Film Festival previews: Play, Obaba and The Dignity of Nobodies.

Heavens, look at those posters for the Best of QT Fest over at Cinema Strikes Back.

Cinematical's most recent Tribeca preview: Martha Fischer on Dear Father, Quiet, We're Shooting....

For SF360, Michael Fox talks with director David Munro and producer Xandra Castleton about Full Grown Men, set to debut at Tribeca.

Dennis Cooper snaps photos of Almodovar: Exhibition! at the Cinémathèque Française through July 31.

Muriel Spark, 1918 - 2006.

Novelist Dame Muriel Spark, who wrote the classic The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, has died in Tuscany where she had made her home.... The book was turned into a much performed play and later a film starring Dame Maggie Smith, for which she won a best actress Oscar in 1969.

The BBC.

Like [Graham] Greene and Evelyn Waugh, Spark was a Catholic convert and dealt with questions of morality and metaphysics, directly or indirectly, in her fiction.

"I don't propagate the Catholic faith but in a funny sort of way, my books couldn't be written by anyone except a Catholic," she told the Sunday Telegraph in 1997.

The AP.

See, too, the Muriel Spark Archive of the National Library of Scotland.

Weekend shorts.

Fred Camper in the Chicago Reader on Douglas Sirk:

Sure, his colors are alluring, and his exaggerations have a certain bleak humor. But ultimately Sirk wasn't in it for the laughs: he was a fatalist, someone who once said that "happiness exists, if only by virtue of the fact that it can be destroyed." This emigre, who lived most of his life in Germany, located his general despair in the American materialism of his day, in our reliance on objects to fill the voids where once there were souls.

In the New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann celebrates Rialto's reissuing of Jean-Pierre Melville's 1969 film, Army of Shadows, "a paradoxical beauty. Very many of the scenes are in sunlight - Melville avoided such facile stuff as shadows for suspense - yet they are chilly. The seasons vary, but the general effect is of a bright winter day that is freezing." Also: "Iran's recent growlings under its new president make such a film as Iron Island all the more remarkable."

Jasmila Zbanich, director of Grbavica, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale in February, shows us, in the Los Angeles Times, a sample of the hate mail lead actress Mirjana Karanovic has been getting from anonymous Serbs, even though you'd think an "unofficial ban" would keep them from seeing the film. "Eleven years after the war, war criminals still direct our daily lives." Nonetheless, "A friend from Banja Luka sends me a text message: 'A pirated copy of Grbavica is being sold underground here. I hear it's selling like crazy. Good. I am losing financially, but it is important to break the isolation of the people in the Republika Srpska." Via Anthony Kaufman.

At Self-Reliant Filmmaking, Paul Harrill talks with Jake Mahaffy about his debut feature, War. Also via Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker: news from Editor & Publisher and Alicia Morgan on a sudden and unexpected "Impeach the President" campaign from former Reagan-supporter Neil Young.

"Many people claim that Peckinpah did not understand what Sergio Leone was doing in languorous Westerns like Once Upon a Time in the West, but Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid proves that assessment wrong," argues Stanley Crouch in Slate.

Anthony Kaufman: "Recently, I stumbled onto the website of William Richert, the writer (The Happy Hooker), actor (My Own Private Idaho), and director (the 1979 paranoid cult classic Winter Kills). Either he's crazy or desperate or just plain passionate, but the site offers a wild ride through one Hollywood creative's career, travails, and lawsuits."

"It would be a crime to dismiss [Ken] Russell's cinema entirely," argues Bradford Nordeen.

Todd at Twitch: "The Hanging Garden is a quieter film, a subtler film, than what has come before and will likely have trouble connecting with many fans of the teen violence aspects of [Toshiaki] Toyoda's earlier work. Nevertheless it shows his unusual gift for character and his ability to create seemingly simple films that leave you stewing well after the final frame."

"[T]heater, painting, music and the novel. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that there could be a tradition of film-making in which it is fatuous to separate the work being studied from those other media," proposes David Thomson. "Are we prepared to tolerate this, without stooping to such crude insults as 'too literary, too stagey, too painterly, too operatic - too difficult'? Then, consider that this tradition embraces much of the work of Jean Renoir, Kenji Mizoguchi, Max Ophüls, Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman, and the subject of this essay, a man who deserves to be considered among the greatest living and working film directors, no matter how he might shrink from the description. I am talking about Jacques Rivette."

Also in the Guardian, John Robinson on the "excellent documentary" My Name is Albert Ayler and Lanie Goodman talks with Danis Tanovic about directing Hell, based on a screenplay by Krzysztof Kieslowski, and about the three films to follow, all in English. More from SF Said in the Telegraph.

Part 2 of Jeremiah Kipp's conversation with Godfrey Cheshire is now up at the House Next Door, where you'll also find five great parting shots from the Odienator.

Patrick Neate profiles Zola, star of a TV soap opera in South Africa and also of Tsotsi.

"An intellectual journalist equally at leisure in the jaunty pages of Esquire (where he reviewed films) and the ascetic quarters of Partisan Review, [Dwight] Macdonald — born 100 years ago last month — was a generalist whose specialty was capsizing conventional wisdom, exposing highfalutin fraudulence and filing heretical dissents," James Wolcott who then goes on to quote from Macdonald's review of The Greatest Story Ever Told: "There was also that 'Woman of No Name' who pushes through the crowd as Jesus is healing the sick and, after he has grappled with her, cries out in purest Bronx, 'Oi'm cured! Oi'm cured!' and turns around to run toward the camera with arms waving in triumph - and damned if it isn't Shelley Winters."

Also in the New York Times:

• "Someday it may be possible to write an article about Roscoe Arbuckle without mentioning the scandal that destroyed his career," writes Dave Kehr. "If that day comes, it will be because of the work of Arbuckle buffs like William Hunt and Paul E Gierucki, who put together the indispensable four-DVD collection The Forgotten Films of Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle, and to Ron Magliozzi, Steve Massa and Ben Model, who programmed the month-long series Rediscovering Roscoe: The Careers of 'Fatty' Arbuckle, which begins Thursday at the Museum of Modern Art."

• Edward Norton meets Sharon Waxman for lunch to complain about the studios' lack of interest in his indie, Down in the Valley.

• Charles Taylor talks with Olivier Assayas about Clean.

• Prep for the fall release of All the King's Men with the first chapter of Richard White's Kingfish.

Melinda Stone recalls her Trip Down Market Street 1905/2005 project at SF360.

Nathan Kosub in Stop Smiling on The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada: "Lone Star, now ten years old, is simply a better movie about border politics, a true landmark with regards to race and community."

DK Holm at Movie Poop Shoot: "Rian Johnson's Brick is so far one of the best films of the year, but it treads a delicate line between being a potent tale or being ridiculous." Related online listening tip via Wiley Wiggins: The Austinist interviews Johnson.

Nick Davis wishes Emma Thompson a happy 47th.

Doug Ireland: "The firing of Washington columnist James Ridgeway by the new management of the Village Voice, and the resignation of the distinguished Pulitizer Prize winner Sydney Schanberg from the paper, represent a sad moment in the history of the New York weekly." What follows is a letter calling for the rehiring of Ridgeway signed by, among others, film critics J Hoberman, Dennis Lim and Ed Park.

Also just barely film-related, but: Owen Hatherley on My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

Online viewing tips. A gun fight from Spaced. Via Opus, also pointing to Ricky Gervais's appearance on the Daily Show. Which leads us to the Mother of All YouTube Link Dumps, Gpod's. Happy weekend.

Weekend fests and events.

At SF360, Dennis Harvey previews the Balboa's Reel San Francisco series, running from April 16 through 18.

Cinematical's Tribeca reviews: Martha Fischer on Maquilapolis and Once in a Lifetime: The Incredible Story of the New York Cosmos; Karina Longworth on Kettle of Fish.

Lebowski Fest. Austin is next. In May. Via Weblogsky.

For the Independent, Alice Jones previews the Fashion in Film Festival, running in London May 14 through 27.

Weekend previews.

"What an appropriate moment for indieWIRE to introduce a weekly column that surveys new films in theatrical release," write Eugene Hernandez and Brian Brooks. "This week more than a dozen indie, foreign, documentary and specialty films are vying for attention from moviegoers (some of whom will also be participating in Passover and Easter activities)." The iW guys suss out the contenders' prospects, while Gary Dretzka at Movie City News notes that "this week's new movie releases would look every bit as enticing on the marquee of a Pussycat Theater." Here, I'll collate their lists with some of the most recent reviews I haven't yet pointed to...

Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times: "Looking more like a bud of Jeff Spicoli's than a learned academic, Canadian anthropologist Sam Dunn conducts a first-rate tour of musical metallurgy in the documentary Metal: A Headbanger's Journey." More from Alexis Petridis in the Guardian and from JR Jones in the Chicago Reader.

Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times on Peter Mullan and On a Clear Day, "a conventional film for an unconventional actor. When you start out working with Ken Loach, Danny Boyle and Michael Winterbottom, it shows recognition of sorts, I suppose, but not necessarily progress, to qualify as the lead in a Baked Potato People movie." Related: At AICN, Capone chats with director Gaby Dellal.

Kenneth Turan in the LAT on Our Brand is Crisis, which "allows us to see exactly what it means and precisely how difficult it is to 'export democracy' to parts of the world with cultures very different from our own."

Manohla Dargis in the New York Times on The Notorious Bettie Page: "In her work with [Guinevere] Turner, in particular, who was also her screenwriting partner on American Psycho (Ms Turner also helped write the lipstick-lesbian romance Go Fish), [Mary] Harron manages to have her pleasure, visual and otherwise, and her politics, too." More from Cindy Fuchs in PopMatters, Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle, Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat and Turan in the LAT. Related: Jeffrey M Anderson meets Gretchen Mol.

Dargis on Hard Candy: "More sour than hard, this highfalutin exploitation flick starts with an unsavory premise - possible pedophile meets the jailbait of his dreams - that quickly becomes downright unpalatable." More from Kevin Crust in the LAT, Alison Willmore on the IGC Blog, Brian Orndorf at Hollywood Bitchslap, and James Rocchi at Cinematical.

Dargis: "Written and directed by Lu Chuan, whose first feature was the well-received Missing Gun, Mountain Patrol: Kekexili is as tough and unsparing as its backdrop, a blood-boiling environmental thriller with a dash of Sergio Leone."

Jeannette Catsoulis (NYT): "[W]here Madagascar was all sharp edges and blocky slabs of uniform color, The Wild is filled with softness and texture." More from Emru Townsend for fps, Michael Wilmington in the LAT, Eric D Snider at Hollywood Bitchslap, Cinematical's Robert Newton, Ebert and MaryAnne Johanson.

Catsoulis: "Bogged down by the stylistic gimmickry of bustling montages and jarring animated segments, Look Both Ways aims for existential drama but succeeds only in reminding us that misery loves company."

Catsoulis: "With its overheated narrative, lush interiors and photogenic cast, La Mujer de Mi Hermano is a big-screen telenovela in which everyone is cheating and every light is flattering." More from Ebert and, in the Ft Worth Star-Telegram, Scott Von Doviak.

Anita Gates (NYT): "Anne Fontaine's seductive film Nathalie is mostly about French star power and sex, so it's somewhat surprising that it is also subtle and intriguing." Related: Kaleem Aftab talks with Emmanuelle Béart for the Independent.

Stephen Holden (NYT): "Kinky Boots doesn't ask you to believe a single detail of what's splashed across the screen. All it wants is to divert you for about 100 minutes and leave you with the glow of vicarious comradeship, as blue-collar blokes and drag queens pull together to save the day. Foot fetishists will drool." More from Salon's Stephanie Zacharek, the IFC's Alison Willmore, Neva Chonin in the San Francisco Chronicle and Carina Chocano in the LAT.

Nathan Lee (NYT): "The fun of Scary Movie 4 is that it isn't a movie at all." More from MaryAnn Johanson, Jan Stuart in the LAT, Ben Wasserstein and Scott Weinberg and Robert Newton at Cinematical.

Laura Kern in the NYT on Herbie Hancock: Possibilities: "Even though the gifted performers occasionally borrow the spotlight, the true star always remains Mr Hancock."

Neil Genzlinger in the NYT on The Sisters: "It's not just that you quickly realize no one in this film is anyone you would want to spend two hours with; it's that you also wonder why the heck they're spending so much time with one another." More from Chocano in the LAT.

Dana Stevens in the NYT on Blackballed, "essentially an extended improvisational skit, with a troupe of comics riffing on a central joke (the elevation of paintball to a noble calling)."

Steve Erickson for Gay City News: "Caveh Zahedi has struggled to make four features in 15 years. With I Am a Sex Addict, he's inadvertently stumbled onto something trendy. This film combines the voyeurism of reality TV with the comedy of embarrassment purveyed by Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm and Ricky Gervais on The Office and Extras."

Andrew Pulver in the Guardian on An American Haunting: "Neither Donald Sutherland nor Sissy Spacek... can do much with this material." More from Anthony Quinn in the Independent.

Variety's Todd McCarthy: "Material that easily could have been turned into cringe-inducing TV movie sap has been handled with reasonable intelligence and authenticity in Mozart and the Whale."

David Gritten in the Telegraph on Take the Lead: "All the clichés are here, but so is an unwelcome whiff of cynicism that kills the film stone dead." More from Mark Pfeiffer.

Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper: "A little too feel-good for its own good, Sisters in Law still has moments of revelation, especially for Western viewers who take legalized justice for granted."

Comment here or discuss among the Cinemarati, check the Christian angle, and if none of these strike your fancy, hold on: "17 Weeks... 50 Movies." David Poland previews the summer season.

"Distribution ®evolution."

Hannah Eaves distills the most crucial arguments voiced in a recent panel taking place at the Sonoma Valley Film Festival, a panel not to be confused with the "Distribution Now... Distribution How?" conversation of a few days ago and mentioned here a few times. With so much in flux now, a discussion checking in on the current state of the near and distant future of distribution is likely to become a staple of film festivals and related events for years to come.

It was an odd place to hold a panel entitled "Distribution ®evolution" - an adobe barracks turned state park that used to house the Mexican Army. The revolutionary spirit huddled on folding chairs in an upstairs room wasn't quite so violent as that of its long gone predecessors. Moderated by Microcinema's Joel Bachar, the panel's participants were Sonoma's take were GreenCine's Content Acquisitions Director Jonathan Marlow, filmmaker Caveh Zahedi, Wellspring's VP of Theatrical Sales Marisa Keselica, Netflix's Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos and Houston King of Goodbye Cruel Releasing, whose recent distribution projects have included Andrew Bujalski's wonderful films Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation.

Bachar began the panel by asking Zahedi to tell the audience about the controversy surrounding Mark Cuban's recent decision to pull his film, I Am a Sex Addict from all Landmark cinemas operating in Comcast markets. The situation with Sex Addict and Landmark sounds confusing in a sentence and only gets more so with a paragraph or four. Zahedi's telling of the story drew murmurs of outrage from the audience, though I've yet to attend a panel in the SF Bay Area that didn't draw murmurs of outrage, no matter how bland the inspiration for them. In this case, the story has prompted some passionate online debate.

The term "day and date," as it was being used in the panel, refers to the simultaneous release of a film in theaters, on DVD and via Video-on-Demand (online and through cable TV). VOD might impinge on a film's box office, but if the distributor for both channels is the same, or if the theater owner is compensated with a share of DVD/VOD sales, profits might even out. Marlow noted Cuban's interest in keeping the entire chain of distribution in his own hands (from production through to TV, DVD and theaters). Cuban has been a proponent of experimenting with DVD release percentage partnerships with theaters, but his experiments with day and date have entailed VOD only for the opening night, diminishing any potential impact on box office over a longer period of time.

All parties seemed to agree that theatrical distribution is still essential to the success of a film, regardless of whether the profit is ultimately made on theatrical, DVD sales and rental or VOD. A theatrical release generally guarantees a higher level of exposure, particularly through print reviews and TV spots.

King voiced concerns that day and date releasing could be cases of larger companies using smaller indie filmmakers as sacrificial lambs for data to ultimately convince studios that VOD might work for bigger films. That said, it makes sense that the model is being tried by smaller filmmakers because of the prohibitive expense of opening on a large number of screens. Using the day and date model, indies can open in two, maybe five cities and then leverage that publicity into instantaneous, nationally available VOD or DVD sales.

Studios do not seem willing at this point to completely close the window between theatrical and DVD/VOD releases. They still hang on to the idea that people are willing to buy their product twice, once at the theaters and once to own. They understand the appeal of one marketing campaign over two or three, but are nervous about closing the gap completely (witness Sid Ganis's speech at the Oscars). It remains to be seen how much they really care about these other experiments, said Marlow, post-panel.

The conversation then moved over to the practical side of theatrical distribution. It appears that there are rarely written agreements between distributors and theaters, which means there is no recourse available to filmmakers whose films that are pulled. Keselica sited Landmark's recent decision to pull Wellspring's Unknown White Male from a theater in New York recently, but didn't go into many details.

Both Sarandos and Marlow went on to warn filmmakers off signing exclusive VOD deals with cable or online content partners. Cable companies are worried about losing subscribers, so they are aggressively pursuing exclusive agreements, even with larger content partners like PBS and HBO, said Sarandos. GreenCine has been offering VOD via the Internet for several years and Netflix has made no secret of its intent to move entirely in this direction. Sarandos sees this as a long-term goal, though; he mentioned 10 to 15 years.

It soon became evident that rights issues are very murky right now. The division between the Internet and TV is one aspect, but here Marlow brought up the line between domestic and international rights, as well as the expiring rights that many documentary filmmakers have to the archival footage used in their films. In a question from the audience, one of the filmmakers behind The World According to Sesame Street asked for advice on working with educational distributors who often charge educators ten times the amount of a regular DVD sale. It seems that this whole model, too, is in flux. King encouraged filmmakers to consider self-distribution, even on a limited budget, as opposed to going through distributors for hire.

Bachar touched on the concern that some filmmakers have about ruining their chances for a contract by putting their films up online for free. Sarandos seemed to disagree, noting that Netflix released Loose Change on DVD after his nephew showed him the film on MySpace. Both Marlow and Sarandos agreed that customers appreciate easy, immediate access to films over exclusivity.

The most notable aspect of the panel was its seemingly unanimous support of the day and date distribution model. Amongst these folks, the debate is no longer when, it's how. That's a much tougher question - one that will probably discussed by about ten more years' worth of panels.

Shorts, 4/13.

Kevin Smith has been blogging about dealing with the addiction problems of his friend, Jason Mewes. A turning point in the story: When Mewes's counselor tells Smith, "[T]he way you've gone about it hasn't worked so far, and that's because you haven't hit him with the worst thing he can imagine: being cut out of your life altogether. You've gotta let him hit rock bottom." Via Ed Champion.