Vertigo. Winter 07.

"Film-essayist Chris Marker's fascination for Japan, and in particular Tokyo, is most famously apparent in Sans Soleil (1983). But he had made a film-essay about Japan almost 20 years previously, a film that had slipped out of distribution - Le Mystère Koumiko or The Koumiko Mystery (1965). Swedish contemporary artist Magnus Bärtås traveled to Tokyo to investigate further." Ben Slater introduces an interview with Bärtås in the new issue of Vertigo.

"Though his name is not unheard-of in film circles, and most of his works have been quietly showcased at international festivals, Sono Sion has somehow never made an impact like his contemporary Kore-eda Hirakazu, or the younger Yamashita Nobuhiro, in spite of a distinctive vision and prolific output." A profile by Maggie Lee.

Go Hirasawa reports on the filming of "[o]ne of the most anticipated projects in recent Japanese cinema," Koji Wakamatsu's Jitsuroku rengosekigun Asama Sansou e no doutei ("Literal translation: The Allied Red Army's Passage to Asama Lodge - An Authentic Account"), which "encompasses the New Leftist Movement, tracing events that lead up to the incident at Asama Lodge, presented in the manner of a factual account. Even though the protagonists are members of the Allied Red Army, the film does not seek to recreate incidents as spectacles. Instead, it probes, from a historical perspective, asking why such a movement emerged in Japan and why revolution was thought to be necessary."

"On the face of it, it's Joe's most straightforward film: a linear narrative with no mysteries, dreams or non-sequiturs." Tony Rayns on how Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Blissfully Yours approaches "Buddhist virtues."

Jason Wood: "A key chapter in the history of cinema was closed on Boxing Day with the death of Andi Engel."

Sundance. Eagle vs Shark.

"A terrific and fun comedy that acts almost as a companion to Broken English, Taika Waititi's Eagle vs Shark follows Lily (Loren Horsley), a shy fast food cashier with a crush on video game store employee Jarrod (Jemaine Clement), a moron trapped in the glittering cage of his own past," writes Tom Hall.

"[D]espite its Kiwi provenance, this romcom-cum-family ensemble piece has the quirky yet life-affirming sensibility synonymous with the festival stamped through it like a stick of rock," writes Ben Walters for Time Out. "Still, it has a definite local flavor about it, with New Zealand's characteristic good-natured doziness ably represented by Lily (Loren Horsley)."

Michael Lerman at indieWIRE: "Sweet, saccharine and stiltedly hilarious, Eagle vs Shark, though downbeat, hits many of the right notes to reach a wide audience and still feel charmingly small in scale despite the fact that it is co-funded by Miramax."

IndieWIRE interviews Waititi.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Acidente (Accident).

"Pondering the everyday and discovering the sublime, Cao Guimaraes's and Pablo Lobato's gentle tone poem of a film, Accident turns the idea of armchair travel upside down," writes Robert Koehler in Variety. "Cinema's power to observe and transform is beautifully achieved."

A second opinion: "My award for the most frustrating exercise in the festival goes to... Acidente," writes Michael Lerman at indieWIRE. "A mishmash of shaky digital video and cheap, twangy sound turns what could have been a beautiful, visceral exercise a la the work of landscape filmmaker Peter Hutton instead feels like a screening of somebody's homemade vacation footage."

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. El Camino de los ingleses (Summer Rain).

"Antonio Banderas's sophomore directorial effort [Summer Rain; site] deserves a look, but I wish he had given as much attention to a solid story as he does to the unforgettable imagery," writes Eric Kohn for the New York Press.

"[W]e couldn't make head or tail of Summer Rain," writes Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog, who finds watching it "like sitting through a haphazard splice of the worst aspects of both Almodóvar and American Pie."

A "train wreck of a movie," declares the Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt.

Next stop, Berlin.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Girl 27.

"Content is everything in a matter-of-fact documentary like Girl 27," writes Steve Ramos at indieWIRE, "and what [director David] Stenn lacks in technical prowess he compensates with a strong understanding of how to start one's tale, articulate the themes, move the storytelling at a quick pace and finish well."

"Momentous things happened the first week of June 1937," begins Robin Abcarian's backgrounder on the self-financed doc in the Los Angeles Times:

Jean Harlow, one of Hollywood's biggest stars, died suddenly and mysteriously at 26. The Duke of Windsor, who had abdicated his kingdom, married the woman he loved. And, though nobody would remember it, a 20-year-old dancer and extra named Patricia Douglas who'd been raped by an MGM salesman at a studio party futilely pressed for justice.

David Stenn, a 45-year-old Los Angeles biographer and TV writer, stumbled across her story when he was researching his 1993 book, Bombshell: The Life and Death of Jean Harlow.

"In a larger sense, Girl 27 is about the moral hypocrisy of Hollywood as well as a testament to the lingering damage inflicted by rape: the attack and what followed ruined Douglas's life," writes Sura Wood in the Hollywood Reporter. "Stenn, an accomplished TV writer-producer with an ebullient personality that doesn't wear well, undercuts his material by putting himself front and center - he has more screen time than Douglas."

IndieWIRE interviews Stenn. So does the Reeler.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. On the Road with Judas.

On the Road with Judas is "easily one of the most original and interesting movies I've seen in some time," writes Bryan Whitefield at ScreenGrab, introducing his conversation with JJ Lask, who spent five years writing the novel before adapting it himself. Rather unsually, too. He explains: "The actors read the book, then we did rehearsals where I would ask them questions and they would answer the questions based on the book. We rehearsed about five times with every actor, and then we put the actors together or separately in the different interview settings. We did that for about seven days. Then we took six months and edited all that together."

But at indieWIRE, Anthony Kaufman asks, "Is a self-indulgent, self-referential movie any less annoying if it unabashedly acknowledges its self-indulgence and self-referentiality?... [T]he film is not as confounding as it first seems, nor is it as clever. But Lask should be applauded for trying something new and putting a postmodern spin on what is ultimately an earnest tale of unfulfilled love."

IndieWIRE interviews Lask.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance/Slamdance. Chasing Ghosts + The King of Kong.

"A strong subject, the birth and stratospheric rise of the video gaming industry, and fascinating, quirky characters - in this case the young male gamers who became video arcade superstars - are the rock solid foundation for director Lincoln Ruchti's likable documentary Chasing Ghosts," writes Steve Ramos at indieWIRE.

"[T]he best doc in competition this year at Slamdance is Seth Gordon's The King of Kong," writes Michael Lerman at indieWIRE. "Far exceeding the bloated Sundance video game documentary this year, Chasing Ghosts, King of Kong tiptoes across the line of mockery so carefully that the result is a surprisingly universal battle of the brawn that even the biggest Nintendo cynic would find hard it hard not to be engaged in."

At ScreenGrab, Bryan Whitefield: "Competition Documentary Chasing Ghosts director Lincoln Ruchti and producer Michael Verrechia hosted a gamers wet dream Sunday on Main Street where kids as young as 10 and adults well past 40 all got a chance to slap buttons and jerk joysticks on vintage video games in their original arcade form."

IndieWIRE interviews Ruchti.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Clubland.

"Clubland, written by Keith Thompson and directed by Cherie Nowlan, is a straight up family melodrama, as classic as they come," writes Annie Frisbie at Zoom In Online. "Superb performances all around (with [Brenda] Blethyn shining brighter than ever) carry this well-crafted movie straight towards a beautifully resonant ending."

"Various complications and a climactic meltdown presage a feelgood ending that shamelessly yanks viewers' chains harder than necessary," writes Dennis Harvey in Variety. "Still, progress is quite pleasant, balancing comedy and drama to solid if familiar effect."

US, UK and German rights acquired by Warner Independent Pictures for $4 million. (Variety).

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Smiley Face.

"Gregg Araki's latest foray into the slacker underbelly of suburban LA, Smiley Face, has a wonderful performance by Anna Faris and one of the all-time great stoner monologues in movie history," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "But is this episodic pothead odyssey, in the end, the classic cannabis comedy it sets out to be? I'll leave that question for another occasion." And you know what? He does.

"Those who welcomed the new 'mature' Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin last year may be nonplussed by this follow-up, his most unabashedly silly effort," writes Dennis Harvey in Variety. "Smiley Face would evaporate in a puff of smoke if it were not for the inventiveness of Faris. Actress has been funny in large parts (as the Scary Movie series' ongoing topliner) and in small parts (Lost in Translation, Brokeback Mountain), but she has never had to carry a film this completely. She's often flat-out hilarious, whether the material offers much help or not."

IndieWIRE has a video interview with Araki.

Gregory Ellwood chats with Faris for MSN Movies.

Craig Phillips takes extensive notes on a panel featuring Araki, David Gordon Green, Tamara Jenkins and Hal Hartley.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Dark Matter.

"Ostensibly based on a true story, [Dark Matter; site] follows the progress of brilliant young Chinese cosmology post-grad Liu Xing who finds that coming to the US to work with his academic idol ain't necessarily all it's cracked up to be," writes Ben Walters for Time Out. "The performances are pretty good, with an engaging lead turn from Liu Ye and Meryl Streep on typically assured form as the university patron who takes a shine to him, but debut director Chen Shi-Zheng is less adept, wheeling out gimmicky effects in an attempt to get inside Liu's head."

"Critiquing both the relentless Eastern drive for success and the insular, self-serving nature of Western academia, this debut feature from opera and theater helmer Chen Shi-Zheng never fully succeeds in burrowing under its protagonist's skin, despite conspicuous effort," writes Justin Chang in Variety. "There's a smart movie to be made about the often unhealthy pressure Asians face to work hard and succeed, but even as a tale of one student's destructive choices, Billy Shebar's script fails to lay the necessary groundwork for Liu Xing's sudden shift into violence. The result is a middling academic drama that passes pleasantly enough for roughly an hour before detouring into a tacked-on tragic climax."

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. The Good Night.

"Jake Paltrow (brother of Gwyneth) makes his directorial debut with this loopy comedic psychotherapy," writes Eric Kohn for the New York Press. The Good Night has "got a marvelous cast and the sort of infectious storyline that makes Michel Gondry fans fall into ecstatic convulsions, although Paltrow's collection of stylish elements don't really develop much past that playfulness."

"Though its forays into the subconscious may strike more adventurous cinematic palettes as precious and unimaginative," writes Justin Chang in Variety, "few will be able to resist Martin Freeman's appealing lead turn or the wry Brit wit that gives this fanciful confection a robust comic core."

The Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt disagrees: "An odd casting choice and awkward methods of exposition get the film off to a halting start. Then Paltrow compounds the erratic storytelling by making every character thoroughly unlikable."

At Cinematical, Kim Voynar reviews the film and interviews Paltrow.

The Reeler interviews Paltrow.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Dedication.

"A man nasty to others by intent makes it very difficult for a young woman to come to like him, and the same goes for the viewer in Dedication," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy.

But the Hollywood Reporter's James Greenberg finds it "an old-fashioned love story charmingly told by first time director Justin Theroux. Although it sometimes strains for the quirky, film is buoyed by winning performances by Billy Crudup and Mandy Moore. This one could really catch on as a date destination for the indie crowd."

Tom Hall: "The movie is stylish and terrific, with uniformly wonderful performances and Theroux shows some serious chops as a director (with great musical tastes)."

Quint at AICN: "Crudup is great in this. In fact, everybody is great in this, but the film rests on Crudup's shoulders."

The Reeler interviews Theroux.

Picked up by TWC and First Look (Variety).

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Banished.

"With Iraq documentaries all the rage, it's refreshing to come across an old-fashioned nonfiction piece that sets its lacerating sights not 'over there,' but right here at home, in the heartland and neighborhoods of America," writes Anthony Kaufman at indieWIRE. "In another revealing account of racial injustice in the US of A, director Marco Williams (Two Towns of Jaspar) investigates the banishment, or to put it more provocatively 'racial cleansing,' of blacks from American towns in the early 20th century." A "potent documentary."

"Banished," writes James Greenberg in the Hollywood Reporter, "adds another compelling and necessary chapter to the literature of racism in this country."

The Reeler interviews Williams.

Online viewing tip. "As an African American man in an openly racist community, and as a documentary filmmaker, Williams is clearly self-aware. But instead of playing the traditional cinema verité director's role of 'fly-on-the-wall,' he (bravely) embraces his the position as conspicuous interloper." Megan Cunningham talks with Williams for Zoom In Online.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. The Go-Getter.

"[Martin] Hynes clearly has serious chops as a director," writes Mike D'Angelo at Screengrab. "If he can dial it down a few notches while maintaining The Go-Getter's hazy, lyrical, asymmetrical visual style, he'll have something really special."

Cinematical's James Rocchi: "A charitable observer would suggest that the flurry of so-called independent films where a bright, neurotic stand-in for the (male) writer-director finds love with a special, super-pretty snowflake of a girl represents our shared yearning for love and belonging; a more cynical one would suggest that this is the sort of self-pleasing fantasy that feels like it was typed one-handed because the not-that-creative creator was using the other to pat himself on the back or do other things to other body parts."

"How many road trip movies of self discovery starring artsy, skinny, white kids that fall in love with unconventionally cute little brown-haired girls do we need?" grumbles Zack Haddad in Film Threat.

Online viewing tip. An iW VIDEO interview with Lou Taylor Pucci and Zooey Deschanel.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Shorts, 1/31.

"The Situation, Philip Haas's deftly paced, well-written, and brilliantly infuriating Iraq War thriller is not only the strongest of recent geopolitical hotspot flicks but one that has been designed for maximal agitation," writes J Hoberman.

Also in the Voice:

• Jim Ridley on An Unreasonable Man: "A cornucopia of talking-head rancor, indefatigable idealism, and livid history, the film argues that the crusading activist, organizer, and working man's champion deserves a bigger place in history than as just the Grinch Who Spoiled the Election." More from AO Scott in the New York Times. Related: Ralph Nader's a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

• Nathan Lee: "In the Pit's empathy feels strictly skin-deep, its insight even shallower." More from Michael Guillén.

• Scott Foundas on Because I Said So: "[L]ike nearly all of [Michael] Lehmann's post-Heathers work, it's lazy and disinterested—a hack-for-hire job any number of film-school grads could have put through its uninspired paces."

"One of the works in Robert Wilson's VOOM Portraits at the Paula Cooper Gallery - an exhibition (also at the Phillips de Pury & Company gallery) of high-definition video portraits of celebrities posed nearly motionless in drolly theatrical costumes and settings - is a 30-minute, continuously looped, stunningly beautiful video of Winona Ryder as the character Winnie in Samuel Beckett's play Happy Days." And Jonathan Kalb simply raves in the NYT.

Also, Dave Kehr: "Home From the Hill (1960), which has crept into the marketplace as part of the highly worthwhile box set Robert Mitchum: The Signature Collection, from Warner Home Video, is a superb example of [Vincente] Minnelli's method and seems even more effective now that its fading color has been restored and its widescreen framing carefully transferred to DVD."

And Jeannette Catsoulis: Room 314 "has a vérité look and a voyeuristic atmosphere that complement the intimacy of the material."

Jay A Fernandez on a probable sequel to The Departed: "According to the sources, [William] Monahan is not taking the prequel route and is instead developing a wholly original continuation of the story." Also in the Los Angeles Times: Matching actors and directors.

For the Nashville Scene, Noel Murray asks Guillermo del Toro about The Spirit of the Beehive: "The thing is that the film by [Victor] Erice is all about the most tenuous, almost intangible lines between fantasy and reality, that are only laid out by the mind of a child. In my movies, I tend to make the fantasy world manifest. Completely manifest and material."

Joe Leydon remembers Oscar-winning screenwriter and late-blooming pop novelist Sidney Sheldon, 1917 - 2007: "Let this be a lesson to us all: You're never too old to become, for better or worse, a phenomenon."

A stuffed diary entry from Francesca Martin: "Roger Michell, director of Venus, The Mother and Notting Hill, is returning to his theatrical roots. He has signed up to direct two plays: a new work at the National Theatre in London [Joe Penhall's Landscape with Weapons], followed by Harold Pinter's Betrayal at the Donmar Warehouse this summer." Also, "Claire Danes has been dusting down her ballet shoes," A Date with John Waters and: "Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, who co-starred in Y Tu Mamá También in 2001, are reuniting for their next project, a low-budget film written and directed by Carlos Cuarón, brother of Y Tu Mamá director Alfonso."

Also in the Guardian:

• Ronald Bergan remembers Maj-Britt Nilsson, 1924 - 2006. She appeared in Bergman's To Joy, Summer Interlude and Waiting Women.

• "Gulpilil has lasted as the generic indigenous actor longer than most." Germaine Greer on Ten Canoes: "The star of [Rolf] De Heer's film is, as Gulpilil would have wanted, the Arafura swamp, where the reflected blaze of the tropical sun splinters through cycads and paperbarks, against which the naked actors lope with inexpressible grace."

• Jonathan Jones hails the return of the European horror film.

• A quick chat with Janet McTeer.

Michael Atkinson reviews Idiocracy ("it should be seen and kudoed just for its principled stance against the cretinism most American entertainment happily exploits") and Sherrybaby: "[Maggie] Gyllenhaal's Sherry has the burdens of Job, and the actress is so fierce and committed to fleshing out this ex-stripper/hardened abuse victim into three dimensions that it's impossible to forget her." Also at IFC News: "To call Gymkata a footnote on the history of cinema would be to vastly overstate its importance." But for Matt Singer, it's a "cult movie in desperate need of a cult."

Kimberly Chun talks with Werner Herzog about The Wild Blue Yonder, which Cheryl Eddy reviews: "If aliens ever do make it to Earth - if they're not already here, that is - and they're in the market for a documentarian, they need only see Yonder to know Herzog has the necessary cosmonautical chops."

Also in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Lynn Rapaport on Flannel Pajamas: "You may feel you've seen all this before, though not in a movie. The film feels true - eventually to a fault." And at SF360, Max Goldberg reviews both films.

Alison Anders has about half a page to say about each of her ten favorite Criterion DVDs (PDF).

Scott Eyman on Bambi vs Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose and Practice of the Movie Business: "The odd thing is, although I don't like this book, I think that [David] Mamet is right about a lot of things." Also in the New York Observer, Andrew Sarris on The Lives of Others, "one of the most amazing films I have ever seen on the subject of the state's control over the lives of individuals, both through modern instruments of surveillance and an ingenious ability to recruit and persuade even family members to spy on each other."

More from Mark Asch in the L Magazine: "The Lives of Others is a model of self-containment and moral responsibility - so much so that it starts to feel like a filmed syllabus."

"Tommy Lee Jones is set to topline the feature film version of James Lee Burke's novel In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead, adapted by Mary Olson-Kromolowski and Jerzy Kromolowski," reports Production Weekly.

"Bob Hoskins is joining the cast of screenwriter-director Neil Marshall's Doomsday." The Hollywood Reporter has more.

Good reading: David Bordwell recommends Gary Giddins.

The 2006 NicksFlicksPicks Honorees: the countdown begins.

"Careful," begins Zach Campbell: "I'm not making an endorsement here. But I would like to say that Tony Scott is one of the most interesting filmmakers in Hollywood today, precisely because he so baldly extracts essences to be found in contemporary commercial cinema."

Reverse Shot writers "herald those films in their top tens of the year that, for whatever reasons, didn't end up in the cumulative Reverse Shot top ten." Also: "Approximately a minute and half into Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, I was already blown away."

And Jeff Reichert reviews Love on the Ground and The Gang of Four together "in the interests of teasing out some of major themes of his works while getting through as much Rivette as possible for the benefit of the uninitiated."

Acquarello reviews Jon Jost's La Lunga Ombra, "a provocative, broader exposition on the intangible, often corrosive collateral damage of psychological warfare and demoralization."

John Adair watches Jerzy Stuhr's Big Animal, which "bubbles over with life, quirkiness, and outright laughter. Yet this light-hearted manner never dominates the film, as comedy and drama intertwine to provide opportunities for complex sets of responses at any particular moment."

Grenouille, the supernaturally gifted and handicapped central figure of Perfume, "a savior who understands the essence and nature of our souls better than we do"? Timothy Stanley argues his case at Metaphilm.

Ryan Wu won't be watching Miami Vice again; but he might revisit The Prestige.

At Koreanfilm.org, Duncan Mitchel finds the TV serial drama Shoot for the Stars frustrating but irresistible.

Online viewing tip #1. Mike Wallace interviews Ayn Rand. Via Coudal Partners.

Online viewing tip #2. The trailer for Bunker Hill, Kevin Willmott's followup on CSA: Confederate States of America, is at the site.

Online viewing tip #3. Hugh Harmon's Peace on Earth at greg.org.

Philip Glass @ 70.

Philip Glass is 70 today, and Alex Ross has already designed the perfect entry.

So that leaves newsier notes, and there isn't much in English other than word from Memphis that the Nashville Symphony will be celebrating with a series of events set for February 12 through 18.

Only somewhat related is Joshua Kosman's piece in the San Francisco Chronicle on the Opera's upcoming season, which will feature the world premiere of Glass's Appomattox, with a libretto by Christopher Hampton, and Chris Beaumont's review of Glass's soundtrack for Notes on a Scandal.

Otherwise, you have to turn to the European papers for the career-spanning appreciations befitting a good round-numbered birthday: Volker Tarnow in Die Welt and, unfortunately for subscribers only, Christoph Bartmann in the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Wolfgang Sandner in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

See also: The site and the Wikipedia entry.

Fests and events, 1/30.

"Though it displays not a single dead body, gory gash, or bombed-out building, and limits its on-screen violence to heated arguments and abortive senior-citizen wrestling matches, Kazuo Hara's The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (1987) nonetheless stands as one of the most harrowing, astonishing documentaries about war ever thrown onto celluloid." Ed Halter previews a series of Hara's films running at the Anthology Film Archives from tomorrow through February 4. Facets will be releasing Emperor's on DVD on February 27, by the way.

Also in the Voice, J Hoberman looks ahead to a busy week for New Yorkers. In fact, notes ST VanAirsdale at the Reeler, all of February's going to be busy for New Yorkers.

At Twitch, Ardvark recalls a few favorite experiences at past editions of the International Film Festival Rotterdam. And a take from this year's lineup: No Mercy for the Rude "a fine example where 'quirky' isn't a curse."

Also in Rotterdam, Jonathan Rosenbaum discovers a variety of ways to see Jia Zhangke's Still Life.

At the Siffblog, Anne M Hockens reviews all she's seen on her second and third days in Noir City, while at the Evening Class, Michael Guillén takes notes on Eddie Muller's opening remarks.

Scott Murphy for the Hollywood Reporter: "The first ever Asian Film Awards, honoring the best of Asian cinema over the past year, will take place March 20 during the opening night of the 31st annual Hong Kong International Film Festival, organizers announced Monday."

Park City, 1/30.

"Sundance has meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people in its 23 years of existence, but if its awards were ever important, they aren't now." Andrew O'Hehir argues in Salon that the juried competitions "have become a sort of sidebar to the main event, and an increasingly confusing one at that." That's Page 1. On Page 2, he lists "five narrative features and five documentaries that premiered here and ought to make some noise."

"In the seven years I've been coming to Sundance, I'm not sure that I've ever seen a film so completely captivate the public and the critics alike as John Carney's Once, the Irish musical drama whose little-movie-that-could odyssey was completed Saturday night when it collected the audience award in Sundance's world dramatic competition," blogs Scott Foundas. "But as I learned from speaking to the film's producers, before Once was selected by Sundance it had been rejected by several high-profile North American and international festivals, which says something telling (and unfortunate) about the kind of snobbery that can infect the festival selection process."

He's got more at the Voice: "Always important to remember when discussing Sundance: The festival is ultimately at the mercy of the films being made - and if one is to take the festival's 2007 dramatic competition as a barometer of today's American indie-film landscape, the news is not encouraging."

Also, Rob Nelson: "Even by the lacerating standards of recent Sundance docs Why We Fight and Iraq in Fragments, the nonfiction at this year's fest felt, well, real - alarmingly so. Indeed, after doing battle with films about US policies on Iraq, Darfur, and global warming, this critic was nearly moved to rescind his American citizenship."

"Going into the festival, word was not good," writes Kirk Honeycutt for the Hollywood Reporter. "Coming out of the festival, you realize how little value this 'word' actually possesses.... If anything epitomizes Sundance 2007, it is the acknowledgment not just in the documentaries but also in the lightest of feature films that the world is in a bad place right now."

Anthony Kaufman ranks the films he caught: "Best," "Strong," "Solid," "Fair," "Weak."

Karina Longworth takes one last look back. Well, two. Maybe eight, depending.

Ray Pride's posting the pictures he snapped.

IndieWIRE and IFC News gather all their Sundance coverage on handy single pages.

Online viewing tip. Attendees name some of their favorites for indieWIRE.

Berlinale. Program.

So they hit us with numbers this morning. Altogether, there'll be nearly 400 films screening at this year's Berlin International Film Festival (February 8 through 18); 700 at the European Film Market. Anniversaries: The Kinderfilmfest, now Generation, turns 30. Shooting Stars have been selected for 10 years now. And so on and so on.

Click to enlarge.

But what every journalist gathered this morning to hear Berlinale festival director Dieter Kosslick and the heads of the various sections really wanted to get there hands on is that program. And now, it's online, too, searchable, and downloadable as a PDF file.

Park City Dispatch. 9.

David D'Arcy on Crazy Love, Manda Bala and Ghosts.

When I think of the Sundance Awards, I can't help but think of the Special Olympics, in which everyone wins something, and you leave the ceremony believing that the world has been brought closer to enlightenment. Given the travail of parking in Park City (and doing anything else there during Sundance), there's also an element of sacrifice (and perhaps a long march) involved in simply going to the ceremony.

Sundance juries tend to be ruled by sentiment, which may explain why Sundance films that win tend to disappear when they enter the marketplace - note that this is not always the case - so I applaud the selection of films like Padre Nuestro by Christopher Zalla for the Grand Jury Prize and Manda Bala for the Doc prize, two films that deserve a wider audience.

One film which was far less acclaimed is the kind of film that brings audiences together in a sick and voyeuristic way. And I don't mean these terms to be negative. Crazy Love, directed by Dan Klores, is a documentary that tells the greatest kind of story - the kind "you can't make up." You can't tear yourself away from the film's characters, who can't tear themselves away from each other. It sounds like love, except in this case a nerdy personal-injury lawyer learns that a beautiful Bronx Jewish princess, whom he's been dating, is going to marry someone else, and he hires thugs to throw lye on her beautiful face. After endless motions and the longest trial in history of Bronx County, he's sentenced to 30 years in prison. The last few years are spent in Attica, where he witnesses the 1971 prison riots in which 39 people died. When Burton Pugach gets out of prison after serving 14 years in the early 1970s, even though Linda Riss is blind and bald from his attack, the two get married. It gets even better in the 1990s when the two seem to have settled into a dull period in their marriage, and Pugach's new mistress tells cops that Pugach threatened to throw lye in her face. (She took him seriously because he kept reminding her that he had already done it.) Pugach goes on trial again and the lawyer, who's been disbarred since the late 1950s, exercises his right to represent himself. Pugach wins an unexpected acquittal, and goes home to - who else? - his wife. Incredible? Of course it is. And that's why the very fact that Dan Klores has exhumed this story is remarkable in itself. The fact that he's made it into a film, and a film well worth watching, for its characters, suspense, and sheer color, made this film one of my favorites at Sundance 2007.

Pugach and Riss (still Mrs. Pugach) are still very much alive in Queens (where else?). And living with each other is as good a version of a life sentence as I can imagine. (They attended the Sundance opening of Crazy Love in matching white mink coats.) Dan Klores takes us inside their story from the perspective of the couple, Pugach's law associates, Linda's girlfriends, and a few journalists. But he also takes us into a very special social milieu - the Jewish Bronx, which is not what it used to be. This was a vibrant world in the 1950s, and Klores - although he's from Brooklyn - gets a lot of it right. (For a great Bronx Jewish screwball comedy, you can try renting Michael Roemer's The Plot Against Harry, a forgotten treasure when it was made in 1969 and re-released in 1989, and a largely forgotten classic today.) But if Car 54, Where are You? had been made like Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, the Burton Pugach-Linda Riss ordeal could have been one of its episodes.

So, is love blind, or blinded? By the time Pugach gets out of prison, Linda seems to be well aware of what she was getting into, but as she told her friends, being married to a man who hired thugs to throw lye in her face was better than being alone. In A Very Different Love Story, Berry Stainback's 1976 book about the first stage of the case, Linda tells the author that lye actually nourished her skin.

Bear in mind that Dan Klores is a professional publicist with a glam and celebrity practice, although this is not his first feature documentary. To be fair, this doc is not what I would even call a publicist's doc. He's not relying on vapid interviews from hard-to-get celebrities, and there aren't any dull commentaries from frequent fliers on Page Six, although Jimmy Breslin and Andrea Peyser are brought in as New York hacks for abbreviated contextual observation. The hard-to-get thing here was the story from the loving couple themselves, and Klores got it. When a publicist does something right, it's best for us all to recognize it.

The other film that came as a pleasant documentary surprise at Sundance was Manda Bala, by Jason Kohn, the protégé of Errol Morris. Kohn's film is set in Brazil, and the look of it in bubbly digital video that seems to be approaching the boiling point, gives you the impression that you're entering another world indeed. The world is a world of corruption and it's a black hole. In Sao Paolo, people are kidnapped every day, and the kidnappers make videotapes of their hostages to send to relatives who are asked to pay ransom. It seems that one way to get a ransom quicker is to cut off someone's ear on camera and then send the ear with the videotape. When the ear doesn't work, kidnappers cut off a finger and send that with the next tape. Then comes the death threat, and when that doesn't work, you just kill the victim and kidnap someone else.

Manda Bala means "send a bullet" in Portuguese. By that point, the victim is dead. But the chain of corruption goes far beyond the kidnapper-victim equation. In Jason Kohn's documentary (this is real, of course, no one's making it up), there's a huge fund for the development of the impoverished north of Brazil, which contains the deserts of the Northeast and Amazonia of the Northwest. One entrepreneurial politician has taken a huge chunk of this to create a farm for raising frogs. You never knew that so many frogs could be in demand for the dinner table. And it's never sure that they are, although we do see Brazilians eating them with gusto, because the frog farm is part of a massive money-laundering scheme that enables the politician to acquire television stations, newspapers, and all sorts of other enterprises. It looks like an open-and-shut case when investigators and prosecutors talk to Kohn about it and the politician is even convicted of his crime: a rare triumph. But he's cleared of all the charges on appeal. If friends in high places can't help you in Brazil, where can they? It seems that every institution is failing in this country, and everyone's on the take. But there's an odd hero in Manda Bala - a plastic surgeon whose genius is rebuilding ears for wealthy abductees who have somehow managed to survive their kidnapping. If the judicial system can't reconstitute your world, at least you can have something that looks like the body part that was taken away from you, provided that you can afford the surgery.

Jason Kohn's film is bound to get a lot of attention as a new doc from a young kid who's made his first film with a visual flair. One film that seemed to be invisible at Sundance was Ghosts - no pun intended - by Nick Broomfield. It's the haunting - still no pun - story of a group of 23 Chinese immigrants who died digging for shellfish in Morecambe Bay in 2005. In this dramatic feature, not a doc, Broomfield and his handheld camera recreate their journey from China, which took six months, to the UK. He follows them through awful jobs and even worse hostility from their British neighbors. (The Chinese call the Brits ghosts, and they are struck by their corruptibility. You will be, too.) They are attacked and beaten when they go to the bay to dig for shellfish, which they think will pay better than dingy jobs in supermarkets or slaughterhouses. After they are beaten with impunity by the locals, they decide to work at night and are surprised by high tides. Only one of them survives. The families who sent them to the UK still owe huge amounts to moneychangers in China. And the British government won't contribute a cent to help them. Broomfield should be commended for showing what it's like to be on the short end of globalism's stick.

It's not exactly like being an outsider in Park City during Sundance - more like being in Park City during Sundance without much money.

More tomorrow on the challenge of running a major film festival in Park City, the "border" films, and a new genre, the abusive romantic comedy.

---

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Hear and Now.

"The cochlear implant - already the star of another Sundance documentary, 2000's Sound and Fury - is the hook to Hear and Now," begins Susan Gerhard at indieWIRE. "But the two retirement-aged parents who live like teenagers, perpetually sneaking out the bedroom window for a late-night adventure, are actually the story. These kooky characters, and parents, of director Irene Taylor Brodsky are well cast in a documentary drama that's less a treatise on a topical medical controversy than a carefully observed study of aging love in flux."

"Though Taylor Brodsky focuses exclusively on her parents, Paul and Sally Taylor, this is no amateur home movie," writes Peter Debruge in Variety.

Zack Haddad in Film Threat: "his film is one worth finding when you can. It has to be one of the most personable documentaries I have ever seen and my only qualm is that I wish that there were some way to find out how they have progressed since the surgery."

IndieWIRE interviews Taylor Brodsky.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Chapter 27.

"I hate to borrow material from another film critic," begins Scott Weinberg at Cinematical, "but a colleague of mine offered the following words after we finished watching Chapter 27: 'It's like a feature-length version of De Niro's "You talkin' to me" speech from Taxi Driver - only without Scorsese, Schrader or De Niro.' I repeat that sentence because it perfectly encapsulates my own opinion on the deadly dull and seriously dreary Chapter 27, a movie that promises to offer some insight into why Mark David Chapman, on one chilly night in 1980, shot the beloved John Lennon to death."

"[T]his is a highly compelling performance on many levels. [Jared] Leto has to carry the picture by himself, and pretty much does so," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Some viewers may well find Chapter 27 sleazy or distasteful, and I won't argue the point. But [director Jarrett] Schaefer's movie creates its own highly compelling world, which is pretty much the prime directive in filmmaking."

Tom Hall: "It's a tough film with an engaging central performance, but nothing that brings us any closer to Chapman's psychosis or his justifications for senseless murder."

Justin Lowe at Filmmaker: "At the after-screening party, Schaefer told me that his goals for the film included 'a good story well-told,' as well as an examination of celebrity, noting that 'now we're in a culture dominated by celebrity,' which seemed particularly relevant considering [Lindsay] Lohan's participation in the film."

Steve Ramos reports on the film's reception for New York.

Update, 2/3: Cyndi Greening video'd the post-screening Q&A.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Fido.

"This is one of the most unique and obscure horror films that I can pretty much guarantee you'll love," Mr Disgusting all but promises. "The best way to describe Andrew Currie's film is that it's a cross between Pleasantville, Shaun of the Dead and Dawn of the Dead. So basically Fido is a funny, vibrant, colorful, bloody good time with a social commentary. In short, it's a perfect zombie movie."

Also at Bloody Disgusting, Ryan Daley: "[T]he heady amalgam of Leave it to Beaver-style social sanitization and the walking undead makes for a unexpectedly pleasing combination. Zombie purists may roll their eyes in dismay, but the casual horror fan will almost certainly be entertained by this droll concoction."

Updated through 1/30.

And they've got clips.

"This Canadian film, when released by Lionsgate in mid-June, should reach out to bemused adult audience who enjoy wise-guy satires, so long as the marketing emphasizes that this movie is playing it for laughs not scares," writes Kirk Honeycutt for the Hollywood Reporter. "For a one-joke movie, Fido does a fine job exploring every possible permutation of that joke."

Updates, 1/30: Robert J Lewis reviewed this one when it screened in Toronto: "Fido is certainly gruesome - it'll be a real trick to sell this one as a heartwarming, offbeat comedy (it won't open until March 2007) when there's enough graphic flesh eating to send an unenlightened genre newcomer reaching for the barf bag - but its unique voice is evident in the chemistry between its rich ensemble (none of whom ever ham it up) and their twisted, even kinky, relationships.... Ultimately, it's the story of a boy and his dog, and while young K'Sun Ray is another charming pre-tween discovery, it's Fido's movie and Billy Connolly has to carry the whole damn show. And that he does."

At Twitch, Todd's found clips.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Starting Out in the Evening.

"Adapted from the book by Brian Morton, though it feels like an excellent off-Broadway play, Starting Out in the Evening traces the relationship between Schiller (an outstanding Frank Langella) and Heather (a luminous Lauren Ambrose), a graduate student who wants to write her thesis about the elderly, out-of-print novelist," writes Anthony Kaufman at indieWIRE. "The multi-layered motivations are constant in Starting Out which is one of the reasons why the film is such a kick."

Updated through 1/30.

"Andrew Wagner, whose 2005 home movie-meets-family road comedy The Talent Given Us became a surprise Sundance hit (and my favorite film of that year), returned to Park City in competition on Sunday with the total stylistic reversal Starting Out in the Evening," begins ST VanAirsdale at the Reeler. "Beautifully shot in HD by cinematographer Harlan Bosmajian, Starting Out nevertheless struggles through a few convenient narrative hitches before settling into the character-driven New York chamber drama in which it finds its strongest momentum."

"Like Venus (to which it will surely invite comparisons), Starting Out in the Evening skillfully navigates the terrain of a relationship pitched somewhere between master-pupil and May-December," writes Scott Foundas in Variety. "But Wagner's pic... is a knowing portrait of three complex individuals of very different ages, all of whom feel the breath of Father Time at their necks.... In a career-crowning performance, Langella plays Schiller with utter vulnerability and lack of vanity - the former seducer whose stage Dracula made women swoon here invests himself fully in the part of a man weakened by illness and regret."

Update, 1/30: IndieWIRE interviews Wagner.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Adrift in Manhattan.

"Typical misery-laden Sundance fare all the way, Alfredo de Villa's Adrift in Manhattan offers three semi-connected stories of angst, loss, loneliness and general unhappiness. Have a ball," sighs Scott Weinberg at Cinematical. "While not exactly what you'd call a bad movie, Adrift in Manhattan is simply too predictable, familiar and obvious to warrant much in the way of attention or enthusiasm."

A "good-natured but forgettable New York street life drama," writes Steve Ramos at indieWIRE. "Adrift in Manhattan is a pile of loose threads and anyone desiring dramatic finality will leave disappointed."

But the Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt finds that "De Villa has a sharp eye for details that articulate unspoken grief and isolation in people. His film is like a good short story, where there are no wasted moments and an economy of expression allows the story to achieve maximum impact." The praise doesn't go unqualified, but there you go.

The Reeler and indieWIRE interview De Villa.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. White Light/Black Rain.

"Of course we know about the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in August 1945 - perhaps the defining event of the 20th century - but this humbling, shocking film reminds us that we don't really know enough," writes Andrew O'Hehir for Salon. "No warning can really prepare you for these images of ashen corpses, maimed survivors and apocalyptic destruction, but in an age of renewed nuclear tension, there can be no question as to their relevance."

"Director Steven Okazaki (the documentaries Days of Waiting and Black Tar Heroin and the drama Living on Tokyo Time), as masterful as ever, shows both sides of the bombings with his perfectly structured and utterly engaging history documentary, White Light/Black Rain [site]," writes Steve Ramos at indieWIRE.

And indieWIRE interviews Okazaki.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Protagonist.

"One of the most visually and artistically exciting documentaries I've seen at this year's Sundance Film Festival - or outside of Sundance in the past few years, frankly - Protagonist is hard to define and easy to enjoy, seemingly scatter-shot but possessed by pure focus, full of invention and newness, but also firmly committed to sure-handed storytelling and classic tradition," writes Cinematical's James Rocchi.

"My favorite film of the fest? Jessica Yu's Protagonist." AJ Schnack points to Joel Heller's interview with Yu at his new blog, Docs That Inspire.

"The dangers of extremism and the virtues of uncertainty are the keys to the remarkable Protagonist, docu helmer Jessica Yu's exploration of four men's journey through dysfunction, obsession and redemption." Despite the Variety-speak, check John Anderson's recommendation. "The film's sheer boldness - Yu uses puppets, and the work of 5th Century BC Greek dramatist Euripides to illustrate the timelessness of her subjects' dilemmas - should make it a must-see among doc fans and artfilm cinephiles."

"Compared to her fantastic and fascinating In the Realms of the Unreal (2004), Yu's follow-up doesn't have the same compelling and perverse punch, but it's an intriguing experiment all the same," writes Anthony Kaufman at indieWIRE.

Tom Hall: "No film at Sundance lays bare the global reach of male certitude like Jessica Yu's exquisite Protagonist.... [T]he film captivates and forces the thoughtful viewer to question his or her own life's narrative."

Kenneth Turan talks with Yu, too, for the Los Angeles Times.

More from Craig Phillips, right here.

Gregg Goldstein reports at the Risky Biz Blog: A "source involved in negotiations said IFC and Netflix were close to closing a low-to-mid-six figure deal."

IndieWIRE interviews Yu.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Online viewing tip.

White Plastic Flower. "Jamie Stuart takes on the Sundance Film Festival in his latest short." At Filmmaker.

Shorts, 1/29.

"Your mind just goes to the craziest idea to lure people into the theater, and then you write your script around those elements," Robert Rodriguez tells Whitney Joiner, who is, of course, checking on the progress of Grindhouse, due April 6: two movies, basically (Rodriguez's Planet Terror, 80 minutes, and Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof, 90), plus four trailers for nonexistent movies by Eli Roth, Rob Zombie, Edgar Wright and Rodriguez himself. Scrunged up prints, missing reels - the boys are going all out.

Also in the New York Times:

• Une Vieille Maîtresse, a period piece based on an 1865 novel by Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly, is not only a departure in form for Catherine Breillat, it's also got a budget four times that of Anatomy of Hell. But Kristin Hohenadel also talks with her about the most dramatic aspect of the project. Having suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in 2004, Breillat is quite sure that her determination to make this film saved her life.

• He "makes his long-overdue American concert debut with 200 musicians and singers at Radio City Music Hall." And: "On Feb 25 he will be presented with an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement, atoning for past omissions. After five nominations, he has never won." Jon Pareles meets Ennio Morricone.

• "[Gary] Shandling has lately been tugged by a powerful, almost obsessive desire to go back and revisit the breadth of his Larry Sanders experience, for the purpose, he said, of finding out both who he was then and how he might give the show, and his role in it, a fitting ending." Jacques Steinberg talks with him about the monster DVD package coming out in April.

After all the arguments and counter-arguments, the Cinemarati have completed their countdown of the top 20 films of 2006. Their #1: Children of Men.

On a related note, k-punk: "British cinema, for the last thirty years as chronically sterile as the issueless population in Children of Men, has not produced a version of the apocalypse that is even remotely as well realised as this." Three points: First, "The catastrophe is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through.... Secondly, Children of Men is a dystopia that is specific to late capitalism." The third point relates to a "cultural crisis" and "the theme of sterility" inherited from TS Eliot's The Waste Land.

Depending on your take on Babel, you'll either be thrilled or horrified to hear from Anne Thompson that screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga and director Alejandro González Iñarritu are talking again. Jeffrey Wells has more. Related: Rob Grace.

Back at the Risky Biz Blog: Why Hitchcock refused to meet Spielberg.

Chris Baker asks Patrick Galloway, author of Asia Shock: Horror and Dark Cinema from Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Thailand "to share his Top 5 Most Deliciously Appalling Moments in Asian Shock Films with Wired."

Volver has fended off a challenge from Pan's Labyrinth at the Goya Awards, winning best film, director, actress and two more. EiTB24 reports.

And Movie City News lists the winners of the Screen Actors Guild awards. Related: Blake Ethridge and David Austin interview Little Miss Sunshine directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris for Cinema Strikes Back.

In the Guardian:

• "France has fallen dramatically out of love with the auteur and the whole idea of art house film which it invented," writes Angelique Chrisafis. She's got the numbers, and they aren't good. "'Cinéphilie no longer exists in France,' the film distributor Thomas Ordonneau said." And from Michel Ciment, editor of Positif, she hears, "Part of the problem is a lack of credibility of film critics."

• When Tadesse Meskela, spokesperson for Ethiopian coffee growers, and Tony Blair meet in London today, they'll watch Black Gold. Ashley Seager reports.

• Julie Bindel: "Horrible lesbians on screen had a bad effect when they were the only ones." Now, they're not, so Notes on a Scandal doesn't really bother her.

"[L]ast year, about one out of every four films I saw was something I had seen before." Why, and how, do we re-view, asks Girish.

"The Situation is, to put it kindly, a spotty piece of work," writes David Edelstein in New York. "The script is by Wendell Steavenson, a reporter who seems to know everything about Iraq and next to nothing about screenwriting." Also, on An Unreasonable Man: "Nader was obviously nuts to assert that there wasn't 'a dime's bit of difference' between Bush and Al Gore. But the film, directed by Henriette Mantel and Steve Skrovan, does a brilliant job of putting his 2000 run for president in context—to show how consistent it was with everything he has stood for in his remarkable career." And Seraphim Falls is "surprisingly gripping."

"[N]obody is writing about John Dahl, and that's a shame." So That Little Round-Headed Boy begins an assessment of the oeuvre. Why? Because Dahl has "made at least one bona fide classic and at least three other very, very good films. And he keeps growing and getting better. I think he deserves serious attention."

David Jeffers is on an Ufa kick, writing about the studio's style during its heyday and reviewing Asphalt at the Siffblog.

"There's something anti-Howard Hawks about the way Delmer Daves directs Dark Passage," proposes John McElwee at Greenbriar Pictures.

Mark Kermode: "Perhaps the most personal of [Terry] Gilliam's films, Tideland is a bold expression of artistic independence with little regard for popular taste or PC politeness. For this it should be celebrated, even if the film proves too challenging for some audiences."

Also in the Observer, interviews: Kitty Empire talks with Will Oldham about Old Joy, Chrissy Iley interviews Jessica Lange, Carole Cadwalladr meets Leonardo DiCaprio and Jason Solomons talks Oscars with Christopher Guest.

Ann Powers on Dreamgirls in the Los Angeles Times: "Beneath this feel-good story lurks a century's worth of assumptions about self-expression, femininity and race.... In the year of Barack Obama's likely presidential candidacy, shouldn't a pop-culture 'triumph' like this film offer a more complex view of black culture and creativity?" Related: Mark Reynolds on Motown in PopMatters.

"Indian music director OP Nayyar, who composed some of Bollywood's most memorable tunes of the 1950s and 60s, died on Sunday after a heart attack at his home outside Mumbai." Reuters reports.

"Frame-counting is a nifty tool for discovering some secrets of filmmaking, but when we work from a video copy, we need to keep in mind the constraints of the various formats. And whenever possible, check the film!" That's the bottom line on this latest entry from David Bordwell; but there's lots to chew on before he gets there.

Online browsing tip. PopSugar's got Annie Leibovitz's photos of celebs posing as fairy tale characters for Disney World's Year of a Million Dreams campaign. Via John Brownlee at Table of Malcontents.

Park City, 1/29.

Dennis Lim lists about a dozen actors who appeared in more than one film at Sundance this year: "To the casual observer the impression is one of an insular club. But even for the heavyweights of the indie star system, the reality is not always so glamorous."

Also in the New York Times, Manohla Dargis: "[T]he Sundance brand helps obscure the reality that there simply isn't enough quality American independent work, particularly of a saleable kind, to justify an event of this size."

Sundance is not as fun as it used to be, chimes in Eric D Snider. Writing at Hollywood Bitchslap, he realizes that this is not an original observation. In fact, he argues, precisely because this perception is becoming so widespread, the festival has a problem on its hands. "If the hassle starts to outweigh the enjoyability, maybe some of us [in the press] will stop bothering with it. The same goes for the public." So he offers a few pointers. Because, after all, Sundance is "a vibrant, important festival. I hope the tireless souls who run it can guide it through the growing pains and continue to make it a positive experience for those of us who look forward to it every year."

Of the films she saw at Sundance, Annie Frisbie lists her favorites at Zoom In Online.

Just before the awards were announced, Eric Kohn, blogging for the New York Press, chose his favorites for each of the categories. Like Tom Hall's picks, these choices are explained - good, quick reading on both accounts.

In an earlier entry, Tom writes, "In almost every single fiction (and, come to think of it, non-fiction) film I have seen at this year's festival, white American (heterosexual) masculinity has been exposed as the playground of self-serving, foul-mouthed, misunderstood pricks whose sole mission in life is to destroy the happiness of women and their fellow men." In short, this was "The Year of the Asshole."

For Time, Rebecca Winters Keegan lists "Seven Surprises from Sundance" - not movies, but trends... or rather, trendlets.

Justine Elias runs down a few festival highlights for the Observer. Also, Killian Fox, briefly, on the shorts.

At Cinematical, Kevin Kelly has a much more thorough review of at least one batch, the Shorts II program. Also, Tommy DiChiara breaks Sundance down "by the Numbers." Nothing to do with acquisitions.

Online viewing tip. A wrap-up edition of iW VIDEO.

Fests and events, 1/29.

Andy Spletzer is attending the International Film Festival Rotterdam (through February 4) and blogging away. Yesterday, he described how, on the spur of the moment, he made a film - which is now showing at the fest. Ok, not in the program, but it is showing at the fest. Related: European-films.net is all over the festival with reviews and several particularly nice pix.

Jonathan Rosenbaum's in Rotterdam as well: "I've seen only one feature so far that I've cared for very much - a documentary called Murch by Edie and David Ichioka, about film editor Walter Murch (whom I once had the pleasure of working with on a re-edited version of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil). The film offers a fascinating glimpse of some of the tricks of Murch's trade, presented with wit and lucidity."

"On Friday the weather didn't disappoint, with a steady rain falling much of the day." Wendell Jamieson seems to genuinely enjoy reporting from the Noir City festival in San Francisco for the New York Times. Also through February 4. Related: Anne M Hockens sends reviews of Raw Deal and Kid Glove Killer up to the Siffblog.

Interview. Joe Carnahan and Jeremy Piven.

Smokin' Aces "may not necessarily pay off in terms of character or dramatic heft, but viscerally, it is strangely fascinating," writes Sean Axmaker, introducing his interview with its director and star. He also asks Joe Carnahan about the film's shared DNA with his debut, Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane, and gets Jeremy Piven going on Entourage.

Related: "A world series of assassins may be the movie's five-word pitch but, burdened with an unnecessarily complicated and aggressively insistent backstory and hence immediately unintelligible, Smokin' Aces is one busy-busy-busy movie," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Carnahan does, however, have an oddball sense of comic timing; what his picture lacks in hilarity it recuperates with a well-developed, albeit mumbling, sense of the absurd."

AO Scott in the New York Times: "'FBI! FBI!' Blam blam blam blam. '[Expletive]. [Expletive].' Blam blam blam. Spurt of blood. Plot twist. 'FBI! FBI!' '[Expletive].' Blam blam blam blam blam. '[Expletive].' "FBI!' 'Hotel Security!' Blam. Exploding skull. Guy sits on a chain saw. Montage. [Expletive]. Plot twist. Roll credits."

At Slant, Nick Schager calls it "a multi-character crime saga that's even less appealing than watching televised poker. Managing the impressive feat of getting practically nothing right, Carnahan's film is the ugly stepchild of True Romance."

"There was much to like about Narc, writer-director Joe Carnahan's previous feature, about a pair of cops dragged to gritty depths by a murder investigation," writes Cheryl Eddy in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "Unfortunately, any good cinema credit Carnahan earned with that flick dissolves in the cesspool that is Smokin' Aces."

Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical: "If this is Carnahan's version of Snatch, let's all pray he doesn't attempt an American version of [Guy] Ritchie's follow-up, Swept Away."

"There are nuggets of humor and flashes of hilariously choreographed brutality among the splatter patterns, but [Carnahan's] reluctance to develop any of the ideas beyond the vignette level makes for an unsatisfying whole," writes Kevin Crust in the Los Angeles Times.

Park City Dispatch. 8.

Brian Darr on Never Forever, Driving With My Wife's Lover and The Legacy.

As with any large film festival I've attended, Sundance screens far more programs than it's feasible for one person to see (take concurrent festivals like Slamdance, Tromadance, etc., into account and the task is even more impossible). In order to cope with the overabundance of choices, I've come up with a decision-making principle: when it comes to independent American dramatic features (as opposed to documentary features), I figure that the good ones are likely to get picked up by a distributor, or at least another film festival, and I'll have another opportunity to see them back home. I don't really need to see the bad ones.

As a result, I've so far only seen one American dramatic feature, Gina Kim's Never Forever, which I was curious about regardless of quality because of outstanding Korean director Lee Chang-dong's involvement as a producer. The film stars Vera Farmiga as a society wife who decides that the way to save her marriage to her impotent Korean-American husband (David McInnis) is to hire an illegal immigrant (Ha Jung-woo) for stud. I'm glad I did see it as, paradoxically, the film has enough problems that it doesn't seem like a slam-dunk for distribution. These problems include: a hopelessly predictable narrative, a rather muddled socio-political outlook (best not to think about it, but it's hard not to when most of the film's twists and turns are visible a reel or more away), and a very weak corner of this sexual triangle: McInnis, a pretty face saddled with a poorly-constructed plot device of a character to play. A score by Michael Nyman and an ambiguous coda are not enough to authentically deepen the film.

I haven't adopted the same principle around the dramatic World Cinema entries as I have with the American indies. I recognize that the system for distributing smaller subtitled films in this country has all but collapsed, to the point where it makes sense for Dave Kehr to call certain films "too good" to play in American arthouses. And with international sales agents asking most festivals and other non-profits to cover unprecedentedly large fees to screen their films, I try to take the opportunities when I'm presented with them.

One opportunity I decided not to let slip by was a chance to see Kim Tai-sik's first feature, Driving With My Wife's Lover, at the Egyptian Theatre. This South Korean loser comedy's love "quadrilateral," in which a Kangwon Province stamp-maker (Park Kwang-jun) attempts to revenge his cuckolding by a cab-driving womanizer (Jung Bo-seog), may not be fundamentally any more original than the triangle in Never Forever. But because the plot loosely hangs on a road movie frame, that is, loosely enough to allow for plenty of unexpected curves along the way, mostly coming in the form of highly symbolic and/or bizarre visual incongruities, the atmosphere remains fresh and engaging. Park is simultaneously unappealing and oddly compelling as the cock-blocked husband who hires the cabbie to drive him the long route homeward through tunnels and past fertility shrines. Although he rehearses how he'd like to confront the driver about the affair he's having with his wife (Kim Sung-mi), he's incapable of actually doing it directly, which spins the narrative in another interesting direction. Unfortunately, the final sequence undercuts the Aristotelian unity of the rest of the film, and for little apparent purpose other than to provide an excuse to use a shot of the taxicab driving under snowfall, clad in its elaborately quilted car cover. It's a beautiful shot, but I wish the credits had rolled before it.

I also, on little more than a whim and an open time slot, wait-listed for another road movie that ended up winning a Special Jury Prize from the World Cinema Dramatic Competition Jury: The Legacy [site]. Comparing notes with fellow wait-listers, I got the impression I was in the distinct minority in having missed director Géla Babluani's previous Sundance prizewinner, 13 Tzameti. He co-directed The Legacy with his father, Temur Babluani. The film drops three idealistic French faces (Sylvie Testud, Stanislas Merhar and Olga Legrand) onto the remotest of rural routes through the mountainous terrain of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. Their need to experience their journey through the lens of their video cameras borders on the pathological, but more dangerous is their desire to meddle in a longstanding vendetta in which the life of an old man (Leo Gaparidze) is about to be offered up as sacrificial olive branch. Inevitably the foreigners' involvement upsets the chances for country justice to be served, in a scene that is tensely staged and intensely metaphorical.

Sundance. Awards.

"A pair of Latin American stories won the top prizes at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival," writes Eugene Hernandez at indieWIRE, where's he's got a full report on how the awards ceremony played out last night.

Here's the bare bones list:

• Grand Jury Prize: Documentary: Jason Kohn's Manda Bala (Send a Bullet). GCD entry.

• Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic: Christopher Zalla's Padre Nuestro. GCD.

• World Cinema Jury Prize: Documentary: Eva Mulvad and Anja Al Erhayem's Vores Lykkes Fjender (Enemies of Happiness).

• World Cinema Jury Prize: Dramatic: Dror Shaul's Adama Meshugaat (Sweet Mud).

• Audience Award: Documentary: Irene Taylor Brodsky's Hear and Now.

• Audience Award: Dramatic: James C Strouse's Grace is Gone. GCD.

• World Cinema Audience Award: Documentary: David Sington's In the Shadow of the Moon. GCD.

• World Cinema Audience Award: Dramatic: John Carney's Once. GCD.

• Directing Award: Documentary: Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine for War/Dance.

• Directing Award: Dramatic: Jeffrey Blitz for Rocket Science. GCD.

• Excellence in Cinematography Award: Documentary: Heloísa Passos for Manda Bala (Send a Bullet).

• Excellence in Cinematography Award: Dramatic: Benoît Debie for Joshua. GCD.

• Documentary Editing Award: Hibah Sherif Frisina, Charlton McMillan, Michael Schweitzer for Nanking. GCD.

• Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award: James C Strouse for Grace is Gone.

• Documentary Jury: Special Jury Prize: Charles Furguson's No End in Sight. GCD.

• Special Jury Prizes for Acting:
  • Jess Weixler in Teeth. GCD.
  • Tamara Podemski in Four Sheets to the Wind.

• Special Jury Prize for Singularity of Vision: Chris Smith for The Pool.

• World Cinema Competition Jury: Special Jury Prize: Shimon Dotan's Hot House.

• World Cinema Dramatic Competition Jury: Special Jury Prize: Gela Babluani and Temur Babluani's L'Heritahe (The Legacy).

• Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking: Don Hertzfeldt's Everything Will Be OK. GCD.

• Jury Prize in International Short Filmmaking: Radu Jude's The Tube With a Hat.

• Shorts Jury Honorable Mentions in Short Filmmaking:
  • Ray Tintori's Death to the Tinman.

  • Mariam Jobrani's The Fighting Cholitas.

  • Marjan Alizadeh's Mardha Hamdigar Ra Behtar Mifahmand (Men Understand Each Other Better).

  • Joerg Wagner's Motodrom.

  • William Lorton's Spitfire 944.

  • Tom Brown and Daniel Gray's t.o.m..

• Shorts Jury: Special Jury Prize: Cynthia Wade's Freeheld.

• Alfred P Sloan Prize: Chen Shi-Zhen's Dark Matter.

• Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Award:
  • Lucia Cedron for Agnus Dei.

  • Caran Hartsfield for Bury Me Standing.

  • Tomoko Kana for Two By The River.

  • Dagur Kári for The Good Heart.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Interview. Farley Granger.

At the fourth annual Noir City festival in San Francisco, Jonathan Marlow cornered actor Farley Granger to discuss his fabled and fascinating career. Granger had the good fortune to work with a number of great directors over the years - Luchino Visconti, Alfred Hitchcock, Anthony Mann, Henri Verneuil - and his performances were always memorable, contributing greatly to the best qualities of every movie in which he appeared.

If Jonathan's conversation ignites your interest, he and his good friend Robert Calhoun have written a book, Include Me Out: My Life from Goldwyn to Broadway, which expands greatly on the stories that you'll find there. This much anticipated autobiography finally hits the shelves in February.

Weekend shorts, fests, etc.

In the week since the last batch of "shorts," there have, of course, been other things going on besides Sundance and Oscar talk.

The WSWS, for example, is running arts editor David Walsh's talk at York University, "Film, history and socialism" (Parts 1, 2 and the Q&A that followed).

In the latest issue of Offscreen to go online, Donato Totaro tackles Paul Schrader's "Canon Fodder," Paul Rist has two 2006 top tens, Paul W Salmon reviews Criterion's release of Powell and Pressburger's The Tales of Hofffman, and the titles of Heather Macdougall's and Linda J Merelle's articles tell all: respectively, "Local and Global Identity in European Film" and "Kieslowski and Besson Meet in Le Cercle Rouge."

"With nine nominations each, box office hits Rachid Bouchareb's Days of Glory (see Focus) and Guillaume Canet's Tell No One are vying for the title of Best French Film of 2006 and dominate the list of films selected for the 2007 Cesars." Fabien Lemercier has the full list at Cineuropa.

Michael Guillén talks with Mark Becker about Romántico, cinematographer Rainer Hoffmann about The Short Life of José Antonio Gutierrez and with Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck, who responds to a few recent criticisms aimed at The Lives of Others.

The Berlinale's Panorama program is now complete. Somewhat related: Pavel Braila at the New National Gallery in Berlin, through February 25.

"Wolf André Oleg 'Andi' Engel was the kind of man to invent a magazine (Enthusiasm) and a distribution company (Politkino) in order to spread the ideas and cinema of Straub/Huillet. He was also the kind of man to make issue Number 2 of Enthusiasm 30 years after the fact of Number 1." Andy Rector presents an essay by Engel on Straub/Huillet published in 1970.

Acquarello reviews "Isaki Lacuesta's elegantly conceived essay film Cravan vs Cravan on the enigma of Arthur Cravan - the legendary poet-boxer, Dadaist, writer, critic, eccentric, provocateur, editor of the notorious Left Bank cultural publication Maintenant (whose readership included such notable personalities as Ezra Pound, Maurice Ravel, Jean Cocteau, and Gertrude Stein), and nephew of famed Irish playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde who, in 1918, set alone on a boat off the coast of Mexico bound for Argentina to reunite with his expectant wife, poet Mina Loy, and disappeared."

"While it's understandable that Brando would be celebrated for his visceral portrayal of adolescent limitations at a time, after World War II, when that archetype began to overtake American society, that wasn't Brando's principal talent," argues Stanley Crouch at Slate. "The aesthetic fact of the matter is that Brando's main achievement was to portray the taciturn but stoic gloom of those pulverized by circumstances. He was one of our finest cinematic poets of defeat."

"Emanuele Luzzati, whose haunting fairy tale images graced opera stages and animated films, has died in his home in Genoa, officials said Saturday. He was 85." The AP reports.

Before catching up with the New York Times, note that Nikki Finke weighs in on the paper's shuffling of personnel overseeing movie coverage. Now then:

• "The cosmopolitanism of international filmmaking is matched by the parochialism of American film culture," sighs AO Scott. "Is it just me? I'm leery of nostalgia, but it does seem that things were different once."

• Manohla Dargis looks back, too: "Once upon a time not very long ago, it seemed as if the studios' specialty divisions might take independent film to another level, like the rich uncle who plucks you out of the weeds and makes you a star." They've done fine, but the true indies are left behind. But there's hope: "Video on demand may not be the great savior of independent film, but it bodes well for those who will never go Hollywood and wouldn't want to even if Harvey Weinstein himself signed the check."

• Kristin Hohenadel talks with Marjane Satrapi about seeing her bestselling Persepolis turned into an animated film.

• Written by Sam Fuller and directed by Douglas Sirk, Shockproof is "a curiosity that's more fun to think about than to watch," writes Matt Zoller Seitz.

• AO Scott: "2 or 3 Things I Know About Him, a new documentary directed by Malte Ludin, examines the impact of Nazism on a single family, in this case the family of a high-ranking member of Hitler's government. But if it tells, in Mr Ludin's words, 'a typical German story,' the movie also offers an unusually matter-of-fact picture of the private and public effects of ordinary evil." In the Voice, Jim Ridley: "Malte's discomforting interviews with his siblings, supplemented by surreally matter-of-fact, Zelig-like photos of Hanns in Hitler's company, make for gripping and confrontational viewing. Yet the harder he persists, the less clear it is what he wants from his family." More from Steve Erickson at Nerve.

• AO Scott: "A schematic exercise in liberal, privileged guilt - in the tradition of Crash and Grand Canyon, but without the prepackaged Southern California anomie - Breaking and Entering moves through a series of moral and social crises as if they were yoga poses and comes to rest with a smile of virtuous complacency on its face." For Salon's Stephanie Zacharek, it "might have been farce, if [Anthony] Minghella weren't so dead-serious." More from Nathan Lee in the Voice.

• Jeannette Catsoulis: "Uninvolving and cliché-ridden (even shape-shifters, it seems, deserve a falling-in-love montage), Blood & Chocolate is Romeo and Juliet with fewer manners and more exotic dentition." But Salon's Stephanie Zacharek finds it "offers the kind of B-movie pleasures - albeit elegant B-movie pleasures - that are hard to come by these days." More from Nick Schager at Slant.

• Stephen Holden: "Although I find the term 'chick flick' odious, I imagine that Columbia Pictures regards Catch and Release as exactly that, although there are signs that [first-time director Susannah Grant, the screenwriter behind Erin Brockovich and In Her Shoes] was reaching for something more layered and subtle than the usual fairy-tale formula. If the compromise between one thing and another leaves the movie struggling for basic credibility, its affection for its characters doesn't feel cynical." More from Stephanie Zacharek in Salon.

• Stephen Holden: "Archetypes and symbols solemnly parade through Seraphim Falls, a handsome, old-fashioned western of few words and heavy meanings that unfolds with the sanctimonious grandeur of a biblical allegory." Related: Pierce Brosnan "manages to show how far a serious actor will go to outrun his own glamorous persona," writes John Anderson.

• Jeannette Catsoulis: "China Blue, a heartbreaking and meticulous documentary about life inside a blue-jeans factory in China, reveals more than we may care to know about the provenance of our most beloved item of clothing." More from Michelle Orange in the Voice.

• Jeannette Catsoulis: "Aliens offer a cure for earthling ennui in From Other Worlds, a limp sci-fi comedy with fewer laughs than a meeting of Abductees Anonymous."

• Look Back in Anger "is almost pure autobiography, and as John Heilpern makes clear in his biography, the anger in it is so deeply personal, with such singular causes, as to make nonsense of it as politics." Ian Jack reviews John Osborne: The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man.

Jeff Reichert on two by Jacques Rivette: "Duelle and Noroît, represent something of a perfect double-bill, though I'd only recommend it to those well initiated with his work. Neither film's necessarily inaccessible, but they're both remarkably strange and benefit from firm grounding in his development through the 60s and early 70s." Also at Reverse Shot, Justin Stewart on Idiocracy.

"[Frank] Capra would almost single-handedly bring esteem to Columbia Pictures when he was hired by the studio in the late 20s," writes Zeth Lundy, who examines Capra's years at the studio for PopMatters.

To follow up on this, a few recent reviews from Steven Shaviro: Andrzej Munk's Eroica, Jiri Menzel's Closely Watched Trains, Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water, Milos Forman's Loves of a Blonde and Vera Chytilova's Daisies.

Time Out's Dave Calhoun visits the set of Ken Loach's These Times, "an uncompromising examination of the shady world of immigrant workers" in London.

"Dasepo Naughty Girls is Korea's entry into the hyper-stylized candy-colored absurdist comedy genre that has been popular of late in Japan, and it fits nicely alongside films like Survive Style 5+, Yaji and Kita: The Midnight Pilgrims and Funky Forest," writes Filmbrain. "In some ways the film is a tremendous departure for director Lee Je-yong, whose last film, Untold Scandal, was a Chosun Dynasty-era rendition of Dangerous Liaisons. However, in that film (as well as his earlier An Affair) Lee exposes a certain hypocrisy in Korean moral attitudes towards sex, and that criticism can be found in Dasepo Naughty Girls as well, though exaggerated for comedic effect.... [I]t is unquestionably one of the most original, memorable, and funniest Korean films of 2006."

Kyu Hyun Kim at Koreanfilm.org on I'm a Cyborg, but That's OK:

While by no means a "watered-down" version of Park Chan-wook's disturbingly resplendent cinema, the movie is likely to disappoint anyone looking for either a TV-drama style tear-jerking romance or a piece of white-hot "extreme cinema" with devastating plot revelations and dynamic action sequences, although it does contain one spectacular sequence of Peckinpah-like carnage that will blow many viewers out of their seats.... Still, few films I have seen, made in Hollywood or Japan, have had such a sumptuous but exacting imagination on display in re-creating the archetypically manga-ish imagery of a young girl fused with machinery. In my humble opinion, Park outclasses any living Japanese director (Kaneko Shusuke, Miike Takashi and Kurosawa Kiyoshi included) in getting "right" such mind-boggling visual details as the jet plasma ejected from the hovering Young-goon's sneakers, scorching footprints onto the dried glass.... Cyborg is every inch a Park Chan-wook film.

"Chatrichalerm Yukol is known in the west for the Francis Ford Coppola-edited version of The Legend of Suriyothai," writes Peter Nellhaus. reviewing Tamnan Somdej Phra Naresuan Maharaj: Ong Prakan Hongsa, which "has even greater ambitions than the earlier film... Part One clocks in at almost three hours, with a record length combined with a record budget for a Thai film. Chatrichalerm clearly wants to make the Thai equivalent to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and indeed recruited some of Peter Jackson's team."

"The Spinning Wheel Film Festival is a showcase of outstanding Sikh films, featuring a diverse mix of genres including documentary, independent, foreign and narrative films." Saturday, February 3, Standford, CA.

Ian Buruma in the New York Review of Books: "Deftly, without polemics or heavy-handed messages, [Clint Eastwood] has broken all the rules of the traditional patriotic war movie genre and created two superb films, one in English, the other in Japanese: Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. The latter, in my view, is a masterpiece." Related: Bruce Wallace profiles Kazunari Ninomiya for the Los Angeles Times.

Also in the LAT: Reed Johnson visits the set of Mike Newell's adaptation of Gabriel Garciá Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera and turns in a longish report.

And Susan King: "Saul Bass: The Hollywood Connection, which was developed with the curatorial guidance of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, also features screenings of his Oscar-winning 1968 short, Why Man Creates. And on select Tuesday afternoons this month and in February, the Skirball will screen films for which he designed the titles and the posters."

Related: Peet Gelderblom's Bass-inspired poster for Terrence Malick's Moby Dick, starring Mel Gibson. Commissioned, see, by Matt Zoller Seitz for his "Wish List" at the House Next Door.

Also: "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a that rarity of rarities: a genuinely deviant work of art. It's the kind of film that could move Prince, Oliver Stone, Courtney Love, Tom Ford, Jenna Jameson, Roman Polanski and Charles Manson to tears, and send them home elated and wrung out, with the same thought rattling in their heads: 'At long last, someone told my story!'"

Grant Rosenberg catches a rare screening of Robert Frank's Rolling Stones doc, Cocksucker Blues, and writes in Time, "Perhaps most pointedly, beyond all the antics of sex, drugs and rock n' roll, the film is a testament to overexposure. Everybody films everybody, all the time, even when nothing is happening."

Richard Corliss has really been cutting loose since Time's shift towards placing more emphasis on its online publishing. In his latest, he remembers Audrey Hepburn 14 years after her death: "In the 40 years between Hollywood's make-believe headlines and the horrifying reality of Somalia, Hepburn as actress and woman seemed an emissary from a finer world than ours."

At the Siffblog, David Jeffers calls DW Griffith's Way Down East "magnificent. By 1920, Lillian Gish had become an actress of considerable depth and the story, with its harrowing climax has never entirely left the cultural consciousness of the American Cinema."

Matthew Clayfield on Casino Royale: "[Daniel] Craig's debut does not, as I had initially expected, usher in the era of what some have called a 'brand-new Bond'; if anything, it ushers in the era of an old one - the oldest one, in fact."

That Little Round-Headed Boy has five thoughts on The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou.

"A ghost story as transparent as the specter of its title, The Other gave me the willies when it first came out in 1972," recalls Flickhead, who was 14 at the time. Now, he finds it "scattered, a frivolous mix of genres, patented Jerry Goldsmith musical clichés, and actors in search of motivation."

In contrast to John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, "for all his great roles, was never the ward of a great technician," notes Nathan Kosub in Stop Smiling. Even so: "At his best, Mitchum's characters follow hunches; when instinct doesn't pan out, he deals with the consequences without rescinding his intentions or mistakes. Sometimes he is cruel, more often indifferent, but always wiser than just street smarts, and romantic enough to believe in a kind of freedom most Western cowpokes or noir snoops never sniff the air enough to try. His persona wasn't Humphrey Bogart's cynicism or Grant's casual precision, but an internal remove that suggested a clear conscience and thought-out certitude."

John Adair's caught Children of Men, and now, he's exploring "why it is I reacted so strongly against [Alfonso] Cuarón's film (a film which has received nearly universal critical acclaim). Suffice it to say that when I walked out of the movie, I found my frustration growing to a point I rarely experience. What is it that's driving this reaction?"

"Diary of a Mad Old Man left me with a strong after-impression, and the sense that the film I wanted to write would be concerned with some of these ideas." Venus screenwriter Hanif Kureishi on the works of Tanizaki Junichiro.

Also in the Guardian:

• Steve Rose presents "a guide to the best issue-drama cliches. But let's not forget these films are here to help all of us - for we are the world." Fun. Related: In the LAT, Todd Boyd wonders, "When did Africa become so hip?"

• "Nicolas Roeg's 1973 film Don't Look Now, starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, is so iconic that it is easy to think you have watched it when you haven't. And I hadn't." Nell Leyshon on watching it once and then putting it away before adapting Daphne du Maurier's story for the stage.

• John Patterson: "The unreliable narrator could easily be superimposed upon almost every major release, and it would probably invigorate every last, sorry one of them. It could be offered retrospectively, as a DVD extra."

• Marina Hyde on the whole Tom Cruise as "new Jesus" thing: "Cynics are instructed to put aside the image of Terry Jones squawking, 'He's not the Messiah, he's a very disturbed man!' and just acknowledge how much more resonant the whole water-into-wine thing would have been if Jesus had been able to do cool bar tricks like Tom's character in Cocktail."

• Ed Pilkington meets the guys behind Loose Change, "the most successful movie to emerge from what followers call the 9/11 Truth Movement." Also: Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia is making a minor bestseller out of Isaiah Berlin's Russian Thinkers.

• Stuart Jeffries interviews Eva Green and Mark Brown profiles Paul Greengrass.

"Sadly, I watched each of these on DVD in my home, unless otherwise noted. Doesn't that just suck?" Matt Prigge introduces his list of "Eleven Favorite/Best Non-2006 Films Seen For the First Time in 2006."

Geoff Andrew talks with Nuri Bilge Ceylan about Climates for Time Out.

Back at IFC News, Aaron Hillis on why four fanboy directors and one fanboy extraordinaire should stay behind the camera.

"A tweaking of artists, the English, the Hollywood studio system, and freaked out momma's boys, all in one deliriously dark comic cavalcade." Bill Gibron revisits The Loved One for PopMatters.

Ella Taylor in the LA Weekly: "If [Sharon] Stone began 2006 in a fruitless effort to revive her early glory, she ended the year with two small but terrific turns in otherwise indifferent ensemble movies, both of which not only played against her beauty but drove home the fact that she's pushing 50. In each she plays, against type, a good woman blinded by her unconditional devotion to others."

In the Independent, Nicola Christie profiles Jodie Whittaker (Venus) and Michael Coveney meets Jessica Lange.

Eilene Zimmerman reports in Salon on how High School Musical can utterly restructure a family's lives.

Online viewing tip #1. Abbas Kiarostami's Two Solutions for One Problem at Expanded Cinema.

Online viewing tip #2. Brian, the "American Messiah" of The Proper Care & Feeding of an American Messiah, is not only blogging but also now "video blogging" on YouTube.

Online viewing tips. Kate Stables's monthly roundup for the Guardian.

Slamdance. Awards.

Announcing its awards, Slamdance notes that this year's edition, its 13th, "shattered all previous submission and attendance records, having received over 3,600 submissions from 20 countries for less than 100 slots, a milestone that catapults the movie showcase into one of the largest film festivals in the world, and attracted approximately 20,000 attendees." The winners:

• Grand Jury Award for Best Narrative Feature: Dylan Verrechia's Tijuana Makes Me Happy.

• Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary Feature: Adam Hootnick's Unsettled.

• Grand Jury Award for Best Animated Short: Robin Fuller's The Ballad of Mary Slade.

• Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary Short: Alice Nelson's A Map with Gaps.

• Grand Jury Award for Best Experimental Short: César Velasco Broca's Avant Pétalos Grillados.

• Grand Jury Award for Best Narrative Short: Charles Williams's The Cow Thief.

• Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature: Jeremy Saulnier's Murder Party.

• Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature: Red Without Blue, written and directed by Brooke Sebold, Benita Sills and Todd Sills.

• Global Audience Award for Best Anarchy Film: Danny Bourque's Commode Creations: The Artwork of Barney Smith.

• Spirit of Slamdance Award: JoEllen Martinson and William Scott Rees's The Mallorys Go Black Market.

• Award for Best Feature Length Screenplay: Nancy Kissam's Drool.

• Award for Best Short Screenplay: Ken Pisani's 4 Corners.

• Award for Best Teleplay: Marcus Clay Carmouche and Seamus Kevin Fahey's Ghost Towns.

• Award for Best Horror Competition Screenplay: Bobby Darby and Nathan Brookes's Slaughter.

• Creative Excellence Award for the Horror Screenplay Competition: Adam Balsam's Blood-Sucking Leeches and Flesh-Eating Maggots.

• Kodak Vision Award for Best Cinematography: Nikolaus Summerer, Director of Photography for Under the Sun.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Park City, 1/26.

Manohla Dargis in the New York Times:

[T]he single most depressing and brutally honest remark I heard all week, the statement that seemed to sum up what Sundance has become for many attendees, came from a distributor who explained why he had stayed to watch a bad comedy that features a clutch of low-level film and television actors. The movie might be lousy, he explained, but imagine 'all those names on a box,' meaning, imagine all those recognizable names once they are printed on a DVD box. It didn't matter that the film was incompetently made and, from the half-hour or so of it that I watched, unfunny in the extreme. It didn't even matter that the film probably wouldn't make much money when or if it was released in theaters. The box would be aesthetically and intellectually empty, but the box would sell.

"One of the debilitating side effects of the pop-culture 'mainstreaming' (if I may use an ugly marketing term) of the Sundance Film Festival brand over the last 20 years or so has been the over-glorification of what I call resumé movies." Jim Emerson elaborates.

"Whatever it once was, today's Sundance has gotten ugly," begins Tim Wu in Slate, wondering why, "despite living in an age where bands are born on MySpace and blogs by basement dwellers out-rate CNN, the world of independent film seems strangely immune to the World Wide Web. Sundance and other film festivals represent the big running exception to the main media story of the 2000s: crowds besting experts in finding great independent material." Here's where he's going: "The real problem is not the technology, it's us."

At indieWIRE, Michael Lerman's got a great overview of the slew of films he's caught at Slamdance. I have a few entries on a few Slamdance titles halfway ready to post, but I'd love to see them fleshed out, and I'd love even more to see more reviews or reactions to more Slamdance films. Please do drop a line if you run across anything.

All those Oscar nominations, and now, "Brits reign at Sundance," too, according to James Mottram in the Independent.

Online browsing tip. Susan Gerhard's list of ten virtual paths to Park City.

Online listening tip. Basically, Kenneth Turan tells NPR listeners that, yes, you'll hear about Grace is Gone, but you ought to be hearing about Once.

Online viewing tip. A second Cinematical roundtable.

David Lynch, 1/26.

Picking up where this left off: "Lynch transfers his own mercurial consciousness to his characters, and his two best films are about being trapped and being vulnerable, though each one has happy intervals of escape, all conceived in musical terms - a song about heaven in Eraserhead and the magnificent celebratory sequence behind the final credits of Inland Empire, a Felliniesque music video staged around Nina Simone's 'Sinnerman,'" writes Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader.

Updated through 1/30.

"And it can't be a coincidence that unwanted pregnancies and related feelings of guilt play significant roles in both movies," he continues. "The titles Eraserhead and Inland Empire, his only metaphorical titles, point to his guarded way of coping with his own ambivalence: he either censors (erases) some of his darkest thoughts or retreats into the relative safety of his inner self."

"Both Lynch and [David] Denby have expressed reservations about HD," notes Jim Emerson. "Lynch says, 'If everything is crystal clear in the frame then that's what it is - that's all it is.' Whereas, 'sometimes, in a frame, if there's some question about what you're seeing, or some dark corner, the mind can go dreaming.' (There's a powerful moment that illustrates this in Inland Empire for me: a shot that I first saw as a close-up profile of a Nosferatu-like figure pressed up against a wall in the darkness. Turns out, it's just a stain - or maybe even a digital artifact - on the wall at the end of a dark hallway.)"

Via Ray Pride, Mark Rahner's interview with Lynch for the Seattle Times:

Want to know what's missing [in Inland Empire]?

What's missing?

Dancing dwarf.

No.

No?

No.

Jette Kernion files a longish report on Lynch's Austin gig at Slackerwood.

Updates, 1/27: Ry Knight announces "The Lynch Mob" at Vinyl is Heavy: "Over the week of February 12th to February 16th (and possibly beyond) we will host a series of essays from each of our four five writers as well as various 'Lynch Links' to be co-ordinated and updated each day as the top post on the home page. We hope you can join us."

David Lowery catches Inland Empire a second time: "I don't think there is a key, or a mystery for that matter. It's all there, in a fairly straightforward sense, and going in looking for something that's missing will only take away from this one of a kind cinematic experience."

Nick Davis: "There is nothing clever, euphemistic, or hyperbolic about this admission: I have never been so scared in any movie as I was during the last half-hour or so of Inland Empire."

Update, 1/30: Ry Knight reviews Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity for the House Next Door: "[T]he whole book is an invitation. When you open Lynch's book, he, in turn, opens his front door and invites you inside for a cup of coffee. And, perhaps, a twenty-minute meditation session."

Sundance. El Bufalo de la Noche (The Night Buffalo).

"Dogged by the suicide and memory of a schizophrenic friend, a young man makes all the wrong choices in The Night Buffalo, the latest work from the prolific world of Mexican novelist-screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga," writes Robert Koehler in Variety. "Unfortunately, the author's tendency toward manipulative melodrama - standard in his collaborations with Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros, Babel) - trump his more interesting storytelling instincts, resulting in a profoundly unsatisfying drama."

Updated through 1/27.

For Bryan Whitefield, writing at ScreenGrab, this was "one of the films I was most excited about seeing," but it's left him "severely disappointed.... It's the weaknesses in the story and script that are this film’s real downfall."

The film, notes Michael Lerman at indieWIRE, "for its faults - most of which have to do with some ludicrous plot points - does manage to keep an eerie atmosphere with its skin-crawling music and jolting cinematography."

Update, 1/27: A "pretentious mess that seems interminable even at 97 minutes," warns Sura Woods in the Hollywood Reporter.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Other fests, other events.

For the Phoenix, Brett Michel previews the Korean Film Festival running at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston through Sunday: "Rather than focus on the fountainheads of modern Korean cinema, this new series relies on the emerging voices, a generation that appears content to explore similar themes from film to film. This is not a criticism; Japanese masters Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi spent entire careers doing much the same thing, to stunning effect."

Speaking of whom. The Stranger's Annie Wagner previews the Long Take on Mizoguchi series running through February 27 at the Northwest Film Forum in Seattle: "Famously ambivalent in his personal life (he's said to have broken up with his muse, the great actress Kinuyo Tanaka, around the time she became the first Japanese woman to direct a film in 1953), his films are unequivocally feminist. They're also despairing about the possibility of social change."

"Last week, not far from the Artic Circle, a group of film programmers and journalists huddled around a fire in a Sami tent at Norway's Tromsø Wilderness Center following an exhilarating dog sledge ride in the bracing below zero cold. After a luncheon feast of reindeer stew, they discussed the definition, history and future of film festivals." Alissa Simon files a report on the Tromsø International Film Festival for Facets Features.

Susan King checks in on the Through the Looking Glass (and Down the Rabbit Hole) series. Also in the Los Angeles Times, Alex Chun talks with Santa Barbara International Film Festival director Roger Durling about this year's edition, which runs through February 4.

Among the events J Hoberman highlights for New Yorkers this week: "Decasia was created for live performance; it's showing at a former synagogue on the Lower East Side, accompanied by TACTUS, the Manhattan School of Music's contemporary ensemble." Related: Alex Ross.

Also in the Voice, Ed Halter on Feedback, a program running at MoMa through January 31, and "a tribute to Chicago's nonprofit distributor Video Data Bank and its founders Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield, sheds light on a time when video remained, as Horsfield told the Voice recently, 'the stepchild of the artworld' - a rough new technology, proudly outside the gallery market system, inextricably bonded to political movements like feminism."

"Ah, subtext!" exults Armond White in the New York Press. "That hidden meaning Method actors emphasized is brought out into the open by British actors Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton in the 1964 film Becket," screening at the Film Forum through February 1. More from Ed Gonzalez in the Voice.

Park City Dispatch. 7.

Craig Phillips has taken notes on quite a panel.

A Sundance roundtable featuring four unique voices in American independent cinema - Hal Hartley, Tamara Jenkins, David Gordon Green and Gregg Araki - was focused on how each of them are making their way today and what's changed since they first started. The discussion was a great opportunity for both enlightenment and amusement; of the panelists, Hartley was the most chatty, and the funny Jenkins - possibly overwhelmed or just a little shy - the least. (She spiritually resembles the character Laura Linney plays in her new film The Savages.) But they all contributed enormously to this conversation; what follows is a sort of "best of."

On the genesis for their newest films, each of which have screened at Sundance:

Hartley: Fay Grim [site] is part two of what appears to be an ongoing process for me. I made a film in 1996 called Henry Fool, which me and my compatriots used to joke about being such a large story that it would [continue in the] future, [and] would talk about this story of a crazy, mixed-up but loveable family in Queens, New York as if it were my Star Wars. We would joke about, it but three or four years after the shooting, I couldn't joke about it any more, because it seemed like a really good idea. It's been a great ambition of mine since '91, when I first met Parker Posey, to write a movie for her from beginning to end, top to bottom. But I never found the right material - and we'd become friends, spoke all the time; [I] got to know her manner and everything - when we did this character Faye in Henry Fool, I understood what I had to do and it was really a perfect fit - that character, her talent, her manner, and how I write. It was sometime around 2000 that I really seriously started writing Fay Grim.

Gregg Araki: Smiley Face is kind of a potsmoking stoner comedy, which seems like an unlikely movie for people who are more familiar with my other work, but it does in a weird way fit the whole trajectory of my movies. Mysterious Skin was also sort of a departure in that it was based on a book, and was more serious and dramatic and heavy than some of my earlier work. I'm very proud of that but after doing such a dark and serious film I really wanted to do something the complete opposite. I wrote the script for Skin but didn't come up with those characters or the story - everything about it really belonged to Scott Heim. And Smiley Face was a script by a young writer named Dylan Haggerty who'd never had a script produced before. I just fell in love with this character and the story and love this movie as much as any I've done.

David Gordon Green: About three years ago I was here with another movie [Undertow], and a buddy of mine, Jesse Peretz [The Chateau], who's a filmmaker, too, said he was interested in directing this book, Snow Angels, by Stuart O'Nan, and asked if I'd be interested in adapting it. I'd never done a job before, and thought it'd be interesting to write for somebody else. I read the book and liked it, and then just started adapting it. I gave it to him a couple of weeks later and said, here's a direction I'd like to take it in if you want to talk more seriously about doing it. I worked with him for about a year and a half on it, developing it. He went off to do another movie and the producers that had acquired the property asked me if I wanted to step in and do the film. I wanted to step back a draft or two, take it where I felt like I had authorship over it. Developing it with somebody else's voice was an interesting process.

Tamara Jenkins: Unlike anyone else up here, I am the least prolific person on the planet. These guys are so frightening. Every year there's a new movie by every single one of them. And I'll think, is it because I'm a girl, and I'm just slow? And then I was with this woman on a film panel yesterday who really made me feel like I was in the Special Olympics. But these guys are just amazing. As I said I'm really slow and think I wrote the first scene for The Savages, or the first scene that was the nucleus for it, with a brother and sister, about ten years ago.

On what she's been up to since Slums of Beverly Hills:

Jenkins: I was submitted every teen girl comedy. [laughter] I got involved with a book that ended up being kind of a disaster for me and I worked on it for three years. That was horrible because it never happened; it was like the Bermuda Triangle for lost time. Regarding things that you get submitted because you've done a film about a teenage girl, they were just generic and not very interesting. And even just reading that stuff is totally time-consuming and can throw you off your instincts and what you're supposed to be doing yourself as a creative person. I can't imagine writing a script and giving it to somebody else, because to me writing a script is such a grueling process. I mean, I've done a couple of things for hire, which was rewriting pieces of somebody else's script as a job. They were rewrites on small jobs, on things that needed reshoots and things like that. But I've never been able to write something from beginning to end and then give it up.

I would love to adapt something I fell in love with, a novel. If my obsessions and the book's obsessions connect, it could be this really great thing.

Araki: It's very much like falling in love. You don't really know why. When I think about the stories Mysterious Skin and Smiley Face, they're literally so night and day, but I love them equally. I guess it's like another filmmaker said, all your films are like your children - I don't have kids of my own - you love them for all their faults. For me at least it's always been kind of personal. I just go with my gut.

On feeling pressure to produce:

Jenkins: I felt a lot of personal pressure because it was taking me so long to get another movie made. There was an article in the New York Times years ago that was about "Why do women [directors] take so long between their first and second features?" And there was a picture of me! [laughter] Like, "Wanted Dead or Alive." I didn't have children, so I didn't have that excuse, and I wasn't married, and I thought, Well, what am I doing? Then I got married, so I checked one thing off the list at least. I mean, I was doing things. I directed a play. I wrote things that were published, did public service announcements for Amnesty International, small odd things - I just wasn't making feature films. And when there's a setback, I'm always down for the count. Unlike these guys - I don't know how you do it. You guys must write really fast. [indicates Hartley] I know you do. And you guys, too. You're not like a woman agonizing.

I was self-loathing: "Why can't I do this?" But I do think in the amount of time its taken me to do another movie, that I work so hard at writing for my own personal growth, fiction and screenplays, and I'm very pleased that I feel like I'm getting better at it.

Green: I try not to have much of a preconceived expectation of myself. I just try to do whatever I think is funny. Like a funny phone call - yeah, I'll do that. I just want to have a good time.

Hartley: Just recently I adapted a Jack Kerouac novel, Doctor Sax, into a screenplay, for the nephew of Kerouac who owns the book. I was teaching in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and they were around there - friends with one of my business partners - and asked my advice on where I'd I go if I wanted to make this material. I think they wanted to make an animated version of the novel, which makes sense because it's about Kerouac's childhood and fantasy life. But they seemed to be going in a bad direction. Every time I talked to them, I'd try to pass on my experience. There are good decisions to make and bad decisions, the right people and the wrong people. Given their sensibility and what the book was, I thought they were talking to the wrong people. That was my opinion. Eventually, I knew the book so well and these people so well that I just said, "Oh forget it. Look, I'll write a script version and then use that version and get going with it." I don't know why. As soon as I said that, I was like, Uhhhhhgggh...[sighs]

But it was, in fact, a great exercise for me to take somebody else's voice - to take Kerouac's particular way of seeing characters and situations, and the words he put into people's mouths - and apply a structure and momentum to it that I didn't think was in the book. To just make a satisfying experience for people who like Kerouac. I didn't feel like my sensibility was very evident. I don't know what will happen to that project at this point, but it was a worthwhile thing.

Like Tamara was saying, when you make your first film and it's coined a certain type of movie, everybody comes to you with thousands of scripts that are about the same thing. When people would give me scripts that were supposedly like The Unbelievable Truth, I didn't understand what they were thinking. And couldn't provide anything to those scripts.

On development money:

Hartley: I don't think I've ever been in a development situation. It's always: Write the script and then come to the table with the script. These are my friends and we want to make this film. I guess I mean I've never been paid to develop a script. That sounds like such a civilized thing. Actually, I was just paid to write a short film that they don't even have the money for making yet. And when they paid me, I said, "Gentlemen, this is the most civilized thing I've ever had happen!" Just unbelievable. In Europe, they think of American [artists] as these, like, Jeremiah Johnson types, mountain men, who eat sticks because we don't have any government funding or anything like that. I said, "Yeah, it is sort of like that."

Green: I guess development to me is like flirting with a girl; you have to give yourself a lot of opportunities to turn around and go the other way, or you can hook up. You get in a room with producers, financiers, actors, you kind of all look at each other, assess each other, size each other up, see if it works. If it does, take the next step. Some of them, I'll write, get producers attached, and then I'll get to the casting and all of a sudden the studio or whoever I'm working with will say, "Eh, we see a different cast." I'll say, I don't like that idea, then go away and close up that project, open up another one. So I've got a number of experiences in... not going all the way.

But there are times when I'll feel it. There's that energy about 30 percent of the way through the development when you don't have that anxiety, where you know you've got the people and are gonna muscle it through. It's gonna happen, we're going to face our obstacles - do or die, we're rolling camera in six weeks. You get that attitude - get the right people together and it happens. In my experience, with the ones that didn't happen, I'm glad they didn't happen because there was something about them that would have stunk it up anyway.

On finding the right producer and people who "get" them:

Green: It's just somebody you can communicate with, jump in the trenches with. One producer's followed me through all four of my films, Lisa Muskat. And a lot of the crew, too, I met in film school, and we all just knew early on, when we were making short films and school projects that we had a similar vibe, style. We like working with each other, know when to work, when to play. You get that kind of communication with somebody, know how to be tough, push each other in the right direction, and it works. When people make you feel guilty about things and you know you shouldn't be, or try to be confrontational when it should be rationally discussed, or they're being passive aggressive about things that should be laid on the table, then... it's time to find some new friends.

Hartley: I started out with a group of people, and I don't know if they had the same ambitions, but they wanted to be successful. We all did. So we could help each other. At the beginning it wasn't so important that my producers or my crew particularly liked the concepts of the movies I wanted to make. We were honest with each other. Of course, they were the type of people who were polite, too. They wouldn't wake up in the morning and say, "You know, I hate the kind of work you do, but we need to shoot a movie." They were decent people.

So it takes time, hanging out with people, getting to know them. Ted Hope and I have this professional relationship for awhile that's been really productive. I don't think we had the same taste in movies at all, really, at least when you're sitting around a table talking about movies. But like David was saying, when you're down in the trenches trying to make something happen, a lot of a person's soul is revealed and you want to be able to trust them. Ultimately, maybe it's not that important that they "get" you. Or they get you but they don't have to share your tastes and sensibilities.

It might be worthwhile to compare it to a corporate business model and something that's more hands-on entrepreneurial. I made one movie that was supposed to be independent but was made for a studio, and this experience of dealing with people whose allegiance is to their paycheck from this huge corporation is remarkable - the hypocrisy and the outright silliness. I had to work a lot harder to protect the film. There'd be really hilarious things, like a middle management guy talking to you, saying, "This is really great, this is really great." And then his boss shows up and says, "I don't know, we have to do something about the third act." And the other guy says, "Exactly. Third act." I mean, you see this stuff mocked in movies all the time but it comes from a real place, from the corporate world, where your humanity is shaped by your function in the machine. Corporate attitude is what I immediately recognize as the problem. And that even comes through in some smaller budgeted productions. You just have to recognize it for what it is and disconnect it.

Araki: Like what David was saying, it is a lot like dating, finding someone who's compatible. I've been through it, had "bad dates" and "good dates." There's so many really great people out there who are really talented and great to work with, and there are probably even more horrible people out there. You have to encounter both and learn to avoid the terrible people at all costs. You have to trust your instincts.

On what they enjoy about independent filmmaking (or, as the moderator put it, "You're certainly not in it for the money"):

Hartley: Well, to be perfectly honest, I am in it for the money. I mean, I consider myself an artist, too, and try to be true to that, but I do have a family to take care of. Why should I do this for nothing? I've learned a lot about doing business; I just do it in a particular way. I'm much more interested in talking to business people than I am talking to philanthropists. I don't want to be a charity case. It's important because, in the early days of your career, you get a lot of people talking about support. "We supported you." Right, you didn't program the film on television and make money - you were supporting me, that wasn't business. Right. So, you have to be careful about that. But, yeah, I'm a professional filmmaker; that means I get paid for what I do. No reason to be ashamed of admitting that.

Green: I think everything is fun. I even like going to the corporate meetings and pitching it. Getting everybody excited, that's kind of fun. The only thing I don't like is when you have to make the credits for your movie and everybody starts crying because they wanted their name in a specific place. I actually had to appeal to my union so that the title of my movie could come after my name. There's so many weird politics about it; everybody gets really possessive about credits. I don't think we should even have credits - the title sequence should just be cool parts of the movie, and they should take out the titles.

I also don't like doing ADR [additional dialogue recording] - I don't like looping things.

Jenkins: Yeah, that credit thing is so bizarre. It's like a laboratory for bizarre human behavior. We just had it with our film, too. There was so much drama - or it was really like a comedy. I could not believe the way people were about it!

Araki: Yeah. Credits suck. It's just the whole "Produced by," "Executive Producer," "Associate Producer," that whole thing.

On the current climate and what's changed over the years:

Green: There's a lot of ways of approaching the financing, structuring and putting the project together, but with this particular project [Snow Angels], it became pretty clear that it was execution dependent. It needed to prove itself. It wasn't something that you could pitch to a studio or a distributor and have them get enthusiastic about. It was something that they could respect the writing maybe or the casting, but it really had to be made without the corporate involvement because this one needed special handling. You needed to show people what the movie was about rather than trying to verbalize it. But every situation is different. You look at the market, what people are selling, and this wasn't a project that had an obvious fit there, so we had to make it as good as we could. There are projects where you have a great concept and the package is wonderful and you make a killing up front, but you make a mediocre movie.

You have to have a respect for where the business meets the art and try to make those compromises to the best of your judgment for a particular project.

Araki: I've always said that I would rather make a movie today for a million dollars than five years from now for ten million. That's just the way I feel. That's why all my movies have been made with these very tight budgets and in a certain independently financed way. People think, oh, you're Gregg Araki, it must be so easy for you, people just throw money your way. It's not like that. Every movie is harder and harder, there's less and less movies, less and less companies out there, and more and more people wanting to make movies - like this room full of people all have movies to make. It's really competitive.

On how technology has changed since they started making films, and changed the way they make them:

Hartley: It's changed shooting, because I've been able to work with smaller cameras, DV stuff. I'm looking at the camera trying to see what that material can give me. I don't want to just try to make this new material try to do what 35mm does. It's changed my work in that it's pushed me into different imagery.

Araki: It's amazing. My first movies were literally edited on a 16mm upright sewing machine, basically, splice and tape and the whole deal. Doom Generation was one of the first movies that we cut digitally on the Avid. And I remember we had to put down a huge chunk of the budget for it, like $100,000. And then for Mysterious Skin and Smiley Face, we used a Final Cut system that was literally $2,000 for the whole thing - computers, software, everything. It makes it all so much easier, and I love the process of editing; it's so creative now. I've edited all my films and it's one of my favorite parts of the process because you just get to play with the material forever. With film editing, you never did that. You'd just cut and say, "Okay, this scene's kind of working out - don't touch it! Because it's going to fall apart if you run it through an editor again!" Now you can just play with it, sculpt it, change it - the creative freedom is amazing.

Hartley: I'd like to tell a funny story having to do with Gregg. Before I started my first feature film, I came across an article in one of thse movie fanzines in '87. It was an interview with Gregg talking about his first two films...

Araki: They were literally black and white non-sync features.

Hartley: And Gregg said, "Well, the first feature film cost $5,000, but the second film cost $3,000 because we had learned so much on the first one." [laughter] I cut that out, Xeroxed it, glued it to my wall. It was great.

Jenkins: Was there a difference for me? You mean because they'd invented sound? [laughter] I went to film school and shot on 16mm film and we edited on splicers and tape. What was especially new this time was doing a DI - digital intermediate color correction. This was like a gift from God. We got it because the studios, Lone Star and Fox Searchlight, each paid for half. It was kind of late in the game and we really wanted this to come to Sundance and didn't have time to do the answer prints. So a bonus of coming to the festival was this acceleration cost where they said, "Well, we're going to have to do a DI."

It was phenomenal experience, where you get to go into a room, at this place called Laser Pacific in LA. It was incredible. We shot really quickly - it was 120 pages in 30 days. I thought that was really quick, though you guys probably think that's luxurious. Anyway, my DP [Mott Hupfel] was fantastic, but we had some issues in a few scenes with low light, and with DI you could take a little chunk, even just one part of a person's face that was too dark and just tweak it. It's very expensive; you can only be in this room for so long unless you're making some epic movie and have tons of money. But we got to correct a few things and it was incredible. [For example], the movie is supposed to be set in winter but we shot it in April in New York - thank God there was a snowstorm one day. That was amazing and helps sell the whole thing. But we had some problems with [too much] green throughout the whole thing and we could go in and suck out the green in these areas of the film just to make it not look like April.

On obtaining music rights:

Araki: I am a total music-head, and my movies are frequently inspired by music, so sometimes in my scripts, like in Mysterious Skin, it actually mentioned the Slowdive song that plays over the opening credits. But having been through the music ringer so many times now, the music thing is getting worse and worse for every movie. Smiley Face has a lot of my usual suspects, Chemical Brothers and all that, but also some weird cues like Styx and REO Speedwagon. As a filmmaker, also, you have to be able to - I have a huge collection - you have to be able to switch, if it's like $2,000 for that song, or $100,000, forget it. You can't insist on a specific song because you'll never finish the movie.

Green: Yeah, you have to be open-minded when you walk into it. I always have things in mind, and play music on the set constantly. I have an idea where I'm going to go. And I have a composer, David Wingo, that I work with on all my movies - he's my best friend since we went to see The Karate Kid in the third grade - he can do all sorts of stuff, so if I can't get the rights to a song I really want, he can do a version that's in the same vein. But you try to take personal approaches to it. Like Explosions in the Sky. I communicated with them directly, and said, "I know you guys are big now but it would be fun to work together." And there are other record labels where it's like, if you're not talking big bucks, it's not even worth the paperwork, so don't bother. Like we were trying to get some older, more well-known songs, and I wanted a Bread song in the movie, which was tough to get. It turned out my uncle was in a fraternity with David Gates and dropped him an email to ask about it. So you try to do those kinds of things, sometime it helps, sometimes it's a dead end.

Araki: Sometimes even that little indie label you think is cool is owned by these huge corporations like Time Warner. And because there are so many layoffs in the music industry, they have like two people clearing all the music rights for Time Warner. It's scary.

On what attracts them to particular projects:

Araki: It's weird what appeals to me. I just sort of follow my heart. Either come across material like Mysterious Skin or Smiley Face, or by writing my own scripts. Gus Van Sant gave me the best advice. He said you shouldn't worry about what everyone else is doing or what's hot or what's selling. I just do what I do. There are certain things I know I don't want to do, like I know I don't want to do a gangster movie. There are certain genres I just don't want to go near. I'm pretty open to almost anything else. I've been working on this horror sci-fi thing for a few years, and there's this family drama, an Ordinary People kind of thing - I don't know why it appeals to me, but it totally does. I try not to limit it to a "this is me" kind of thing, I just look for stories that appeal to me, that I fall in love with.

On European money:

Hartley: I once was pretty well supported in Europe, by the French, but that's over. Every single time it's a totally different thing. There were three films in a row - my second, third and fourth were made for a company in England called Zena. And that was a business deal, not "support." It was good business for both of us, but then that dried up. In the early 90s, they were making pre-sales in Europe. There was a lot of interest at that time in independent American films. It was a real new thing then, but for this American independent filmmaker at least, they lost interest. So I had to look to other places, and now most of my funding comes from the United States.

On producing other people's work and supporting up and coming filmmakers:

Green: I like helping my friends. People that help you out and work real hard and you see that they've got initiative, you see them invested in themselves. That makes you want to jump in there and help them out in whatever way possible. That may just be a phone call, a "go get 'em, Tiger," or giving them some money, or maybe literally make phone calls for them or physically help push the dolly, like I did on Great World of Sound. You kind of gauge what they need, and how passionate you are about what they're doing. It's just a matter of getting good voices out there, making movies so I stop wasting my money on some of the garbage I've shelled out cash for.

Hartley: For me, teaching has been my connection to the younger next generation. It's always kind of shocking when you discover that you actually have something that somebody else needs to know. It's like, Oh yeah, I actually do know something about that! That's very satisfying. It's very important, too, for me to stay connected to younger people, to know what's going on and what they're interested in. They're very ambitious and they're very smart, but they want to be famous and powerful.

Araki: It's really a generation thing. Hal and I and Rick Linklater and Quentin, we look back and see we were a sort of weird, 80s film school generation. We were all so passionate about filmmakers, Godard, Cahiers du Cinema, auteur theory, Hitchcock, Hawks. And the next generation seems different. When I was in film school, there were a few specific filmmakers that everyone was influenced by - Kubrick, Scorsese, Coppola... Now there's a completely different mindset and it makes me feel old. [laughs]

On living in LA:

Araki: I live in Los Angeles and love it. [laughs] A lot of people hate Hollywood and all the fake people and all that. I was just talking the other day to Miguel Arteta, who just moved to New York, and other filmmakers, Scott McGehee and David Siegel, they moved to New York, too. The cliché about LA is that everyone there is so mellow and brain dead, and life is easy because it's sunny all the time. But for me as a filmmaker, New York is such a struggle - like even just to get a carton of milk, that's your whole day, "I got milk and lived" - that I wouldn't have any energy left to make movies and write scripts. In LA, I have such an easy life, work on my scripts, work on my movies, do my stuff, that I feel fortunate.

Hartley: You're from there, right?

Araki: Yeah, well, I grew up in Santa Barbara, Southern California...

Hartley: I think this is important because - it's not necessarily about a lifestyle, but you're very part and parcel about the geography of the place. I think that contributes to an artist's voice. I've never had much of a reason to be in LA but I remember discovering your films and thinking, Wow, this is a side of LA I've never heard about. Even the authorial voice of your work was something I hadn't heard about. But it definitely seemed like LA. And around the same time, I was also getting interested in X. I said, Wow, there's something else happening there that they don't tell you about. [Note: Hartley currently lives in Berlin.]

Jenkins: I live in New York. It's a hard thing not to live by choice there because it's expensive. But I've lived in the East Village for 15 years.

Green: Los Angeles and New York are both exciting, wonderful places, and I think you can sculpt them into being the communities with resources that you need. But I like to be bored, and whenever I'm in those places, I always feel the need to go out because there's always some once in a lifetime opportunity, something amazing happening. I live in New Orleans, where I can just sit back on my porch and something amazing's just gonna go right by, and I'll just sit there with a book or a lemonade watching it go by. I like to stay away from the business, keep it peaceful.

On the pressures of the indie market; and the "Sundance film":

Jenkins: You're talking about the institutionalization of the independent aesthetic, right? Like that there's this "originality" - "Oh, they're quirky," and they're this, and that it's going to be that kind of independent film or that kind. I do think there's this kind of expectation when you're seeking financing that they need to be able to plug it into something that they've already seen that was successful. Just like they do in Hollywood. It's just a different economic branch of the same problem. If there's something utterly unique, or if it hasn't been discussed before, it's harder. There was a lot of anxiety with my movie because it's not the sexiest subject matter in the world - two middle-aged siblings put their father in a nursing home - that doesn't sound really sexy. It was really hard to get financing for it. I don't know, I think there is that desire to find something else like it that did well.

Araki: I don't want to sound like a preacher or something, but I don't think you should make a movie just because it's like another movie that was successful at Sundance. One of the horrors of 90s American cinema is all the people who wanted to make their Reservoir Dogs, which resulted in some of the worst films ever made. You need to stay true to your own individual voice and what you want to say, and not go, "Oh, Little Miss Sunshine is great and I want to make the Sunshine of next year." As a filmmaker, you need to be true to your voice, and hope that will connect on a broader level.

Sundance. Black Snake Moan.

"Some people will consider Black Snake Moan [site], Craig Brewer's second feature after his triumphant debut at Sundance two years ago with Hustle & Flow, to be a powerfully involving story of redemption," blogs Eric Kohn for the New York Press. "Others will think that it's exploitative, directionless, and dumb. There is a middle ground, however, and I'll say this: At least it's not Hounddog."

But Zoom In Online's Annie Frisbie calls it a "parable wrapped in an exploitation movie" and "immensely entertaining.... There's nothing shy about this movie, with [Christina] Ricci seducing everyone around her (including the audience), and [Samuel L] Jackson unleashing the full force of his powerful personality. Each gives a mesmerizing performance. Together, they're a sticky August night, cold beer and heat lightning, too many ways to sin but there's always church on Sunday."

Updated through 1/30.

Cinematical's James Rocchi finds it "a lesser film than Hustle & Flow. It's not that Black Snake Moan is provocatively salacious, but rather that it's poorly structured."

For the Los Angeles Times, Robin Abcarian talks with Ricci and Brewer, who calls the film "a kind of stew. A Southern narrative. This constant circle of sex and fear and lust and God." And Sheigh Crabtree meets cinematographer Amy Vincent: "If Craig came to me with material even more extreme than Black Snake Moan, I know it's ultimately going to be a story about love and redemption. So yes, I would go anywhere with him."

Ray Pride snaps photos of the swag: "This is the rear of the Black Snake Moan promotional hat; after you see the back side, you may thing it's both crass and brilliant, as a handful of people think of the movie itself."

Updates, 1/26: "It's difficult to calculate a film's merits while enveloped in celebrity endorphins and the clicking of a thousand camera phones, but let's just say the audience turned up determined to have a good time and was not disappointed," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Some viewers will doubtless disagree, but I see no misogyny at the heart of Black Snake Moan. It depicts a misogynist society, one that has beaten, shamed and victimized Rae all her life. But if that society has warped Rae's self-image, it has not vanquished her spirit. Both she and Lazarus may be trapped in dime-novel situations, separately and together, but they nonetheless are complicated, fleshed-out characters, marred by self-hatred and stiffened by pride."

Bob Fischer talks with Amy Vincent for Filmmaker.

Update, 1/30: Scott Foundas calls it "a fairly straightforward variation on George Bernard Shaw - Pigsfeetmalion, if you will. When he outgrows his terminal adolescence, Brewer might be the perfect filmmaker to take on William Faulkner or Tennessee Williams."

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Longford.

"A crime that shocked a nation becomes the touchstone for a social campaigner's test of his Christian beliefs in Longford, another powerful exercise in dramatized 'reimagining' by The Queen scribe Peter Morgan," writes Derek Elley in Variety.

"It's inspiring to see faith in action taken seriously, and a reminder that religion has its share of saints as well as hypocrites," writes Annie Frisbie for Zoom In Online.

For background on "one of the most engrossing of the new British films," see David Thomson's recent piece for the LA Weekly.

Andrew Haydon saw it on the UK's Channel 4 back in November and, writing for Culture Wars, found a few problems.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Park City, 1/25.

A few odds and ends. First, today at noon, there'll be an event at the intersection of Main Street and Heber Avenue: "Filmmakers Rally Against Troop Surge... We stand in solidarity with the nationwide protests planned for Saturday Jan 27."

David Bordwell: "We call a bland Indie film quirky, but there are others we call dark. They're Indie Guignol.... Reports from Sundance indicate that the trend isn't flagging."

Rob Nelson in the City Pages on a few docs: "Zoophiles are people, too, but not so the genocidal monsters of the Darfur doc The Devil Came on Horseback."

"An alleged cult, the police and HBO all mingled in a wild night Tuesday in Park City," reports Steven Zeitchik for Variety. "At a Slamdance screening of Noah Thomson's docu Children of God, two members of 'the Family,' the alleged cult profiled in the docu, were ushered out of a Q&A after they began protesting the film and one was found to be wearing a microphone."

Via the Film Panel Notetaker, Shooting People's Jesse Epstein's notes on the Documentary Funding panel.

A bit of online viewing that hasn't been mentioned in other entries:

• A series from Casimir Nozkowski (Crying, while eating) for the Daily Reel.

• The IFC's Matt Singer talks with Crispin Glover.

• A Cinematical roundtable with Anne Thompson, Kim Voynar and James Rocchi.

• IndieWIRE talks with Christine Vachon.

• David Poland's growing a beard.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Noir City.

"The screen comes painted in startling collisions of black-and-white, but the truth is never anything but gray," writes Robert Avila at SF360. "It's classic film noir - courtesy of Noir City 5 [tomorrow through February 4], the fifth edition of San Francisco's prominent annual noir fest - and its indelible contrasts color the world to this day in iconic images as definitive as the light cut by a Venetian blind."

For the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Max Golberg talks with fest organizer Eddie Muller about how the event has prompted studios to look into their vaults, release DVDS and, more urgently, preserve their treasures: "'In these last five or six years,' he says, 'I've learned the possibility is very real that American culture can just decay and slip away.'"

Somewhat related: New Yorkers, you can get your noir fix at the Pioneer, currently screening Shockproof, written by Sam Fuller and directed by Douglas Sirk.

Sundance. Slipstream.

"Apparently needing to release some private thoughts, musings and images to the world, Anthony Hopkins takes a leap into stunning self-indulgence with his directorial debut, Slipstream," announces Robert Koehler in Variety. "What can either be viewed as one huge home movie or a plaything from an actor who has been observing other filmmakers for decades, pic strains to convey the interior emotions and ruptures of a vet screenwriter on deadline, and the obnoxious film crew and cast that keeps intruding into his universe.... If, among actors-turned-filmmakers, Clint Eastwood stands on one pole of classical restraint, Hopkins certainly stands on its opposite."

"In this poor man's Inland Empire, the veteran actor and first-time filmmaker condenses a lifetime's worth of mental doodles into one flatulent anti-industry tirade," writes Dennis Lim for indieWIRE. "The promise in the program note that the audience will start 'questioning the limits of the human brain' proves all too accurate."

"The editing is absolutely squirrel-fucking insane," notes Quint at AICN. "At the Q&A afterwards, Hopkins said that he views the whole thing with a great sense of humor.... I'm still personally trying to figure out just what the hell Slipstream is."

John Horn talks with Hopkins for the Los Angeles Times.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. In the Shadow of the Moon.

"David Sington's In the Shadow of the Moon is an awe-inspiring film about an unbelievable accomplishment," writes James Israel. "One particularly ironic shot [is] of a modest sign that NASA displays after landing on the moon that simply states, 'Task Accomplished.' It is obviously reminiscent of a recent display of misguided bravado that makes one yearn for the 1969 America where racial and social lines were being redrawn, people weren't afraid to speak out against a unjust war, and men dared to dream of the impossible."

Updated through 1/29.

But Michael Lerman, writing at indieWIRE, finds it "overly nostalgic, dripping with sentimentality from every pore, and putting the old TV footage to triumphant music seems like a forced miscalculation."

A "surprisingly fresh take on familiar material," writes Jamie Tipps at Film Threat. "The success of this movie is twofold. First, Sington treats the topic with a combination of wonder and awe... Second, lest he fall into over sentimentality, the director balances his reverence with the interviews of the astronauts, a technique which effectively anchors the grand abstractness of the subject in the wonderfully human details."

Jennifer Hillner at Wired News: "I sat down with Apollo 11 vet Buzz Aldrin two days after his seventy-seventh birthday to talk about the movie, his views on the space program today, and what the future holds."

IndieWIRE interviews Sington.

Update, 1/26: Picked up by ThinkFilm for $2.5 million. (Variety).

Update, 1/29: Tom Hall: "There is a clear dedication in In the Shadow of the Moon to the power of our collective will to realize the fullest of human potential, and in the face of so many films highlighting the depths of human behavior, Sington's movie was a true breath of much needed (and highly enlightened) fresh air."

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. The Nines.

"Screenwriter John August (Go, Big Fish, Charlie's Angels) makes his directing debut with The Nines, an interlocking metaphysical puzzle that amuses, engages, frustrates, and leaves audiences with a lot to chew on," writes Annie Frisbie at Zoom In Online. "August is going way, way conceptual with The Nines, and gives Lost a run for its metaphysical money."

But for Mike D'Angelo, writing for ScreenGrab, August is "squandering his first shot as an auteur by indulging an idea so breathtakingly stupid that I personally witnessed it get shot down twice in undergraduate screenwriting courses at NYU, in both cases by professors who cared enough about their students not to let them waste their time on anything that inane."

Dennis Harvey, writing in Variety is far more upbeat, admitting that, yes, "The Nines arcs from witty Hollywood insiderdom to a climactic metaphysical leap that may leave many viewers nonplussed. Nonetheless, there's more than enough intelligence, intrigue and performance dazzle to make this an adventuresome gizmo for grownups - albeit one whose complexity presents marketing challenges."

But here's the thing for the Hollywood Reporter's Sura Wood: "August initially conceived of the project as three separate ideas, and therein lies a problem: The three sections, which feature the same four actors playing different roles with overlapping phrases and ideas, don't coalesce into a cohesive whole or stand on their own."

Via Ray Pride, a few pages from the screenplay.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Padre Nuestro.

"Loaded with supersonic shooting style and moral ambiguity to spare, Christopher Zalla's Padre Neustro is easily the best directed narrative feature I've seen at this year's festival," begins ST VanAirsdale at the Reeler. "It's an engrossing story - a tribute to Zalla's extraordinary pacing and characterizations; that said, it's a difficult sell if only because it features only one genuinely likable character - Diego - and then places him inexorably in devastation's path."

Updated through 1/30.

Another endorsement comes from Steve Ramos at indieWIRE: "[A]rguably the best dramatic feature I've watched so far at the festival. My initial response would be to call Padre Nuestro an immigration drama, one grittier and a notch more tragic than the recent Sundance movie Maria Full of Grace."

The Reeler and indieWIRE interview Zalla.

Update, 1/25: James Ponsoldt talks with Zalla for Filmmaker.

Updates, 1/30: Cyndi Greening: "I really connected with this film and, clearly, the dramatic jury panel did as well. Superbly acted, exquisitely shot and beautifully edited, Padre Nuestro was a pleasure on many levels."

Scott Foundas: "Part thriller, part Greek tragedy, the Spanish-language Padre Nuestro stars a cast of unknowns in what is an often bleak portrait of America's have-nots, and is one of the only movies I saw in this year's competition that reminded me of the original mandate of the indie-film movement: to tell stories that Hollywood itself would not tell and give voice to those who are too often silenced in mainstream movies."

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Never Forever.

"Never Forever from writer/director Gina Kim is a marvelous film," writes Annie Frisbie at Zoom In Online, "a haunting meditation on love, desire, and hope, with a radiant central performance from [Vera] Farmiga, in a role that couldn't be more different from the cocaine addict she played in Debra Granik's Down to the Bone... [A] small masterpiece."

Updated through 1/28.

"The film's lyrical soundtrack by Michael Nyman calls to mind an earlier work by the composer, Jane Campion's The Piano, obviously an influence on Never Forever," notes Anthony Kaufman in indieWIRE. "While evoking similar lyrical rhythms, dramatic flourishes and feminist themes, the choice of Nyman further helps to tip the film over the edge, from intimate character study to broad overreaching melodrama. Not that this is a terribly bad thing."

The Reeler interviews Kim.

Update, 1/26: A "surprisingly sensitive and mature first feature," writes Bryan Whitefield at ScreenGrab.

Updates, 1/28: "The film is problematic less because of the soapy aspects of the story... and more because the character of Sophie is a construct that never comes together," writes Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog.

And Brian Darr, right here.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Year of the Dog.

"Needy human animals straining against the leash of emotional expectations make Mike White's low-key Year of the Dog more situation tragedy than situation comedy," writes John Anderson in Variety. "But Molly Shannon's bittersweet portrayal of its lonely canine-loving heroine, along with a passel of pups trying to steal the picture, make for a satisfying and funny, if ironic, comedy intended for lovers of both the beast and/or sophisticated laughs."

Update, 1/25.

For Mike D'Angelo, writing for ScreenGrab, White, making his directorial debut, "seems constitutionally incapable of tackling any subject without resorting to cheap ridicule" and "constantly vacillates between asking us to empathize with these misfits and prodding us to guffaw at their pain. As usual, I responded by detaching myself altogether."

"Like [Gregg] Araki's Smiley Face, Year of the Dog is an enjoyable, patchy, rambling affair, a series of bittersweet comic sketches strung together with thin wire," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir.

Update, 1/25: Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker: "It's not a diss to say that midway through The Year of the Dog I had no idea where the film was going. Like Chuck and Buck, which White wrote, The Year of the Dog takes offbeat narrative asides and refuses to be bound by the rules that govern Hollywood-produced romantic comedies."

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Son of Rambow.

"Pairing very Britishly dry humor with a light-hearted exuberance, Son of Rambow [site] takes what could've been a gimmicky premise and turns it into a highly original comic adventure tale," writes Annie Frisbee at Zoom In Online. The film "aspires to be a lot more than just another Rushmore, and it achieves it in spades."

"After a week of high-power documentaries and wrenching dramas at Sundance, there's a strong chance I may have been extra-susceptible to the charm and sheer exuberance of Son of Rambow, the newest film from director Garth Jennings and the production team known as Hammer and Tongs," writes Cinematical's James Rocchi. "But I don't think so; the giddy, goofy and heartfelt creativity of Son of Rambow would stand out regardless of where, or when, one had the good fortune to see it."

"[F]uckin' great," exclaims Quint at AICN: "It's a comedy, absurd at times, it's a fantasy, it's a family drama, it's a coming of age story and it's also a love letter to watching and participating in the making of movies."

Variety: "A bidding war for British coming-of-age pic Son of Rambow broke out Monday night and lasted into dawn Tuesday before Paramount Vantage walked away with all worldwide rights for a reported $8 million."

Updates, 1/25: Mike D'Angelo at ScreenGrab: "Son of Rambow lacks the melancholy undercurrent that made Wes Anderson's film something truly special, but it definitely brings the funny."

Ben Walters for Time Out: "[A]n absolute treat, a schoolboy yarn with a bracing emotional honesty that packs a real kick."

Update, 1/26: Acquired by Paramount Vantage for over $7 million. (Variety).

Michael Lerman at indieWIRE: "[T]he perfect kids' film, capturing a fun, childlike and energetic spirit while simultaneously discussing issues of leadership, popularity and, to a surprising degree, religious choice."

Updates, 2/3: Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog: "Thick with whimsical visual gags (Rushmore cut a bit of a swath through Sundance 2007), 80s references and well-placed pathos, Son of Rambow works because of its leads: [Bill] Milner is wide-eyed and utterly without guile, while [Will] Poulter is not unlike Benny Hill squashed into the body of a ten-year-old. Neither panders for the sake of cuteness; both approach their roles with a certitude that's a reminder that even in the depths of childhood, you never think of yourself as a child."

Via Brendon Connelly, Coming Soon's "nice, long interview" with Hammer and Tongs.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Park City Dispatch. 6.

David D'Arcy moderated a panel last night of military experts, a journalist and No End in Sight director Charles Ferguson and producer Alex Gibney. Here, he offers his take on the film - and on the mess we're in. Related linkage follows.

The title No End in Sight points to how worrisome things have become In Iraq and in Washington. You get the feeling that the film could have been called The Perfect Storm if that title had not already been taken.

Charles Ferguson's first feature, produced by Alex Gibney (The Trials of Henry Kissinger, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), probes the decision-making process that got us into Iraq, and the subsequent decisions that got us in even deeper, as the Iraqi population and then the American electorate became aware of how a bad idea became an even more badly managed disaster. After taking Baghdad, the US forces watched as Iraqis looted their capital, destroying its infrastructure, pillaging its museums amd libraries, demoralizing the city, and fueling an uncontrollable atmosphere of anarchy that prevails today. Ferguson's film tracks the collapse of order from then to now, juxtaposing the recollections of analysts, administrators and soldiers about how the war was managed with the consequences of those decisions on the ground. It is graphic and grim.

The doc raises and explores now-familiar facts that should have been part of John Kerry's standard speech in 2004. When an advisory group assembled a 13-volume warning on the difficulties of occupying Iraq, Bush never read it. When it came to assigning responsibility for occupying Iraq, the White House assigned it to the Defense Department. When Bush annointee L Paul Bremer, the man given carte blanche to run Iraq, arrived in May 2003, one of his first major decisions was to disband the Iraqi army, sending hundreds of thousands of men with guns into unemployment. When the demoralization that followed fled the loosely organized opposition called the "insurgency," Donald Rumsfeld denied that such a thing existed. The list goes on.

Yesterday I moderated an event that brought together Ferguson, Gibney, former Marine officer Seth Moulton, former general and Iraq administrator Jay Garner, former Baghdad administrator Barbara Bodine, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, Lawrence Wilkerson, and Omar Fekeiki, a journalist who ran the Baghdad office of the Washington Post, who now studies journalism at UC Berkeley.

Everyone seemed to agree that the US war in Iraq had reached a point of crisis, at least with this administration, and that much of the challenge for the US there involved undoing the damage that the US occupation had caused after the capture of Baghdad. The Vietnam parallels, loose but clear, came up again and again, not least in the manipulation of language to sway public opinion. What other reason could there be for talking about a troop "surge" instead of an escalation? Remember that "escalation" was first used by the Johnson administration to avoid calling a troop increase by its actual name. Garner and Wilkerson, both Vietnam veterans, were quick to acknowledge the connections.

No End in Sight does not raise specific Vietnam parallels, a deliberate choice by its director. It's not anything like Hearts and Minds, Peter Davis's essential 1974 documentary which surveys conditions on the ground from battlefields to brothels, and talks to soldiers and politicians after the 1973 decision to end the draft and withdraw US troops. (Hearing the soldiers talk, you remember that these kids were 19 and 20 years old. Suffice it to say that if a draft were in effect today, Bush would have gotten nowhere near invading Iraq.) Ferguson's Iraq footage tends to be observation of horrific events and interviews with officials and other observers. Yet there is something of a parallel. Peter Davis likes to quote a general's comment in Hearts and Minds, stressing that, "if you grab them by the balls, their hearts and minds will come along, too." That's beginning to sound more like Iraq, where a curfew is in effect almost four years after the invasion that the CIA director, George Tenet, said would be a "slam dunk." Two million people have fled the country. Now, in his speech last night, George W Bush offered a perverted twist on John Lennon: "Give war a chance." Remember that the White House set the FBI out after Lennon for proposing the opposite.

The other parallel might be the long study of the decision-makers in the Vietnam War, The Best and the Brightest, by David Halberstam. In that 1972 epic, Halberstam told the story of a high-achieving elite of a generation that put itself in the service of a myth about American power and virtue that the Vietnam War put to rest - for most of us. I've never heard or seen any of W's reflections on the Vietnam War - too busy keeping the Corvette tuned. It's clear that we don't have the best and brightest in the White House. Just listen to the commander in chief - or listen to the analysts in No End in Sight whom he and his advisers at the Defense Department and in the Ocval Office ignored. The similarity is that a clutch of men - and a woman Secretary of State walking and talking in lockstep - have brought us this war, with minimal accountability. So far, no Robert McNamara has emerged as a critic of the war. Lawrence Wilkerson is the highest-level former official so far to repudiate the policies that took us to Iraq, and he was an army colonel who was Chief of Staff to Colin Powell. Let's bear in mind that McNamara didn't emerge as a public critic until years later. Where is this war's Daniel Ellsberg?

I was struck yesterday by an observation by the Iraqi journalist Omar Fekeiki - that he envied the people of Sudan, because there at least the Bush administration was aware of the problem that the people of Darfur were facing. I think his parallel is completely wrong. Sudan's Darfur region is facing an extermination campaign that reminds you of the worst days of Saddam Hussein, and getting the press in there to cover it is extremely difficult. Yet his words reflect the depth of anger at the US and what has been done in the name of the "war on terror."

No End in Sight suggests that things could get far worse before they improve. Isn't that what the title means?

Seen on the Main Street: the mantra on the button circulated by the Sundance Festival is "Focus on Film." Alas, on Main Street it might as well read "Focus on Fur." There are enough furs on Main Street strollers that I can just imagine how much more fur there is inside the VIP limousines favored by those film types who wouldn't be caught dead walking anywhere. A store is advertising 80 percent discounts. At Park City prices, that's probably just twice retail. The street could easily be carpeted with the pelts of these dead animals. I haven't yet determined whether this is "independent" fur. I always thought it looked a lot better on the original animal.

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"Now that both public and the politicians are denouncing the war in Iraq, documentaries like Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight, premiering in Sundance's Documentary Competition, are simply essential," writes Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay. "The inevitable withdrawal of US troops is sure to prompt attacks by the real 'bitter enders' - administration officials and neo-cons who will pin the war's failures on an American lack of resolve - and Ferguson's sober and straightforward documentary is the necessary rebuttal."

Anne Thompson has a backgrounder for the Hollywood Reporter: "The film was fully financed by Ferguson, who earned his doctorate in foreign affairs at MIT and later sold his Silicon Valley software company, Vermeer Technologies, to Microsoft for about $133 million. His 1999 tell-all book, High Stakes, No Prisoners: A Winner's Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars, is angry, analytic and piercingly frank. So is No End."

Updates, 1/25: At indieWIRE Brian Brooks reports on a press conference and adds: "Unlike fellow competition doc Ghosts of Abu Ghraib by Rory Kennedy, which focuses on one particular calamity at the hands of systematic abuse, Ferguson's doc reveals the overarching blunders, including the chaos that ensued after the invasion, destroying everyday Iraqis' confidence in the US's intentions to secure their safety."

Cinematical's Kim Voynar attended the panel as well - and she's got video.

"There's none of the Zinn-Chomsky-Goodman crowd here," notes Jason Silverman for Wired News. "Ferguson interviews mostly players in the Republican party and disgusted former members of the Bush team.... Devastating."

Update, 1/26: "[T]his piercing and unbiased account of all the stupidity, venality and small-mindedness that created our nation's latest foreign policy disaster combines hardheaded journalism and a tragic sensibility," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir, emphasizing, like so many: "This is no left-wing screed; Ferguson himself says he was initially optimistic about America's foray into Iraq.... This is the film those stubborn Bush supporters in your family need to see."

Update, 2/3: Kim Voynar at Cinematical: "If the film's title strikes you as a bit negative, well, Ferguson clearly doesn't have the most optimistic outlook on the Iraq situation, but with deliberation and aforethought, he shows the viewer exactly why."

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

DVDs, 1/24.

DK Holm rounds up DVD specialists' thoughts on two significant releases; a few more items follow.

The reviews of Robert Bresson's heralded if difficult masterpiece from 1967, Mouchette, widely cataloged as a companion piece to Au hasard Balthazar, are finally in, but first, a few takes on upstart DVD distributor Fantoma's The Films of Kenneth Anger: Volume One.

Kenneth Anger is, of course, the underground filmmaker who gradually rose to prominence after distribution of his 1947 short film Fireworks. But like many artists who emerged in the 1950s (Jack Kerouac comes to mind), he was rather misunderstood by superficial students of his oeuvre.

Far from being a rebel against the corporate moviemaking machine, Anger was a child of Hollywood, born in Santa Monica, with a grandmother who worked in the studios and who himself appeared in William Dieterle and Max Reinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935) as an aspiring child actor. In 1958, he published the first version of Hollywood Babylon, a compendium of seamy gossip that exposed the grotesque underside of the dream factory. As an avant garde filmmaker, he was one of the first, if not the first, to explore gay themes openly, and he was a progenitor of the camp sensibility. That Anger had ambivalent feelings about Hollywood that far surpassed Parker Tyler's is probably a given, since Anger later became a disciple of Aleister Crowley and hobnobbed with satanist Anton LaVey and Manson-follower Bobby Beausoleil. Adding to his controversial standing, Anger is also, frankly, a self-mytholgizer and resume padder.

Which doesn't lessen fascination for the films he actually did make. The Fantoma disc gathers together five films covering the years 1947 to 1954 (Fireworks, Puce Moment, Rabbit's Moon, Eaux d'artifice, and Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome), all restored and complete with commentary tracks by Anger, in a box set that includes a 48-page book celebrating Anger.

Glenn Erickson, the DVD Savant, digs into the disc with enthusiasm. Noting that as an "experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger used his camera to express his innermost feelings," and that his "first efforts are photographically crude but visually arresting; they communicate precise states of mind and conjure visuals that stick in the memory," while taken together his films "express a personal, symbolic inner world." Anger's "personal visions seem obsessed with the idea of transformation, a concept that links his fascinations with glamour, monsters and ambivalent primal creatures akin to the mythological 'elementals' of his later work." After in depth considerations of each film in the set, Erickson praises the transfers, which are "annotated with text explaining their various 'lives' in altered forms; some have been exhibited in shorter versions and synchronized with different soundtracks" - as well as Anger's "relaxed commentaries" in which he "speaks openly" but "doesn't indulge in gossip or tell tales out of school." Erickson concludes: "Experimental filmmakers can't be accused of doing what they do for the money. Anger's work has lived on in museum and film school showings; none of them ever received anything like an organized theatrical distribution."

Fernando F Croce, writing at Slant, is somewhat less enthusiastic. Anger's career is "one of fragments, of esoteric sensation pieces surreptitiously made when not lost, unfinished, or figuratively as well as literally buried," and as it progressed, Anger slipped from meaningful personal expression to films that "explicitly linked film form (color, movement, rhythm) to the tools of occult intoxication, and his films became increasingly more of an excuse to soak in the voluptuousness of pure style." Croce finds the transfers "noticeably cleaned up from previous copies," though "the image occasionally has a slightly muted feel that goes against Anger's splurging style," and he has little patience for Anger's commentary track, which "drops interesting bits (the first midnight screening of Fireworks counted James Whale and Dr Alfred Kinsey among its guests), but it is overall barren, mostly descriptive along the standard 'This is milk poured on me in slow motion' lines." Still, Croce concludes that it is a "long-overdue presentation for the valuable fragments of Anger's outlaw poetry."

Meanwhile, Bresson. The acronymal DSH at the DVD Journal finds that some of the touches in Mouchette, such as the title character (Nadine Nortier) taking a bumper car ride seem anachronistic because "the emotive core of Bresson's works feel timeless" and because "avoiding technology is at the very heart of Bresson's movies, which are about the characters, their pain, and their doubts about their beliefs and existence." Adapted from a novel by Diary of a Country Priest author Georges Bernanos, Mouchette is a character study, a portrait of a 14-year-old girl that is, so to speak, unpredictable in its honesty and realism, at least until the its problematic end. "How the audience views her act, how much redemption they see in her choice, how much futility, and how much waste, is one of the great, haunting questions of Bresson's masterpiece."

For Digitally Obsessed's Jon Danziger the film has "the very conventional trappings of a coming-of-age picture, but it's so much more compelling than any run-of-the-mill story about How I Became A Woman That Summer, or something." He adds that, on a technical level, "France may not have yet produced a more gifted craftsman than Bresson - his eye is impeccable, and the framing and photography of the images are unparalleled," and concurs that "its climax is shattering - you realize that you've been witnessing a morality tale unfold, one with devastating consequences, and that even though life goes on after a Bresson movie is over, the sense of loss is palpable."

Bill Gibron at DVD Verdict calls Mouchette "the first pure punk-rock icon." He goes on to contemplate the meaning of the girl's life. "Mouchette is more than mere juxtaposition - it's coincidence complicated by routine and ritual. In all the saint's trials, no figure has supposedly suffered as much as our heroine. But it is also clear that her disposition is as responsible for her torture as her circumstance. For Mouchette, life is a lot of little burdens. Instead of bearing them, however, she seals her fortunes with her reactions. Poor child."

But he also has some qualms. "As an example of Bresson's artistic approach to film, Mouchette is not as memorable as Balthazar, lacking the overt humanness associated with that calm, cruel fairy tale. In addition, the obtuse approach to narrative clarity, using inference to fill in character and situational blanks may seem adventurous and novel, but it tends to keep us, the audience, at arm's length from the movie's poignant core." Still, he has no hesitations when it comes to the transfer, calling it "one of the best black-and-white DVD transfers in recent memory. The amazing monochrome image, presented in a 1.66:1 anamorphic widescreen format, is flaweless, looking better than a film from 40 years ago really should. Since much of the movie takes place at night, in the sunken shadows of storm-swept woods and underlit cabins, there is a fear of getting lost in all this cinematic darkness. But Bresson's beautiful camerawork is captured vividly, resulting in one of the best digital presentations ever."

Noting that "Bresson was a gifted enough director of non-actors to get a great performance out of a donkey in Au Hasard Balthazar," Steve Erickson of Nerve's Movie Lounge begins by clearing the air with these remarks: "Much critical discussion of Robert Bresson - whom Jean-Luc Godard called the Mozart of film - has fixated on whether he was a religious artist or a materialist. But do we have to choose? His Mouchette is notable for being both uncanny and earthy; it's also the turning point between his earlier, more optimistic films and his grim later work." Of the supplements, Erickson writes that the eight-minute extract from the TV show Cinema is "disposable, memorable mostly for [actor Jean-Claude] Guilbert's matter-of-fact statements about the dullness of acting," while Au Hasard Bresson is "substantial, particularly for juxtaposing Bresson's statements about the purity of cinema and the possibility of transforming images through music with concrete examples of his working methods."

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Dave Kehr in the New York Times: "With their veil of dirt and time removed, the Anger films no longer look as angrily marginal as they once did: these are extremely handsome films, designed and photographed with a discriminating eye.... [T]hey traffic in many of the same tattered movie myths that would later turn into the delirious camp of Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures (1963) and Mike Kuchar's Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965)... [Anger] had the taste and the technical know-how to capture the hermetic world of silent film." Also, Criterion's new releases of Yojimbo and Sanjuro.

Nathan Lee in the Voice: "Proto-pop genius, gay maverick, hardcore occultist, master of montage, and, through his pioneering use of unauthorized pop songs and intensity of vision, one of the most influential filmmakers of the 20th century, Kenneth Anger is a cornerstone of the American avant-garde and a gift that keeps on giving.... For all his emphasis on magic, myth, symbol, and rite, Anger is as material a filmmaker as Brakhage."

More from André Salas at Filmmaker and Michael Atkinson at IFC News, where he also reviews the Robert Mitchum Signature Collection: "Mitchum knew how to be on film in a way that eludes most actors; his massive bulk, sleepy eyes and laconic voice disguised a quick, quiet intelligence that always seemed to surprise his co-stars."

Park City Dispatch. 5.

Before ceding the floor to Brian Darr and his terrific takes on a slew of animated shorts at Sundance, a reminder: you can watch all sorts of shorts right now. Online. Free. Take a break from news of acquisitions and crowded restaurants and all that and watch some films. Updated through 1/29.

So far, after five days at my first-ever Sundance Film Festival and no out-and-out duds, my very favorite film so far is an animated short. Everything Will Be OK (not to be confused with the global warming documentary Everything's Cool or Crispin Glover's new It is fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE., neither of which I've had a chance to see here yet) was the jaw-dropping capper on a very respectable selection of animated short films put together under the easy-to-remember title: Animation Spotlight. The spotlight began with Alex Weil's One Rat Short [site], an effectively anthropomorphic sci-fi vignette that suffered slightly in its narrative clarity in a few moments but more than made up for it in technological accomplishment. Suitably dazzled by this opening, the audience was ready to absorb animations which focus less effort on photorealistic visuals and more on humor and/or intensely personal or political visions.

Several of the films engage directly with the history of illustration and animation, and their broader influence in the public sphere. Martha Colburn's cut-out and paint piece Destiny Manifesto emphasizes ghoulish parallels between America's bizarrely persistent romanticized image of the conquering frontiersman with images used to sell modern warfare to our populace. Yong-Jin Park's Duct Tape and Cover restates the ludicrousness of governmental attempts to simultaneously frighten and reassure an infantilized public, by wedding the soundtrack of the 1951 Civil Defense animation Duck and Cover - perhaps you remember "Bert the Turtle" - to sequences presented in the manner of a Homeland Security safety pamphlet, only animated by computer.

Somewhat less elegant but even more packed with darkly subversive humor is Aaron Augenblick's Golden Age [site]. This set of ten Comedy Central-produced shorts exposes the embarrassing underbelly of cartoon history in punchline-packed two-minute "documentary" segments chronicling the rise and fall of a famous cartoon character - or rather a transparent stand-in like Mortimer Koon (which plays off of Mickey Mouse's roots in blackface) or Antsy & the Bugaboos (think chipmunk). There are far too many references for an animation buff to catch on a first viewing, and seeing all ten episodes in rapid succession felt like some kind of overdose, but if in some ways a festival setting didn't seem quite right for Golden Age, it was a kick to be in a room with hundreds of other people unable to control their laughter.

But Everything Will Be OK was most definitely in its natural environment projected on the large Prospector Square Theatre screen. Hilarious, touching, frightening, and wildly cinematic, Don Hertzfeldt's latest short continues down the same fourth-wall-breaking path he set himself on with Rejected and the trilogy from the first Animation Show. But this time the non-sequiturs and meta-cinematic effects are not used to reveal and expand the filmmaking apparatus so much as they serve to simulate an everyman named Bill's mental collapse. This is Hertzfeldt's first time using split-screen techniques (that I'm aware of; a couple of his films have eluded me), and he uses them a lot, and quite well. Sometimes with up to eight or nine separate screens in action on the frame at the same time, reminiscent of Sid Laverents's Multiple SIDosis. He also introduces photography of objects and scenery which help show Bill's increasing alienation from the rest of the world.

Hertzfeldt's stick-figure drawing style may be propelling him into experimentation outside of the animator's traditional realms, but it's also the secret weapon that makes his films as widely relatable as they are. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud expresses the ideas that human beings naturally find faces everywhere we look, and that the less specific the face we find, the more suitable it is to be a stand-in for ourselves. The barebones character constructions in Lily and Jim or Everything Will Be OK are consequently more universal and understandable than those in, to use a handy example from the same program, Joanna Quinn's wonderfully clever and superbly penciled, but oddly unfunny Dreams and Desires - Family Ties. Which means that anyone who's ever felt a bit out-of-sync or depressed is likely to see themselves in Bill, and become appropriately unnerved when the representation of his anxiety begins to overwhelm even the narrative conventions Hertzfeldt had previously established.

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Related: As you may have noticed, clicking on a few of those names, the Reeler interviews Alex Weil (One Rat Short), Martha Colburn (Destiny Manifesto and Meet Me in Wichita) and Aaron Augenblick (Golden Age).

Update, 1/29: "Where Rejected stands as a wonderfully entertaining piece about just what happens when commercialism meets art, Everything Will Be OK goes for a more general sensibility," writes Dan Eisenberg. "It's Hertzfeldt's best film to date, and I desperately hope he continues in this direction."

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Hounddog.

"Hounddog is an indigestible gumbo of Southern Gothic ingredients seasoned with snake oil, Biblical hash, and thoroughly unpalatable spice," growls Variety's Todd McCarthy. "Deborah Kampmeier's second feature became notorious even before its premiere as the 'Dakota Fanning rape movie.' The problem, however, is not that pivotal scene, which is as tastefully handled as it could be under the circumstances, but the fact that, after a reasonably atmospheric, if uneventful, first hour, the picture subsequently runs right off the rails."

Updated through 1/25.

"[W]hat kept me interested throughout was Fanning's unbelievable performance," writes Jason Guerrasio for Filmmaker. Otherwise, he's underwhelmed, but: "Whether she's singing Elvis, being the object of affection to all the neighborhood boys or struggling with her dysfunctional life she captivates the screen. Unfortunately most will be interested in the film's 'controversy' before the talent put into it."

"Dakota Fanning got sold a bill of goods," writes Annie Frisbie at Zoom In Online. Hounddog "gives her yet another opportunity to prove how frighteningly talented she is, but the movie is an absolute disaster from start to finish."

"[D]eeply moving," submits Grib to AICN. "[T]he real reason to see Hounddog is Fanning. She does things in this film that would challenge an actress twice her age."

Torie Bosch explains to Slate readers why Hounddog is not, in fact, kiddie porn: "[F]or the film to run afoul of the law, an average viewer would have to think that Dakota Fanning really did engage in sexual intercourse on the set during production." Click back to Jason Guerrasio's entry to see why you'd have to have severe reality displacement issues to think so.

Robin Abcarian had a backgrounder in the Los Angeles Times a few days before the premiere: "'I have to say I have started to feel very sorry for these people who are out to silence this,' said Kampmeier, who wrote, produced and directed the film. 'These are really wounded people, just like the characters in the film.'"

Updates: Mike D'Angelo at ScreenGrab: "If nothing else, the film will lay to rest any doubts about whether Fanning is genuinely gifted or merely precocious - her character as written may be little more than a fanciful construct, but she tackles each suspect emotion with unshakable conviction. Alas, she's trapped in a movie that seems unaware that wise Negro stablehands and drooling Faulknerian man-children have gone out of style for a very good reason."

Eric Kohn for the New York Press: "Hounddog is one of those movies that makes people who love the medium join together in the name of creative integrity and wage war against the vacuous monstrosity that threatens to malign their favorite art form."

Slate seems to have taken a particular interest in this movie. Particularly which, I'm not sure, but here's Meghan O'Rourke: "Dakota Fanning has been making dark and creepy movies for years. Over her seven-year career, she has become a small, blond embodiment of America's fond hope that scarred children can be restored to childish innocence. It was only a matter of time before the trauma she faced would be rape."

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir: "Sundance 2007 finally has a bomb. Every festival needs one.... [I]t turns out the defenders of my ancestral faith are correct, if only by accident: Hounddog should be boycotted. Not because it depicts the sexual exploitation of children but because it's a turgid, overripe mess."

Updates, 1/25: It's the Showgirls of Sundance, suggests Steve Ramos at indieWIRE. Not a bad thing: "I think it speaks to a fantastic theatrical future akin to a John Waters movie."

Cinematical's Kim Voynar joins the chorus: Fanning, good; movie, bad.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. The Devil Came on Horseback.

"The aesthetic arguments against the film I heard in the post-movie chatter of the exit lobby - it's too long, it's depressing, some of the structure was off - must, and do, take a backseat to the moral argument presented in it," argues Cinematical's James Rocchi. "It's not enough to simply say 'never again' to genocide when it is happening over and over and over right now. The Devil Came on Horseback [site] hurts the heart and stirs the soul, because even as I write this, even as you read this, even while this film is perhaps finding its way to a distributor and wending its way slowly to theaters, the killing in the Sudan will go on, and on, and on until someone in power decides that it must stop or until there is no one left to kill."

Updated through 1/29.

"While the point of view of privileged, Anglo observers on African issues usually raises hackles, such is not the case with The Devil Came on Horseback, a tense account of former Marine Capt Brian Steidle's witnessing of the genocide in Sudan's western province of Darfur," writes Robert Koehler in Variety. "Since Steidle, armed only with his camera, became an unexpected recorder of ethnic cleansing, his work is uniquely suited to the purposes of documakers Anne Sundberg and Ricki Stern."

The Reeler interviews Stern and Sundberg.

Earlier: David D'Arcy, right here.

Update, 1/29: James Rocchi introduces a video interview at Cinematical: "We had the chance to speak with the film's subject, Brian Steidle, and co-director Annie Sundberg. If, after viewing this interview, you're interested in the Web sites Mr Steidle mentions, please go to any of the following: www.savedafur.org; www.sudandivestment.org or www.globalgrassroots.org."

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Weapons.

"A slow, hazy hip-hop trip through screwed-up young America, Weapons is the anti-Boyz n the Hood," writes Anthony Kaufman at indieWIRE. "Less concerned with character development, social statements, and climatic revelations, director Adam Bhala Lough's sophomore effort is a woozy mood-piece about dead-end teens and the cycle of violence in contemporary life." Ultimately, though, "the movie - somewhere between Larry Clark, John Singleton and Gus Van Sant - loses whatever measured momentum it begins with."

"Lough is about as bashful as Gaspar Noé or Larry Clark, both of whose prurient influences Weapons reflects in spades," writes ST VanAirsdale, reporting on the post-premiere Q&A for his Reeler. As for the film, "the ambiguity of its tragedy is perhaps Weapons' most devastating quality. Lough's talent is itself quite formidable, his camera seeming dislocated from its subjects yet seemingly the only record of their existence... and his skill with actors hinting at a hands-off benevolence."

Both praise the heck out of that opening shot.

Earlier: Craig Phillips, right here.

Update, 1/24: Mike D'Angelo walked out after 40 minutes, "bored with its macho cretins and its fashionable game of chronological hopscotch. But I do want to quickly note my revulsion for its celebrated opening shot, which even people who dislike the film overall seem to find impressive."

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Update, 1/25: Scott Weinberg at Cinematical: "I'd like to say that the film, for all its grunge, grime and bleakness, is a well-intentioned piece, but I never really got that impression from Weapons. It's basically another 'teens hate everyone, especially each other' story, not very much unlike River's Edge, Mean Creek or the collected works of Larry Clark - only not nearly as good."

Updates, 1/29: "[M]y least favorite narrative film this week," writes Bryan Whitefield for ScreenGrab.

IndieWIRE interviews Adam Bhala Lough.

Sundance. Red Road.

"This neo-noir thriller has been bouncing around the filmfest world since premiering last May at Cannes, and should finally reach US theaters this spring," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir, and it's "dynamite, the kind of sexy, paranoid, creepily atmospheric picture that invades all your senses at once.... Red Road is economically crafted and full of startling moments. [Andrea] Arnold's evocation of the ruined, post-1984 surveillance culture of inner-city Britain is nothing short of terrifying."

"This story has been done before, and not just by the far more audacious Morvern Callar, which Red Road conjures through its bleak Glaswegian streets and dour central performance from Kate Dickie," writes a less enthusiastic Annie Frisbee at Zoom In Online. "It hits all the story marks that have come to characterize screenplays that get processed through the Sundance Institute, where Red Road was developed.... [Dickie's] choices as an actress elevate this shopworn material into a heartbreaking, moving film."

Update, 1/29: Eric Kohn: "Hitchcock would've loved this stuff, although I doubt he would've treated a feminine star with such honesty and care."

Sundance. Ghosts of Abu Ghraib.

"While Ghosts of Abu Ghraib is obviously a strong political documentary," writes Anthony Kaufman at indieWIRE, "there is an underlying psychological and moral heft that takes it beyond the well-worn form. Not only does it show how the Bush Administration has irrevocably destroyed America's moral standing in the world, but it exposes the awful truth that human nature cannot be trusted."

Glenn Kenny calls it "a concise, cogent and even-handed indictment of the chain of command that made the abuses at that famous prison not just possible but inevitable."

Updated through 1/29.

"Not only does the film thoroughly and skillfully explain the context in which something as heinous as Abu Ghraib could happen, it attempts to understand the psychology of those involved," writes James Greenberg in the Hollywood Reporter. "[A]n important and eloquent piece of filmmaking."

More from Jamie Tipps at Film Threat.

The Reeler's interview with director Rory Kennedy is the most substantial so far; more from indieWIRE and a bit more from Boris Kachka in New York.

Update, 1/24: Cinematical's James Rocchi calls it "a potent piece of documentary filmmaking that demonstrates a clear chain of lawless, inhuman cruelty and corruption that went from the gleaming conference tables of the Oval Office and Pentagon to the blood-spattered, shit-smeared halls of a prison in Iraq." What's more, "Kennedy reminds us that in a war on terror, bad investigatory work is more dangerous than no investigatory work at all. It's possible that one or two of the captives at Abu Ghraib were culpable terrorists; after pictures of them being assaulted by dogs, forced to simulate male-on-male fellatio or threatened with electrocution made it into the world media, it's far more probable that those inflammatory images inspired dozens, hundreds, thousands of young men and women to take up arms against the nation-state responsible."

Update, 1/29: Eric Kohn: "I've come to realize that the movie is remarkable for the incorporation of a plurality of voices."

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Nanking.

"The horrific 1937-38 massacre of more than 200,000 Chinese during the early days of the Japanese occupation gets a polished presentation in Nanking," writes Justin Chang in Variety, calling the doc "a vital addition to the small body of reportage on a tragedy whose repercussions continue to be a source of pain and controversy."

"[Ted] Leonsis, who paid for the movie himself and owns all rights, is hoping for a theatrical release, followed by DVD, TV and cable sales," writes Anne Thompson in the Hollywood Reporter. "Then he wants people to find the movie online. He plans to create a Nanking portal full of material about the movie, where people can download the film for free. 'I'm not worried about piracy,' he said. 'I want people to share the movie.' How will he do this? 'We'll get a sponsor,' he said. After Leonsis recoups costs, he'll give the profits to charity, he promised, saying, 'Call me a filmanthropist.'"

David Poland argues that co-producer Bill Guttentag and co-director Dan Sturman almost got away with ripping off writer Elizabeth Bentley.

And indieWIRE interviews them.

Update, 1/24: "I'm less a fan of the film than simply an admirer of it," decides Eric Kohn, blogging for the New York Press.

Update, 1/25: For Variety, Mark Schilling reports plans for a Japanese doc aimed at countering Nanking's "fabrications," even as the Chinese are working on yet another doc as the 70th anniversary of the Massacre approaches.

Updates, 1/29: "Unlike traditional historical docs, this one's edited at a pace that doesn't allow curiosity and voyeurism to overtake the initial shock of seeing rows of severed heads, bloated bodies, and starving children staring intently at the camera," writes Susan Gerhard for indieWIRE. "The script highlights how the Westerners creating the "safe" zone for nearly a quarter million Nanking refugees wished and tried to make calls out to the world - including the people of Japan, who they believe would put a stop to the situation if they knew the facts - and skillfully backs away from nationalist debates. This is a kind of bravery war docs rarely get the chance to celebrate, and in an era of learned helplessness, it couldn't come at a better time."

A "deeply affecting film," writes Kim Voynar at Cinematical. "The scripted reading actually works more effectively than mere voiceover would have, bringing to life the people who were a part of the events that happened in Nanking during that time."

Update, 1/30: And Voynar interviews Leonsis.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. The Signal.

"The Signal is the big discovery of the Sundance Film Festival," declares Quint at AICN. "Directors David Bruckner, Dan Bush and Jacob Gentry have made their Bad Taste. The Signal is rough and low budget, but so fucking entertaining and well made that tonight's audience was electric."

"This one sold in the lobby of the Egyptian Theater around 2 am," announces Variety. Magnolia's paid $2.3 million for US, UK and Australian rights.

Updated through 1/26.

"I can't make heard nor tails of the film's official site," Brendon Connelly. "Can you make it do anything other than screech awfully, flash a bit and implant subliminal orders to become a murdering psychopath into your brain?"

Bloody Disgusting has talked with all sorts of people involved in making the film.

Update, 1/24: For Filmmaker, James Ponsoldt interviews all three directors, one by one.

Updates, 1/25: Zoom In Online's Annie Frisbie: "Because there's no logic to the story, there's nothing to be afraid of, and the truest feeling it evokes is tedium."

Eric Kohn for the New York Press: "The base fear of Signal stems from the idea that any innocuous digital helper could turn on you mercilessly.... Oh, and did I mention that it's funny?... Signal has a cosmic sense of justice that's often hilarious; a sense of irony about the suggestion that we really could amuse ourselves to death."

Update, 1/26: Scott Weinberg at Cinematical: "It's a character-based (and very well-acted) science fiction horror flick that's got a solid sense of humor, an admirable air of dread and a 50-ton vat of ultra-gooey gore: Cool."

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. The Great World of Sound.

"One of the best narrative features I've seen here is also one of the smallest," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Craig Zobel's The Great World of Sound is an intimate character study of two guys clinging to the gritty underside of capitalism.... Morally ambiguous, subtly crafted, resolutely free of cliché and made with almost no money, The Great World of Sound is under-the-radar independent filmmaking in the Jarmusch-Cassavetes mode, both noble and ruthless in spirit."

The Reeler interviews Zobel.

Updates, 1/24: "[T]riumphs over the boundaries of constrained budgets and crew by way of fascinating filmmaking prowess," blogs Eric Kohn for the New York Press. "If the top third of Sound feels vaguely like a matured cousin of NBC's The Office (not a negative comparison, in my eyes), the rest of the movie enters the Twilight Zone of the music business, applying an anecdotal approach to an unexpected career-from-hell turn of events. A great feel-bad movie with noble intentions, this sound deserves to get heard."

"A kind of American Idol meets Borat - without the pranky cultural warfare," suggests ST VanAirsdale at the Reeler. "[T]his movie deserves every accolade it has coming to it."

Update, 1/26: "It wasn't the typical approach to casting supporting characters in an independent film - even one shot on a shoestring budget by a novice writer-director who earned his professional bona fides working low-level jobs in reality TV," writes Chris Lee, who talks with Zobel for the Los Angeles Times. "The movie combines elements of cinema verité, unscripted drama, guerrilla filming and conventional narrative to examine the lengths people will go to attain fame - as well as the methods of those who would prey upon such aspirations."

Update, 1/29: Eric Kohn: A "beautiful investigation into the desire for fame and the sacrifice of integrity for the sake of financial gain."

Update, 2/5: David Bordwell notes that "for The Great World of Sound, director Craig Zobel has created a website. Nothing new in that. But Zobel also provides a website for a fictional company in the film."

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. The Good Life.

"The Good Life is an impressive debut from former pro skateboarder turned writer/director Steve Berra," writes Bryan Whitefield at ScreenGrab. "Based loosely on some of his own experiences growing up and set during a Nebraska winter, the film is a somber story that maintains an undercurrent of hope even as life for its main character, Jason (Mark Webber), gets darker and darker." Even so, "For the most part, given its Sundance-friendly subject matter, the writing avoids easy cliché."

John Horn recently profiled Berra for the Los Angeles Times:

Updated through 1/29.

Like mastering a kick-flip backside tail-slide or any of his other shin-shattering skating tricks, Berra's transition from friendless teen to gregarious filmmaker required relentless dedication amid repeated failure. His film's journey to Park City, Utah, also makes for a quintessential Sundance story: Determined storyteller perseveres for a decade; gung-ho producer cobbles together a motley crew of investors; intensely personal film beats out more than 3,000 other submissions for a spot in the nation's top showcase for indie cinema.

And indieWIRE interviews Berra.

Update, 1/24: Bryan Whitefield talks with Berra, Webber and Zooey Deschanel.

Update, 1/25: Cinematical has a video interview with Chris Klein and Patrick Fugit.

Update, 1/29: A "sweet and engaging film that has 'Sundance' written all over it," writes Tom Hall. "Chris Klein's performance as a psychopathic failure is spot-on and provides The Good Life with a dangerous sense of unpredictability."

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Park City. Index.

Coverage of the coverage. Films with their own entries here on the Daily so far:

Sundance:

World Cinema:

• Driving With My Wife's Lover.
• Eagle vs Shark.
• The Legacy.
• Once.
• The Night Buffalo.

Documentary Competition:

• Banished.
• Chasing Ghosts.
• Crazy Love.
• Everything's Cool.
• Ghosts of Abu Ghraib.
• Girl 27.
• Hear and Now.
• Manda Bala.
• My Kid Could Paint That.
• Nanking.
• No End in Sight.
• Protagonist.
• White Light/Black Rain.
• Zoo.

Spectrum:

• Dark Matter.
• Dedication.
• Delirious.
• The Devil Came on Horseback.
• Expired.
• The Go-Getter.
• The Great World of Sound.
• Interview.
• Red Road.
• Waitress.
• The Unforeseen.

Dramatic Competition:

• Adrift in Manhattan.
• Broken English.
• The Good Life.
• Grace Is Gone.
• Hounddog.
• Joshua.
• Never Forever.
• On the Road with Judas.
• Padre Nuestro.
• Rocket Science.
• Snow Angels.
• Starting Out in the Evening.
• Teeth.
• Weapons.

World Cinema / Documenta:

• Acidente.
• Bajo Juárez, the city devouring its daughters.
• Comrades in Dreams.
• Crossing the Line.
• Enemies of Happiness.
• Hot House.
• Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten.
• In the Shadow of the Moon.
• Manufactured Landscapes.
• A Very British Gangster.
• VHS - Kahloucha.

Premieres:

• An American Crime.
• Away From Her.
• Black Snake Moan.
• Chapter 27.
• Chicago 10.
• Clubland.
• The Good Night.
• Longford.
• The Nines.
• The Savages.
• Son of Rambow.
• Summer Rain.
• Year of the Dog.

Frontier:

• Slipstream.
• Strange Culture.

Midnight:

• Fido.
• The Signal.
• Smiley Face.

Animation Spotlight.

Awards.

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Slamdance:

• American Zombie.
• Bangkok.
• Cold Prey.
• Ganja Queen.
• The King of Kong.

Awards.

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Park City. Cleanup. Notes on films that screened in Park City that aren't listed here.

Sundance. Waitress.

"I'm really pleased and frankly relieved to report," begins Glenn Kenny, "that, a couple of snippable minutes and some dubious music choices aside (that Cake song about the jacket is one thing, but a cover of Howard Jones's 'No One Is To Blame' is pushing it), writer/director Adrienne Shelly's final feature Waitress is a delight, a refreshing comedy that mixes a bunch of familiar ingredients in offbeat ways that payoff every time, much in the way that its title character Jenna (the fabulous Keri Russell) blends, say, blackberries with bittersweet chocolate in her universally beloved pies."

"All films arrive at Sundance with a back story, but none have the poignancy of Waitress." On Friday, David Carr spoke with many close to Shelly about moving on since her murder in November.

Updated through 1/29.

"Sundance festival Director Geoff Gilmore and Waitress producer Michael Roiff were left with the unenviable task of introducing the film, whose tone and spirit is so completely at odds with the circumstances of its debut that it made the situation especially hard to square," reports Carina Chocano for the Los Angeles Times. "A tender, loopy, uplifting comedy about a young woman (Keri Russell) who finds herself transformed by a pregnancy she thought she didn't want, Waitress is the kind of film whose giddy festival debut usually proceeds uninterrupted through its theatrical release. (Fox Searchlight bought the film soon after the screening for a little less than $4 million.)"

Vadim Rizov talks with Roiff for the Reeler.

Updates, 1/24: Cinematical's James Rocchi: "You'd think it'd be tricky reviewing Waitress - no one wants to speak ill of the dead - but the good news is that endorsing and recommending Waitress is easy as, uh, pie. Viewed in the context of no context, Waitress is a light, breezy romantic comedy with a crackerjack cast and a certain degree of faux-Southern charm that never descends to cornpone mawkisness, and also has a whip-smart comedic sensibility in every scene."

"For many years, Adrienne Shelly was my best friend." So begins one helluva tribute from Reid Rosefelt at Zoom In Online. And here's how it ends:

I don't see anything bittersweet about this: I am overjoyed. I've been in this business a long time, and Waitress could have come to the festival, gotten a standing ovation and remained unsold. And to sell to Searchlight! She hit the jackpot! I tried to explain how great this was to her mother, Elaine, but even while I was talking we both started crying. But Michael Roiff and I are sure that Adrienne can still hear the laughter somehow and is happy. As someone said at her memorial service, Adrienne's life may have been cut short, but she sure left her mark.

Updates, 1/26: "Color me relieved," sighs Mike D'Angelo at ScreenGrab. "Waitress was never going to set the world ablaze, but it's a funny, charming, refreshingly levelheaded portrait of 'a woman in trouble' (to borrow a logline from the guy who came up with the Log Lady), the kind of movie that initially seems a bit clunky and forced but grows on you as you spend more time in the company of its distinctively addled characters."

Acquired by Fox Searchlight for between $4 million and $5 million. (Variety).

Update, 1/29: Tom Hall: "The movie is a sweet fantasy that is part Like Water For Chocolate and part Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, but it delivers a vision of men that is less than flattering. Male obsolescence is the path to female happiness."

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Oscars. Nominations.

Hey, where's Colossal Youth?

Kidding. The nominations. Here, and in a comment below.

And all the usual bitching, PR, prognostication and so on worth noting (and if found) will be filed to this entry over the next seven days.

Updated through 1/27.

"In recent years, the general public's interest in watching the Academy Awards, as reflected in the ratings, has become much more dependent on how familiar they are with the films and actors being nominated. By contrast, the Super Bowl usually draws large audiences year after year, in the neighborhood of 90 million, regardless of which teams are playing." New York Times advertising columnist Stuart Elliott reports on how ABC and the Academy are working together to make "significant changes in the tune-in campaigns this year."

"[N]ever in my wildest dreams could I have predicted such shockers as the Best Picture snub of Dreamgirls - somebody better put uber-fan David Poland on a suicide watch - and the Best Actor honor for Ryan Gosling of the widely praised but little seen Half Nelson," writes Joe Leydon. "This may turn out to be an interesting Oscar race after all."

"If [Jennifer] Hudson goes on to win a best supporting actress Oscar, it will be another landmark moment in the breakdown between our pop culture's major and minor leagues," suggests Patrick Goldstein in the Los Angeles Times. Well, she did. "Whether it's Hudson, lonelygirl15 or Jade Goody, the foul-mouthed ex-nurse who, thanks to her antics on Celebrity Big Brother, is just as celebrated in England as Posh Spice, celebrity has been rudely down-marketed and democratized."

Oh, but this is fun: "New York film critic David Edelstein and Hollywood producer Lynda Obst discuss the Oscar nominations by e-mail each year. This year, Daily Intel gets to host their thoughts. Check back throughout the day for updates."

Nathaniel R weighs in with "Ten Talking Points."

That Little Round-Headed Boy has "10 Thoughts," too. #5: "I guess this means I've got to break down and see Babel, huh?"

Scott Lamb introduces a chart at Salon: "We were curious: How well did the nation's critics do in predicting who the nominees would be? There was nearly universal (and as it turns out, wrong) common wisdom when it came to the best-picture and best-director picks."

Anne Thompson at the Risky Biz Blog: "The happy camper this morning - along with the folks behind Babel, The Departed, Little Miss Sunshine and Borat, which nabbed a surprise adapted screenplay nomination, is Clint Eastwood, whose Letters from Iwo Jima pushed Dreamgirls out of the best picture race."

"I have no real answer to Dreamgirls missing Best Picture after being nominated by the PGA, DGA, SAG and others," writes David Poland. "But Clint happens. I have been saying for weeks that I expect the nominees to have 15 percent of support each and that the fight was in the other 25 percent... not unlike presidential politics. And obviously, Dreamgirls lost on that level."

Time's Richard Corliss: "[W]ho knew that audiences would like a hit musical more than the Motion Picture Academy does?"

"But if it's such a crowd-pleaser, where's the box office take to show for it?" counters David Cornelius at Hollywood Bitchslap.

Nikki Finke: "Trust me, the folks at Dreamworks and Paramount who've been pimping this pic are having a nightmare today."

"[T]he Academy, and this is just the Bagger typing in a hotel room, apparently decided that that there was not enough movie in the movie. The Bagger fell for all the stitching between songs, but others did not."

Anthony Kaufman: "I can only suspect that Harvey Weinstein did some backroom dealing to get the mediocre Days of Glory into a spot that should have gone to Volver."

"YAY! for Gosling," shouts Nick Davis before adding, "By my count, the five movies that did squeeze into the top race only racked up 26 nominations among them - an incredibly low number, even lower than last year's 29."

Edward Copeland: "This may well be the first time where four out of the 5 nominees for best actor are the only nominations for their films and no nominee comes from a best picture nominee."

"Ever since nomination voting for the Oscars closed before the Globe awards have been announced, they have often been less of a true bellweather," notes Aaron Dobbs.

"The films that remain in the race generally impress with their mediocrity rather than their merit," write Jürgen Fauth and Marcy Dermansky.

Jeffrey Wells is working on posting at least one entry for each category.

Online viewing tips. At TickleBooth, Ajit Anthony Prem is gathering links to a few of the nominated shorts.

Ryan Wu has a few observations on Paul Greengrass's nomination and more.

"This sudden spike in Oscar fever draws attention to the lack of obvious [Best Picture] candidates showing this year [at Sundance]." Eric Kohn elaborates for the New York Press.

Slate's Dana Stevens presents "an overview of some of the most egregious disses on the list."

Gabriel Shanks: "By choosing one racial minority over another, of course, the Academy protects itself from charges of racism. But don't be fooled... this is about loving Clint Eastwood and hating anything remotely queer (including colorful musicals)."

Updates, 1/24: James Wolcott: "Every year or so critics, audiences, and Academy voters decide to adopt a puppy, and this year the adorable scamp is Little Miss Sunshine, ludicrously nominated for Best Picture. It isn't a terrible fraud of a movie (unlike some previous nominees and winners), but its modest assets have been overblown and oversold, its rickety contrivances mistaken for the raw bones of life."

"Some think that since only Babel and The Departed were nominated in the influential editing category, the race comes down to those two," writes Kim Masters. "Others point out that a contingent of academy voters hates Babel and dreads nothing more than seeing it become this year's Crash. Another group seems inclined to go only so far for Scorsese - and especially for this movie, which seems to have a number of endings."

Also in Slate, Christopher Beam gathers a few bloggers' reactions and Timothy Noah suspects Richard Griffiths's performance in The History Boys was looked over because he's, well, "very fat."

"[T]he Academy wants to be viewed as serious, thoughtful, not too frivolous - the equivalent of a knee-length hemline, a pair of Calvin Klein wire-rimmed spectacles, a fun date, but one who actually read a book once," suggests Stephanie Zacharek in Salon. "[I]n the final analysis, the movies the group doesn't recognize might say more about it than its actual choices do." So, Dreamgirls: "I'd like to think that members of the Academy recognized that the picture is really a headache-inducing mess, cluttered with lousy songs, but I know that's wishful thinking. I believe that Dreamgirls simply doesn't suit the Academy's solemn, beard-stroking mood this year: Can't have any crazy plaids clashing with those modest stripes."

Dennis Cozzalio: "Oscar, a lot of the movies of 2006 are too smart for you. Hell, I'm too smart for you. But you had me in 1969 with 'And the winner is Midnight Cowboy' and you've got me 37 years later, for better and worse, with 'And the Oscar goes to...' You are, at this point, for better and worse, an inextricable, though increasingly unimportant, element of the movies themselves for me."

"Oscar is growing more diverse and international by the year," writes Roger Ebert. "That's perhaps an indication that the Academy voters, who once went mostly for big names, are doing their homework and seeing the pictures."

Jim Emerson tracks the various "front runners" from this summer right on up to the nominations and asks, "Don't you love it when the conventional wisdom is just wrong?"

Michael Guillén is torn up over two categories: Best Foreign Language Film and Best Actor.

"For once, the Oscars may really mean something." C Jerry Kutner explains at Bright Lights After Dark.

Update, 1/25: For Deutsche Welle, Ina Rottscheidt asks Lives of Others director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, "What was it like, hearing that you had been nominated for an Oscar?"

Updates, 1/26: Mark Lawson, writing in the Guardian, has a theory as to what the Academy is responding to in The Queen: "They see Elizabeth II as an example of that cherished plotline in American cinema: The Star Who Came Through." Also: Mark Brown profiles Paul Greengrass and an Oscar special edition of Film Weekly.

In the Independent, Nick Hasted: "The fact that Bill Condon's [Dreamgirls] is a travesty, replacing some of the 20th century's finest music with unmemorable showtunes and hack melodrama, only confirms what a string of recent releases suggest: that current cinema cannot cope with the story of rock and soul music, and seems tame and timid by comparison."

In the wake of the nominations, AJ Schnack talks with Jesus Camp directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, with My Country, My Country director Laura Poitras and with Iraq in Fragments director James Longley: "I was so rooting for Jesus Camp,' Poitras said. 'It's one of the those movies where you go, damn, now that's a good movie. If you look at Iraq in Fragments, it has production value that studio movies don't have. And in terms of cinema, these are all well-crafted films. They aren't just message films, driven by content. They are really driven by craft.'"

John Nagenda, advisor to the president of Uganda, has a few unique tales to tell about the making of The Last King of Scotland in Prospect.

Matt Wolf profiles Judi Dench for the London Times, where someone, of course, has to celebrate the British nominations in general. The task falls to James Christopher.

And there're more Brits in the Telegraph. Tom Robey: "He's got his Oscar nomination, but, if we might politely ask, how much of a stretch can it really be for Peter O'Toole to play a saucy old lush again?" Well, "He predictably excels in Venus as a charismatic luvvie living off bit parts, but the performance is grand enough to feel like a richly enjoyable career-capper, not just his latest binge." Also, David Gritten talks with Notes on a Scandal director Richard Eyre and Sukhdev Sandhu praises DiCaprio's performance in Blood Diamond.

By the way, the Guardian reports that some diamond industry "insiders are suggesting that its campaign has been so effective that the film has turned out to be a blessing in disguise, creating a PR opportunity that has boosted sales."

Updates, 1/27: So Al Gore will attend the ceremony, and Mick LaSalle offers this angle: "If he's no chubbier than he was in the movie - and especially if he's thinner - Obama and Hillary should start worrying."

WSWS arts editor David Walsh: "The Academy Award nominations announced Tuesday morning confirm a recent trend: a growth in the overall seriousness of international filmmaking, in response to events, combined with significant limitations and confusion.... However, the most profound global realities—including the vast social imbalance, the new colonialism, the criminality of Washington's drive to dominate the world—and their consequences for wide layers of the population have only made their way into film work to a very limited degree so far. One would not want to overestimate any of this year's nominees."

Dave Micevic sifts through the nominees.

Andrew Gumbel in the Independent: "It may be an odd thing to say of an actor who has been gracing our screens, and grabbing his share of the limelight, for the past 15 years, but Leonardo DiCaprio has finally arrived."

Slamdance. American Zombie.

"I won't say with any confidence that American Zombie [site; watch that trailer!] is an allegory about Muslims or undocumented immigrants or anything else specific," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "It might just be a goof on the silliness of contemporary media that gets a little broader and darker as it goes along. But the mere fact that [Grace] Lee can make both a media satire and, in the end, a creepy horror flick, while at least alluding to bigger social issues, suggests the breadth of her wit and intelligence."

Lee blogs at indieWIRE: "The audience was great - they really seemed to get the movie and were troopers, after a couple of nervewracking technical problems. While they were fixing the sound, Austin Basis, who plays Ivan, started passing out one of his Slamdance special edition 'zines and people went apeshit."

Back in February, Grady Hendrix noted that "the most interesting thing about it is that it's entirely produced by a Korean company, iHQ. This company is planning to produce a whole raft of English-language pictures, the same way Columbia Tristar has an arm that produces Chinese-language movies."

Update, 1/27: In a blog entry, Grace Lee wraps her Slamdance experience.

Update, 2/1: Bloody Disgusting interviews Grace Lee.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Joshua.

"[A]n expertly crafted and creepy film about a strange little kid and his fractured family," blogs indieWIRE editor Eugene Hernandez. "Striking music and visuals heighten the tension in Joshua, with Vera Farmiga and Jacob Kogan. While I still have a number of films to see, Sam Rockwell shines as a troubled dad in the two strongest overall Sundance dramatic competition entries I've seen so far, Joshua and David Gordon Green's Snow Angels."

But in iW's virtual pages, Steve Ramos disagrees sharply. At Cannes, he assumes, "audiences would openly jeer a disastrous movie like director George Ratliff's unintentionally silly, bad seed horror drama Joshua. At Sundance, where the film made its premiere over the weekend, the audience I sat with was polite and only laughed at all the wrong places. The only person yelling back at the movie was I."

Updated through 1/29.

Rav raves at AICN.

"I can't say I disliked the film. But like so many films at Sundance this year, it lacks a clear focus," sighs David Poland.

Gregg Goldstein and Nicole Sperling report at the Risky Biz Blog that Fox Searchlight have picked up rights for the entire world - except Canada. No, really.

IndieWIRE and the Reeler interview Ratliff.

Update: "How much credit should a movie get for provoking an honest-to-goodness full-body shiver?" wonders Mike D'Angelo at ScreenGrab. "Like its similarly underrated cousin, Birth, Joshua makes up in potent atmosphere and formal mastery what it lacks in narrative logic; unlike Birth, however, it's further enhanced by two superlative adult performances (courtesy Sam Rockwell and Vera Farmiga) that invest a ludicrous premise with conviction and behavioral nuance."

Update, 1/25: Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog: "Joshua paints itself into a corner at the end, but that final sense of deflation fits in with the film's own tendency to cut dread with the everyday. It's still an impressively subversive tweaking of the horror genre, and a memorable one."

Update, 1/26: Acquired by Fox Searchlight for nearly $4 million. (Variety).

Updates, 1/29: "Will Fox Searchlight play the parental horror angle (most certainly) or will the coming out story at the heart of the film be recognized and promoted?" wonders Tom Hall.

Reid Rosefelt has a video interview with Blitz at Zoom In Online.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Lists, 1/23.

Jonathan Rosenbaum pages through that 1000-film list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?.

Facets Features has quietly rolled out a list of "the best films and DVDs of 2006, as ranked by select Facets staffers." #1: Taxidermia.

The Cinemarati's countdown is always one of the most notable of the year in that, for each title, one member explains how that particular film landed on the list and another dissents, that is, explains why s/he feels it ought not to be on the list at all. They start at #20, never in a hurry to hit #1, and as I write, they're at #13, Inside Man.

Aaron Dobbs takes a break from his Tribeca duties to finish his list: "I know everyone has been complaining about how 2006 was a bad year for film, and maybe overall it was, yet I still found myself with plenty of titles to choose from, and a few that I think will stand the test of time." His #1: Pan's Labyrinth.

Sundance. Once.

"It's the sort of completely un-hyped, unheralded little gem you go to a festival like Sundance hoping to find and, every once in a while, do," blogs the LA Weekly's Scott Foundas. "I don't want to overstate the case for Once - it is, after all, a very small story about a Dublin street musician (Glen Hansard, of the band The Frames) who meets up with a Czech immigrant pianist (Markéta Irglová) and discovers that they make beautiful music together. But I liked this movie right from the opening scene... Once is at its best when it bursts into song, which is, fortuitously, most of the time."

"I loved it and the music was perfect," agrees AICN's Quint.

"Writer-director John Carney has a great talent for capturing the way it's often easier to be intimate with strangers than friends," writes Cinematical's James Rocchi. "Shot on digital video and shot through with passion, Once is a true pleasure that only the rankest cynic couldn't enjoy."

IndieWIRE interviews Carney.

"Sometimes a movie leaves you with such a warm feeling, you just want to point people in the general direction of its reflected light, and not write about it, not describe modest virtues in a way that oversells genuine heart and soul," writes Ray Pride. And Once "is one of those movies."

Update, 1/25: Once again (sorry), Ray Pride: "More than a couple of Sundance sins got committed yesterday: For one, I saw Once twice; who sees a movie twice at a film festival when there's so much else possibly to see and do? But the simple beauty of John Carney's romantic musical was even more powerful a second time around." A helluva photo accompanies the entry.

Update, 1/26: Salon's Andrew O'Hehir: "Carney has measured the bitter and the sweet in precise proportions in Once; this is a romance for everyone who has ever fallen in love when you weren't really free to do so. A wistful and delightful little film, just the thing to send me on a jet plane homeward with an Irish song in my heart."

Update, 1/29: Tom Hall: "Mark my words, John Carney's Once is going to be a minor sensation if it is ever given the chance to build word of mouth in US theaters."

Update, 1/30: Scott Foundas: "In the seven years I've been coming to Sundance, I'm not sure that I've ever seen a film so completely captivate the public and the critics alike as John Carney's Once, the Irish musical drama whose little-movie-that-could odyssey was completed Saturday night when it collected the audience award in Sundance's world dramatic competition.... But as I learned from speaking to the film's producers, before Once was selected by Sundance it had been rejected by several high-profile North American and international festivals, which says something telling (and unfortunate) about the kind of snobbery that can infect the festival selection process."

Update, 2/3: Fox Searchlight picks up Once. Movie City News has the press release.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Expired.

"Just saw what might well be this Sundance's Me and You and Everyone We Know," wrote David Poland the other day. "It's called Expired..."

"Expired isn't a love story, no matter what anybody says - unless, of course, that person is also saying that The Shining is a love story. In which case, run." Praise for the leads, Samantha Morton and Jason Patric, as well as for "wonderful turns from Illeana Douglas, as Claire's neighbor and victim of Jay's wrath, and Teri Garr, as Claire's stroke-stricken mother," follows. Zoom In's Annie Frisbie likes this one.

But Glenn Kenny pronounces it "an hour and fifty-three minutes of 'close, but no cigar.'"

"To her credit, filmmaker Cecilia Miniucchi does not manipulate heartstrings or resort to generic conventions to serve up a touchy-feely love tale," writes Duane Byrge for the Hollywood Reporter. "Expired is a remarkable romance of no easy answers; to wit, like real life."

Updates, 1/29: Bryan Whitefield at ScreenGrab: "I can honestly say I probably haven't laughed as hard in a movie theater since Napoleon Dynamite."

Tom Hall: "Jason Patric's performance as Jay in Cecilia Miniucchi's inspired romantic comedy Expired is perfection; the über-asshole to end all assholes."

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Steve Buscemi x 2.

Steve Buscemi, "an indie god among video-store clerks: patron saint of character actors, working stiffs, and last-true-believers everywhere," as Logan Hill called him in his profile for New York last week, stars in two films at Sundance, Tom DiCillo's Delirious and his own Interview. Now, the first reviews are coming in.

"Delirious is a major-league indie crowd pleaser and could end up being one of the biggest sales of the festival," wrote David Poland the other day. "[I]t has the makings of a cult classic." But the Reeler "can't figure out why Poland - whose contrarian-for-its-own-sake streak traditionally runs hot but who certainly has taste - could be so upbeat about a straight-to-DVD shelfwarmer."

For Cinematical's Scott Weinberg, though, Delirious is "a poker-faced but insightful and amusing comedic drama that takes square aim at pop stars, paparazzi and stargazers without ever settling for the obvious joke or the predictable punchline. This comes as no big surprise to me, considering that the writer/director of Delirious is Tom DiCillo, frequent Jim Jarmusch cinematographer and rather astute filmmaker in his own right. (DiCillo gave us Johnny Suede, The Real Blonde and - one of my favorite movies about filmmakers - the excellent Living in Oblivion).

But for Eric Kohn, blogging for the New York Press, it "feels like the corpse of a movie treatment that once seemed like a good idea. It veers from a send-up of NYC publicity chaos to a buddy comedy, then teases with some vaguely homoerotic themes, morphs into a thriller, and suddenly throws everything out the window for a mindlessly cheery finale."

Then again, on the other hand, Sura Wood for the Hollywood Reporter: "Tom DiCillo's smart, funny and ultimately over-the-top spoof is more often than not, spot on."

In Interview, tabloid joke Sienna Miller convinces that she can carry a film, which bodes well for the upcoming Factory Girl," writes Annie Frisbie at Zoom In Online. "She's the definition of lovely, and far outshines this poorly scripted remake of slain Dutch director Theo van Gogh's 2003 film of the same name."

But AICN's Quint finds it "a great mix of artistry and entertainment."

Updates, 1/26: Sheila Johnston profiles Buscemi for the Independent.

Robin Abcarian talks with Sienna Miller for the Los Angeles Times.

Update, 1/29: Tom Hall: "Of all the losers on the screen at the festival, Buscemi's Les [in Delirious] somehow felt the most human."

Update, 2/5: In MovieMaker, Tom DiCillo sings the praises of the "digital intermediate (a digitization of a project in order to manipulate color and other image characteristics)": "In some cases, the DI actually allows you to rewrite the script."

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten.

"My favorite film of the festival so far, beyond a doubt," declares Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "[Julien] Temple's film is much more than a biopic of the late Clash frontman, and still less a hagiography. Like the director's outstanding Sex Pistols doc The Filth and the Fury, it's a portrait of the peculiar convulsions of British society in the late 1970s and the exciting and often self-destructive pop culture it produced. Joe Strummer has all the energy, passion and high style of Temple's many music videos, but the sheer complexity of the subject makes it his best film by a fair stretch."

"Strummer's strange career, from his sudden burst onto the punk rock scene of the mid-70s with the Clash to his post-Clash burnout, exile and gradual re-emergence, provides Temple with unusually dramatic and complex elements to explore a brilliant if mercurial, creative musical life," writes Robert Koehler in Variety.

Jeremy Mathews for Film Threat: "Temple succeeds in creating a portrait neither glowing nor damning, but representative of a remarkable man."

Update, 1/26: "Temple's friendship with Strummer serves as a bit of a double-edged sword." Kevin Kelly explains at Cinematical.

Update, 1/30: Beth Gilligan at Not Coming to a Theater Near You: "[T]he critique of British life in the mid-to-late 20th century ultimately takes a backseat to an affectionate, all-encompassing portrait of a middle-class boy once known as John Mellor."

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. A Very British Gangster.

"From his girth to his fondness for family, Manchester mob boss Dominic Noonan could be Tony Soprano's English cousin," suggests James Greenberg in the Hollywood Reporter. "Donal MacIntyre, one of the UK's foremost undercover journalists, was granted total access to make A Very British Gangster [site], a fascinating portrait of a larger-than life crime figure."

Updated through 1/26.

"MacIntyre's style evokes Nick Broomfield," argues Annie Frisbie at Zoom In Online. His "many intrusive authorial moments... break the spell of the story. On several occasions, he stages elaborate crane shots, meant to give Noonan's story an epic quality, but the fancy camerawork, so clearly not spontaneous, only raise questions about the genuineness of the rest of the material."

Update, 1/26: IndieWIRE interviews MacIntyre.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Jim Jarmusch Blog-a-Thon.

Jim Jarmusch turns 54 today - congrats! - and Sujewa Ekanayake celebrated yesterday by recalling his initial encounters with the work. Now, at Wild Diner Films, he's tracking entries in today's Jim Jarmusch Blog-a-Thon.

Sundance. My Kid Could Paint That.

Following up on the Reeler interview with filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev, ST VanAirsdale reports on the story behind My Kid Could Paint That - Marla Olmstead becomes an art world star at the age of 4 - and the controversy that spills over into the making of the documentary as Bar-Lev and Marla's parents fall out.

Updated through 1/27.

"Director Amir Bar-Lev had originally conceived the film as a meditation on modern art, but after 60 Minutes suggested in a report that Marla, who had been compared to artistic lions of abstract art like Kadinsky and Pollock, was being assisted by her father," explains David Carr, the "documentary then morphed into a consideration of where truth comes from and who has custody of a story."

ST VanAirsdale tosses in his own opinion: "It seemed fairly obvious to me just in viewing the pieces on their own (without the commentary from child psychologists, collectors, Charlie Rose and Times art critic Michael Kimmelman) that the paintings in the first Marla Olmstead show boast a complexity and construction that is entirely absent from her subsequent work. Whether it means she changed her style or approach or aesthetic is anybody's guess, but execution of the girl painting on camera in Bar-Lev's film pretty clearly lacks the technical sophistication required to pull off the detail pointed out by observers onscreen."

And here's the indieWIRE interview.

Update, 1/23: the most inadvertently profound and wide-ranging documentary since Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills," announces Mike D'Angelo at ScreenGrab. "[W]hen Marla's mother bitterly refers to one development as 'documentary gold,' it's at once a scathing rebuke and an undeniable truth."

Updates, 1/25: As noted, David Carr's blogged about the film; now, he's got a story in the paper: "The film raises questions about the custody of a given story. Very often regular people are enrolled in the effort, but in the end, the author, not the subject, is the owner of the narrative. The choices are his — in the editing, in the framing, in the end."

ST VanAirsdale: "I have doubts that any 'judge for yourself' marketing campaign (already begun at Sundance with the installation of Marla's art at a gallery on Main Street) can trump the resentment of a devastated family. Am I overthinking this, or are we gazing at a blueprint for bad buzz?"

Updates, 1/26: Susan Gerhard at indieWIRE:

Like [Capturing the Friedmans] which welded together a family portrait with essayistic takes on 80s sexual hysteria, My Kid marries its portraiture and investigation to an essay on art. Unlike Friedmans, the filmmaker will not really bend the stick back toward his subjects, but instead offer audiences an insider's criticisms of his own project, approach, and conclusions as an act of intellectual generosity.

[...]

If a "kid" could truly paint a Pollock, in this case a 4-year-old who could be at home on a Gerber label, is a Pollock really worth that much? That question about art, however, leads to another about ethics: If a kid's Pollock was actually created by an adult, is the adult more fraudulent than the too-easily replicable modern art? And that ethical question - which finally sends the director's sympathies away from his subjects - leads to yet another about documentary filmmaking itself: Whose story is it, anyway?

As ST VanAirsdale notes, the film's been picked up for $1 million by Sony Pictures Classics; more from Variety).

Update, 1/27: Eric Kohn in the New York Press:

In some ways, Kid plays as a companion piece to last year's Who the Bleep is Jackson Pollock?, which was about a trucker who navigates the snobbery of the art world trying to sell a supposedly original Pollock work. I'm also reminded of the serialized Jules Feiffer comic about a young opera singer whose parents force him to perform, until he escapes to the streets and has a lot more fun being a regular young boy. Marla's parents don't seem antagonistic, but like everything in the creative community, surface appearances can be misleading. An arts editor for the New York Times explains that Marla is "an innocent," and that's what makes her work popular. "Nobody is saying 'fuck you' in this painting," he says. Unless, of course, they are.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Park City Dispatch. 4.

Craig Phillips has been up to all sorts of things over the past couple of days.

I wanted to get away from the usual "I saw Alec Baldwin in the men's room and he was looking sort of paunchy" sort of Sundance gossip, so on Sunday, I gravitated towards a few people who are tuned into something very near and dear to my heart - the environment - and found it more fulfilling to fixate on that for a bit.

At Ed Begley's Project Greenhouse HQ, I told the very affable and eco-eager Ed that my stepfather, a "green" architect based in Santa Barbara, greatly respects what he does and is trying to spread the green home gospel locally (think global, etc.). Ed was very excited to hear about this, and, as everyone knows, to talk excitedly in general about all his eco-contraptions. Got a picture of him on his now-famous bicycle that stores household energy created by pedaling. I remarked that this invention could kill two birds with one stone - since Americans are also a generally overweight lot.

Photo by Craig Phillips

On a more grassroots level, the guys behind Freedom Fuels, winner of the 2006 Environmental Preservation Award at the '06 Artivist Film Festival, were pushing their documentary on biodiesel fuel by screening it in a school bus on Main Street. It's also available for free online - free! - so go here to see it. The well-made "little" doc features appearances by Daryl Hannah and Willie Nelson, and a lot of recycled fuel.

At Project Greenhouse, I also ran into two of the people behind the Slamdance film Bangkok [site] - which is probably more enjoyable than many of the films at Sundance this year.

Speaking of Slamdance, the night before I saw the fascinating if slightly raw documentary Ganja Queen, which will air on HBO at some point this year. The doc tells the rather unbelievable - if it weren't true - Brokedown Palace-ish story of an Australian girl who travels to Bali and gets arrested by customs for smuggling the largest freaking bag of marijuana I've ever seen - we're talking the size of a boogie board. Which was where it was found - in a boogie board satchel under the board. It quickly becomes (mostly) clear that the girl is innocent, a victim of a frame-up - whether it was by baggage handlers in Australia, someone she knows or another person is part of the story here. The other part is about the girl's trials (in both senses of the word) in a Balinese jail while awaiting the verdict from a judge who has convicted 600 drug cases out of 600. The story is mostly told via video interviews and footage, much of it shot in secret, in the jail with the increasingly distraught young woman.

Her family falls apart. The case is investigated. A "savior," a wealthy Australian cell phone magnate, helps fund the defense before harming the case with his mouth. Revelations arise. The clock ticks. It's all very disturbing and compelling, but the film could definitely use another big edit; it feels about 20 minutes too long at least, with one (or three) too many scenes with the girl's older sister freaking out, and the time it takes to finally get to the verdict we're all waiting for dragging out. Still, it's an incredible story and, assuming they fix a few sound glitches (the director assured us she will) and cut it a bit, it will definitely be worth a watch.

We attended a seminar in the "New Frontier" series which brought together a panel of five artists who had works - both installations and films - at the festival to talk about using new media in film and art. Or something. I'm still not sure what the point of this talk was except to debate the challenges of creating an artistically viable film in (quoting Being John Malkovich) "today's wintry economic climate," but there were a few choice moments. Much pretentiousness and laughter ensued.

Speaking of puppetry - well, Malkovich provides a weak segue - Jessica Yu's Protagonist is a fascinating, ambitious if not always fully successful documentary that brings together four unrelated men to tell the stories of making major transitions, or transformations, in their lives. The film asks the question, "When does a man become his own tragedy?" Besides being about the roles we play in the stories of our own lives, it's also about storytelling itself, and the film cleverly mixes things up by using Greek theater, specifically Euripides (whom Yu said was initially the inspiration for the film), in puppet form. The classical puppetry, by Janie Geiser, is impressive and brilliant, while Jeff Beal's hypnotic score matches the mood of the film. But the film's success hinges on how well these men tell their stories and each of them - particularly author Mark Salzman, who is a wonderfully engaging presence here, both funny, self-deprecating and astute - get our attention.

Protagonist reminds me a bit of Errol Morris's Fast, Cheap, Out of Control, as it's an ambitious film with a quartet of subjects that don't always fully connect with each other but fascinate anyway. In Protagonist, the cuts between each story sometimes feel abrupt - the German who was once a member of a terrorist group before becoming disillusioned with their twisted politics, tells an increasingly interesting story that is more often than not disturbing; a cut from him to a lighter moment in one of the other stories, for example, could use a bit of a segue, even if just a fade/black out. (The two other subjects are a gay man who was once a staunch evangelical tormented about his sexuality, and a Latino writer who gravitated from a life of crime to writing the amazing stories of his life.) And if the film doesn't completely knock it out of the park, it's a most illuminating work nonetheless. The puppets and Salzman are the real stars here.

I'm still not sure what the New Frontier is or means, but if there is one, may Jessica Yu be a part of it.

Peer Raben, 1940 - 2007.

For years, Peer Raben worked closely with the legendary director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. He not only wrote the music for many of his films (Lili Marleen, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Lola, Veronika Voss, among others) but also worked as a producer. The composer's workshop he founded in Munich has announced that he died on Sunday evening at the age of 66.

Raben has been active recently as well: He composed the music, for example, for Wong Kar-wai's 2046.

The DPA.

Updated through 1/23.

Raben's musical choices perfectly complement Fassbinder's narratives, with his parodic twists to light entertainment (in places, an outright indulgence in conscious schmaltz), or else mock-dramatic music.

Roger Hillman, "Fassbinder, and Fassbinder/Peer Raben," Screening the Past, March 2001.

See also: the site and this terrific photo (1968).

Update: "How to describe Raben's music?" asks C Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark. "It was as bittersweet as a hurdy-gurdy played on a streetcorner in Lang's Berlin, or as melancholy as a tango in a Parisian brothel. He was modern, but only in the sense that early 20th Century composers like Stravinsky, Bartok, and Kurt Weill are considered modern. Just as Fassbinder's films got better and better, so did Raben's music, and his last Fassbinder scores, the ones written in the early 1980s, are his most memorable: Querrelle, Berlin Alexanderplatz (a 15-hour miniseries), and Lola."

Update, 1/23: The German papers: Peter Uehling in the Berliner Zeitung, Christian Schröder in Der Tagesspiegel and Die Welt.

Berlinale. Competition.

The lineup for this year's Competition program at the Berlin International Film Festival is now complete. So we already know about these, these and this one; here's what's new:

• Cao Hamburger's O ano em que meus pais saíram de férias (The Year My Parents Went on Holiday, Brazil/Argentina).

• Ariel Rotter's El otro (The Other, Argentina/France/Germany).

• Joseph Cedar's Beaufort (Israel).

• Zhang Lu's Hyazgar (Desert Dream, Korea/France).

• Wang Quan'an's Tu ya de hun shi (Tuya's Marriage, China).

• Li Yu's Ping Guo (Lost in Beijing, China).

• Ryan Eslinger's When a Man Falls in the Forest (Canada/US).

• Zack Snyder's 300 (US).

• Richard Eyre's Notes on a Scandal (UK, out of competition).

• David Mackenzie's Hallam Foe (UK).

• And closing the festival will be François Ozon's Angel (France/Belgium/UK).

And here's the full list, in alphabetical order.

Park City Dispatch. 3.

David D'Arcy sees three trends and three movies: The Devil Came on Horseback, Zoo and Cold Prey.

It seems that almost everyone comes to Sundance looking for trends, assuming that the festival will shape the course of independent film for a year to come. Here are three that seem clear enough.

More films at the festival are getting more political. Take everything from the Darfur expose in the voice of an ex-marine, The Devil Came on Horseback [site], to the opening film, Chicago 10, about the brutal suppression of anti-war riots at the time of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in the summer of the 1968 and the circus of a trial a year later.

Beside the political trend, there remains a group of films that push at the boundaries of sex that can be shown on the screen - or even discussed. Zoo, by Robinson Devor, certainly keeps this tendency active and growing, in its meditative inquiry into the men who organized sex parties with horses in Enumclaw, outside Seattle, which led to the death of one of them in 2005, when his colon was perforated in an encounter with an Arabian stallion. (The horse lived, but is not at the festival to do press. I can just imagine the "dinner" in his honor.)

Next is the obvious trend that the festival is growing far beyond the capacity of Park City to accommodate it, whether the problem is cost, lodging, parking, or the congestion on a Main Street that some are now just calling Bourbon Street. Limo-lock is now as much a part of the festival as anything else. Traffic is often reduced to a motionless snarl, in which buses transporting filmgoers packed in with their faces pushed up against the windows just stand still. We all know that prices have gotten so high here that it would be cheaper to have a festival like this one in Monaco or Palm Beach. Yet Park City, I'm told, is contracted to be the home of the Sundance Film Festival through 2018. Who made that decision? A multiplex of 12 theaters, which every little town on the prairie in the US seems to have, would be an obvious answer. Don't hold your breath.

A few films to consider.

The Devil Came on Horseback by Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern takes its title from a book by the former marine Brian Steidle and his sister Gretchen Steidle which is due to be published later this year. Steidle went to Sudan as a monitor for the African Union. He took his camera and recorded what he saw, which was death inflicted on villagers in vast areas by the Arab Janjiweed militias. Steidle makes it clear that the militias are paid, armed and commanded by the Sudanese government. It couldn't be any clearer when Sudanese planes bomb villages before the militias enter to rape, pillage and burn. Anyone foolish enough to believe that government's public argument that the killers are acting autonomously, or that Sudanese courts have the inclination to punish mass murders, won't believe it after seeing this film. Once again, genocide happens, and the world stands on the sidelines. Steidle's pictures are gruesome, yet some of the cinema here is stunning in its spareness, in its silvery images of water, which seems to be the resource in least supply in this region besides truth-telling courage, and even in the generic footage of Steidle trying to get anyone in Washington to listen.

Zoo continues to be a film that everyone knows about, but few know. Who hasn't heard of the movie about the guy who gets killed after having sex with a horse? Robinson Devor was at Sundance in 2005 with Police Beat co-written with Seattle theorist/scribe Charles Mudede, about an unlikely Senegalese cop on a beat in the city that brought you Jimi Hendrix and Bill Gates. He's back with Zoo, which is the term by which practitioners of sex with animals, zoophiles, refer to themselves. Don't call it bestiality. There's real affection on both sides of the relationship, they say. If you want the tabloid side of it, or the everyday journalism, turn to the Seattle Post, where the stories on the incident were the most-read articles in the paper's history. It makes you wonder whether there isn't a mass-market audience for a film of this kind, which tries to humanize the men who have been maligned and prosecuted. They've had to turn people away from screening sin Park City, where lots of people can afford horses. Now that this film has opened up the conversation on human-animal sex, and opened up the jokes - was the horse wearing a condom? - I'm surprised at how many people are conversant on the subject, with strong opinions. Broadening the debate once again at Sundance.

One film that I wouldn't have seen anywhere else was at Slamdance, still a rival to Sundance after all these years, and still as disorganized as ever on Main Street, and just as uncomfortable, if you sit through an entire screening, as I did last night. The film is Cold Prey [site], a Norwegian horror movie, and a huge hit there. Five snowboarders set out for an Easter weekend in the mountains, and when one of then breaks his leg after tearing through fresh snow, they hole up in an abandoned hotel. It's haunted, in case you haven't guessed, and the huge murderer/ghost puts them away one by one with a pickaxe. In its borrowing from The Shining and Psycho, this film isn't original, but the acting by the young cast of unknowns - some of them unknown inside Norway - is superbly nuanced. (The director, Roar Uthaug, told me that the Norwegian public is so accustomed to seeing the same actors in its films, that it's actually an asset to be making films without over-exposed stars. Tell that to Hollywood, or to Sundance.) This is a director to watch, if he moves beyond entertainment, or even if he doesn't.

Sundance. Crazy Love.

A "kooky, only-in-New-York tale of improbable love," writes Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay. "There are scores of docs that center on the mysteries of character. Why do people do the things they do? Many of these docs leave you unsatisfied at their conclusion, though, when you realize you still don't know what makes these people tick. It’s the ultimate success of Crazy Love that, I think, you perfectly understand these two people by its end."

At Film Threat, Mark Bell declares it "a rarity in documentaries; it's fun."

"I know that there are relationships in the world that are, at best, sick and delusional; at the same time, I don't want to hear about them," grumbles Cinematical's James Rocchi. "Crazy Love wants to be a portrait of obsession - right down to the oh-so-knowing quote from Lacan that opens the film - but it simply feels like a feature-length version of any episode of The Jerry Springer Show, where unlikable people demonstrate they have no shame by carefully detailing their twisting and idiotic hate-fueled squalid past and unhappy present."

The Reeler and indieWIRE interview director Dan Klores.

Update, 1/23: Allison Hope Weiner talks with Klores for the New York Times.

Update, 1/26: "Klores's rollicking film" is "his finest effort yet," writes Steve Ramos at indieWIRE. "Despite the sadness, crimes and terrible actions, the story of Burt and Linda is the best time at Sundance."

Update, 1/29: Tom Hall: "One of the most nauseatingly egocentric people I have ever seen, Pugach was, hands down, the most troubling character I saw on screen at the festival because he is the real deal."

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Away From Her.

"Sarah Polley, the best actress not enough people know about, is poised to become a director everyone is talking about," wrote Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times the other day. "Away From Her [site], Polley's first feature as a writer-director, comes to the Sundance Film Festival after an opening at Toronto that had local critics calling it 'one of the most astonishing feature debuts by a Canadian director in ages.'"

The IFC's Alison Willmore finds it "so grown-up it is, thematically, approaching death.... Polley's direction and dialogue adaptations are so self-consciously lyrical that they constantly throw you out of the film, so the fact that the story takes unexpected turns is more of a clinical observation than a recommendation."

Writing in Film Threat, Jeremy Mathews has nothing but praise for the two leads, Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent.

Update: "Away from Her was adapted from an Alice Munro story by Polley herself," notes Cinematical's James Rocchi, and "it's an astonishingly moving feature-length directorial debut. It manages to get fresh, bold performances from seasoned veterans Christie and Pinsent. It also turns what could have been mawkish, rote TV-movie-of-the-week material into a truly engaging drama."

Update, 1/23: Andrew O'Hehir for Salon: "As pale and lovely as a Canadian winter sunrise, Away From Her is a story of love, sex and disease whose major characters are all over 60. And don't think you can just snuggle up to it; Polley's adaptation of Alice Munro's story 'The Bear Came Over the Mountain' is loaded with icy switchbacks and spiky surprises."

Update, 1/30: Eric Kohn for the New York Press: "A rare treat: Straightforward storytelling with no gimmicks or last minute tricks—instead, we get a solid pace and involving conflict. Sad as hell, when all's said and done."

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Broken English.

"I despise romantic comedies as a rule," writes Jeffrey Wells, "but Zoe Cassavetes's Broken English is an exception, perhaps because it doesn't try to be 'funny' as much as sardonic and bitterly truthful about what a slog it is out there for no-longer-young women who are 'looking for love,' or at least for a relationship that allows for the possibility of something nourishing and genuine."

"Broken English is a film one cheers for before watching simply due to the Cassavetes legacy," writes Steve Ramos at indieWIRE. "The fact that it's a likable romp with just enough chuckles earns Cassavetes status as a moviemaker with potential.... With its bad date gags, constant girl talk and fashionable wardrobe, Broken English is an unabashed women's comedy, a Marlo Thomas comedy for the 21st century."

"A pitch-perfect lead performance by Parker Posey and debuting feature writer-helmer Zoe Cassavetes's deft, low-key approach raise "Broken English" a couple notches above the usual run of lonely-single-woman-seeking-romance-in-the-big-city yarns," agrees Dennis Harvey in Variety.

But Jamie Tipps, writing at Film Threat, finds: "What began as an interesting character study ends in convention, offering only the most clichéd platitudes in summation. You can't find true love until you love yourself? Hasn't Dr. Phil been telling us that for years?"

For New York, Emma Rosenblum asks Cassavetes a few questions, and the Reeler not only has a chat as well, but ST VanAirsdale also gets a few words with Parker Posey at the post-premiere party: "I'm so glad the movie got a good response, because its got a light touch in a very unusual way, but it's dealing with a very tenuous and soulful transformation and transition in a woman's life."

Update, 1/23: Online viewing tip. Posey and Cassavetes chat on iW Video.

Update, 1/27: Mike D'Angelo at ScreenGrab: "[T]his is the first time in my memory that [Posey's] ever come across as a plausible human being."

Update, 1/29: "Parker Posey turns in one of her best performances to date," writes Tom Hall. "Broken English is a lovely addition to the 'sex and the single girl' genre, and while it's hard to find a man for whom to root, one can't help but root for Nora the whole way."

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Manda Bala.

"There are many impressive documentaries at Sundance this year but my favorite so far is Jason Kohn's Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)," writes Jason Guerrasio at the Filmmaker blog. "Examining the violence, political corruption and rampant kidnappings in Sao Paulo, Brazil, this doc - with a brisk running time of 85 minutes - never lets you catch your breath as it weaves through numerous stories that are sometimes humorous but often excruciating to watch."

"[A]rguably the best documentary I've watched so far," agrees Steve Ramos at indieWIRE. Both mention Kohn's work with Errol Morris, "but the twenty-something director deserves unshared acclaim for his bright, beautiful and utterly engrossing omnibus film," adds Ramos.

Updated through 1/25.

IndieWIRE and the Reeler interview Kohn.

Update, 1/24: "What gets my blood running is to fall in love with a movie, and my favorite movie at the festival so far is Jason Kohn's Manda Bala." Reid Rosefelt introduces his video interview with Kohn at Zoom In Online.

Updates, 1/25: Bryan Whitefield talks with Kohn for ScreenGrab.

"Kohn's film lives in the extremes while somehow taking refuge in the commonplace. It's fascinating, unsettling viewing," writes ST VanAirsdale before quoting a few very lively bits from the Q&A with an audience.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Strange Culture.

"The surreal nightmare of internationally acclaimed artist and professor Steve Kurtz began when his wife Hope died in her sleep of heart failure," Lynn Hershman Leeson [site] tells SF360. "Medics arrived, became suspicious of Kurtz's art, and called the FBI. Within hours the artist was detained as a suspected 'bioterrorist' as dozens of agents in hazmat suits sifted through his work and impounded his computers, manuscripts, books, his cat, and even his wife's body."

Asked to "categorize" Strange Culture [site], her film about the case featuring Thomas Jay Ryan, Tilda Swinton, Peter Coyote and Josh Kornbluth, she replies, "Hybrid, tactical media, like Steve's work. It's kind of a portrait, in that way. Like everything I do, it defies categorization. One might think of it as a documentary, or even as a sci-fi, though."

David Carr meets her well and, for the New York Times, asks her about the work's virtual premiere on Second Life.

Gabriella Giannachi saw an early cut and wrote for the Presence Project, "I remember two moments that moved me to tears - Steve Kurtz talking about the fact that Tilda Swinton is playing Hope. 'I can't think of any better gesture of remembrance' - and... Swinton: 'The second she died even the gesture of making art changed.'"

"[Y]ounger filmmakers should be looking to Hershman Leeson for lessons on how to reinvent old forms while at the same time telling an urgently topical story," writes John Anderson in Variety.

Update: Karina Longworth at Netscape: "Strange Culture includes a good deal of nostalgia for the day in which the government put artists on the payroll - or at least declined to persecute them. 'Art isn't important in this country at all,' Hershman-Leeson says worriedly. 'You measure a society's progress by the art it produces. How will we be measured?'"

Update, 1/25:"[P]robably the best and certainly the most urgent film in the Frontier section," writes Dennis Lim for indieWIRE. "Completed just as President Bush bulldozed through the Military Commissions Act, which redefined habeas corpus for so-called enemy combatants, the film nails the mood of post-9/11 America: the paranoia, fear, and willful ignorance that the government has fostered and exploited. Strange Culture may have been the first film to reach Second Life avatars but one can only hope it has some impact in the real world."

Update, 1/29: Jason Silverman reports on the Second Life screening for Wired News.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Grace is Gone.

The Weinstein Co's already picked up worldwide rights for Grace is Gone, the film John Cusack "found himself yearning for," as David M Halbfinger put it in a piece for the New York Times last month, "a movie project that could cast a spotlight on an aspect of the war that the government was keeping largely off screen." Nicole Sperling has more on the deal at the Hollywood Reporter.

"[T]he best film I've seen so far at Sundance '07," declares Jeffrey Wells. "It's a plain and pared down thing, emotionally subtle but very specific and often moving, familiar and understated with a Midwestern voice of its own - a family film about a very American, very here-and-now tragedy."

"In general, I found Richard Corliss's Time mag broadside, 'Sundance Movies are Bad for You,' unsupported and churlish, but if there's one film that some of his criticisms might apply to, it's this one," counters Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay. "The film is made with obvious sincerity, it's well acted (particularly by Shélan O'Keefe, who plays the older daughter)... but it's full of so many familiar indie-film narrative tropes and plot devices that it was unable to convey anything to me that felt real about the experience of an American family losing a loved one in Iraq."

"I think you'd have to be a heartless bastard to sit through this movie and not get at very least a little tear swelling in your eyeduct," protests Rav at AICN.

IndieWIRE and the Reeler interview director James C Strouse.

Updates, 1/23: Karina Longworth at Netscape: "Deliberately paced and remarkably tender, the film defies expectations by avoiding political statement in favor of intimate portraiture. In the context of Sundance, a festival known for showcasing polemics, that in itself feels like a revelation."

Anthony Kaufman at indieWIRE: "Not nearly as funny or sad as it needs to be, Grace is Gone represents the well-intentioned efforts of a novice filmmaker still finding his way." He sees in "this middlebrow melodrama" an "opportunity to purge their pain about the war. At least that's what The Weinstein Company must have been thinking when they paid up $4 million for the film in the wee hours of the morning. But the hype around the movie is undeserved, and if Harvey can turn Cusack's performance into a legitimate awards contender than the mogul truly is a marketing magician."

Michael Scasserra for IFC News: "This is politics made palatable, but it's unimpressive filmmaking."

Updates, 1/24: "[I]t looks like a slam-dunk for 'Liberal Hollywood' - a politically outspoken star taking on a politically charged topic," writes Cinematical's James Rocchi: "But one of the noteworthy things about Grace is Gone is that it's not explicitly political; there's no big moment of righteous fury, no big speech about public policy - just intimate moments of private pain.... Grace is Gone has the look of life, and the glow of art."

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir: "I won't claim I didn't shed some tears, but I longed for some window-smashing, lamp-throwing, fuck-all-you-bastards catharsis."

Update, 1/25: Scott Macaulay passes along an email from producer Mike Ryan, which begins, "Donald Rumsfeld and all pro-war Republicans will love the new John Cusack film, Grace is Gone." The argument follows, and he wraps thusly: "[L]et this be a warning to all liberally minded filmmakers: let's think out our choices carefully before proceeding with a war-themed film. We may end up doing more harm than good."

Update, 1/30: Scott Foundas notes that "Grace Is Gone has plenty of champions who proclaim it a sensitive, non-partisan allegory about Americans' unwillingness to acknowledge the full horror of Iraq. What I saw, however, was a cowardly film only interested in using its angel-faced child stars to manufacture a cheap, tear-jerking payoff."

Update, 2/5: Beth Gilligan at Not Coming to a Theater Near You: "It may be structured to maximize the manipulation of audience emotions (there wasn't a dry eye in the house at the jam-packed screening I attended), but it also addresses a subject matter so thoroughly overlooked by the mainstream news media that to criticize it seems almost like nitpicking."

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Fests and events, 1/21.

Popnutten's reporting that Anton Corbijn's Ian Curtis biopic, Control, will see its world premiere at the Berlinale. Rumor? Do a little googling, and you'll find lots of confirmation, but I can't remember it appearing in any earlier announcements from the festival itself.

Matt Riviera previews the Adelaide International Film Festival (February 23 through March 4).

"Buñuel is routinely described as a 'surrealist' director, which I guess is correct, but it's still a reductive label," writes Peter Bradshaw on the occasion of the retrospective at the National Theatre in London. "Maybe it is more accurate to describe him as a cinematic director, one of the few available in that Greenaway-esque sense, a director who senses that cinema endows an artist with the license to challenge and even abolish the constraints of time and space and social convention."

Oscar run-up, 1/21.

So Newsweek's Oscar roundtable mentioned some time back, the one with Cate Blanchett, Penélope Cruz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Helen Mirren, Brad Pitt and Forest Whitaker, the one hosted by Sean Smith and David Ansen, is now online.

David Poland reflects on the influence of online media on the Oscar race.

The Producers Guild of America has named Little Miss Sunshine movie of the year; Movie City News has more, while Nathaniel R comments and points more of his own choices as well as the results of Edward Copeland's "Best & Worst 'Best Actress' Wins."

"The last of a generation of hell-raising, gut-wrenching Shakespearean actors who made it in the movies, [Peter] O'Toole has had more comebacks than a phoenix with repetitive strain injury," writes Gaby Wood in the Observer. "Along with his late friend Richard Burton, he holds the record for the most nominations without a win, and when the Academy offered him a Lifetime Achievement Award four years ago, he famously quipped (before accepting it anyway) that he ought to turn it down because he still hoped to 'win the lovely bugger outright'."

Online viewing tip. "Much like last year's timely tribute to Robert Altman, the honorary Oscar to [Ennio] Morricone will likely be the highlight of the night for me," writes That Little Round-Headed Boy. Watching a few concert performances via YouTube, "I am reminded of the weird alchemy of instruments that musical creators hear in their head. Seeing the actual instruments and vocal effects used - oboe, gongs, brass, harp, strings, choristers, martial percussion, operatic soloists - makes me appreciate the genius of Morricone anew."

Sundance. An American Crime.

"Not only does [Ellen Page] get to scream her head off playing innocent scapegoat Sylvia Likens, she gets to suffer at the hands of master actress Catherine Keener, playing torturer mom Gertrude Baniszewski," writes Annie Frisbie, reviewing An American Crime at Zoom In Online. "Page's performance is captivating, fresh and intelligent, and the rest of the cast lives up to her standard and that of the subtle Keener, but the story itself never quite transcends true-crime exploitation."

"Christ, what a slog," sighs Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog.

Updated through 1/27.

An "artistic nullity," growls Variety's Todd McCarthy. "Having demonstrated at best a mild talent for comedy in his earlier films, beginning with the Sundance entry Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss and followed by Get Over It and Ella Enchanted, [director Tommy] O'Haver seems clueless as to how to make something palatable and illuminating of the twisted psychology and pathological behavior at the heart of this tragic tale."

Reid Rosefelt has a video interview with O'Haver at Zoom In Online.

Earlier: Pat H Broeske spoke with O'Haver for the New York Times: "It would have been easy to take this story over the top... My mantra was 'restraint, restraint, restraint.'"

Update, 1/27: Mike D'Angelo at ScreenGrab: "No amount of good intentions can possibly justify such a vile, sadistic betrayal of the viewer's trust."

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Rocket Science.

It's "a festival-friendly comedy/drama very much in the vein of Thumbsucker, Art School Confidential and Napoleon Dynamite," writes Scott Weinberg at Cinematical. "Tailor-made to appeal to the kinds of audiences who regularly show up at the Sundance Film Festival, Rocket Science is certainly well-made and heartfelt enough to earn some praise - but it's also more than a little familiar, and (despite several excellent performances) it's not all that consistently funny a piece. Quirky, colorful and filled with typically oddball characters, sure, but not all that funny."

"My favorite movie after nearly 3 full days of festing," declares AICN's Quint.

Updated through 1/27.

"Rocket Science has a few things in common with 1999's Election, from its purposefully drab visuals to its larger-than-life personalities - all variations on recognizable high-school types, albeit a hundred times brighter, better-spoken and more interesting," writes Variety's Justin Chang. "But [Jeffrey] Blitz's film is ultimately a sweeter, more heartfelt picture, more barbed coming-of-age tale than satire, and very much on the side of its lovably awkward hero, Hal Hefner (wonderfully played by Reece Daniel Thompson)."

"[A]s in his Academy Award-nominated documentary Spellbound, [Blitz] presents adolescence as it really is," writes Zoom In Online's Annie Frisbie. "Blitz's teens earn our respect because they fight for dignity, and win our hearts when he lets them lose."

"Quirky coming-of-age comic-dramas are not a rare species, especially at Sundance," notes Anthony Kaufman at indieWIRE, obviously not one to shy from the Q-word, either. "But Rocket Science, Jeffrey Blitz's narrative debut, bristles with sharply written dialogue, a fresh-faced cast and an offbeat tone somewhere between Wes Anderson, Alexander Payne and 80s John Cusack movies."

Update, 1/22: Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog: "Rocket Science has its share of problems - it goes on too long, and it's saddled with a needless and irritating voiceover and far too many swelling music moments. Still, the film has an unfeigned sweetness that, in combo with clever throwaway details like a couple whose music therapy involves playing Violent Femmes songs on a cello and piano, make it a welcome variation on a Sundance trope."

Update, 1/27: Blitz's "determination not to succumb to cliché pays hilarious dividends throughout, but also ultimately makes Rocket Science feel more like a collection of sharp sketches than a bona fide film," writes Mike D'Angelo at ScreenGrab.

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Teeth.

"In Teeth [site], writer/director Mitchell Lichtenstein takes a kicky premise - that Dawn has the fabled vagina dentata - and pushes it to absurdly gory campy extremes," writes Annie Frisbie at Zoom In Online. "[Jess] Weixler plays her part perfectly straight, and this no-winking performance makes the movie wickedly funny. Amid the laughs, Lichtenstein manages to convey the horror of rape in a visceral way that's harder to watch than the no-holds-barred graphic castrations (yes, more than one)."

"Lichtenstein has taken an outrageous concept and realized it with his own blend of campy humor, splatter gore, and emotional realism," writes Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay. "Props to lead actress Jess Weixler too."

"If Lichtenstein's aim with his mixed-bag horror comedy was to bring the fear of vaginal dentate to life, he succeeded fantastically," writes Steve Ramos at indieWIRE. "As far as achieving the perfect balance of comedy, horror and coming-of-age satire, Lichtenstein comes up slightly short. Still, to his credit, he set his bar very high." Like Scott Macaulay, he's reminded of David Cronenberg, only here, "Cronenberg's cerebral cynicism has been replaced with coming-of-age sensibilities and playful pokes against the religious right."

David Poland breaks into song.

Updates, 1/22: "Think of it as a mix of Superman and Scream, with a side of Mothra," suggests Jennifer Hillner at Wired News. "To me, Dawn's a modern day superhero, biting the penis off any baddie in her path. You go girl!"

"[I]t takes a good deal of talent to take an outrageous idea and turn it into a effective, entertaining and weirdly powerful experience," writes Scott Weinberg at Cinematical. "Teeth (against all odds) ends up being one of the most witty, intelligent and darkly insightful looks at young womanhood since Lucky McKee's brilliant May. (And how strange and admirable is it that both of these movies comes from male writer/directors?)"

"Lichtenstein is clearly a director with vision and ambition, and I think he ends up selling himself a little short," proposes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "This is going to be a notorious film that young audiences will be daring themselves to see, but it's actually funnier, darker and more troubling before it turns into a carnival of repeated dismemberment."

Updates, 1/26: IndieWIRE interviews Lichtenstein.

Picked up by TWC and Lionsgate. (Variety).

Reid Rosefelt introduces his video interview with Lichtenstein at Zoom In Online: "Howard Karren of Premiere pointed out to me that Teeth is a kind of upside down horror film. Usually the sexuality in a scary movie is in the subtext. The teenagers screw and then the guy in a mask or with knives on his fingers comes in and slashes 'em. In this film, writer/ director Mitchell Lichtenstein eliminates the middleman and gets right to it."

Update, 1/27: Mike D'Angelo at ScreenGrab: "The film delivers as many bloody penile stumps as anybody could possibly desire, but that's all it delivers."

Update, 1/29: Tom Hall: "The film is intentionally hilarious and had the audience howling at the long string of castrations, but as a record of male behavior and representation, it is pure pathology. I was reminded of Ginger Snaps, a terrific and little seen Canadian horror film about a young woman's coming of age that applies the same winking sense of humor, but truth be told, no film in recent memory will have men squirming in their seats and women snickering like I expect Teeth will."

Beth Gilligan at Not Coming to a Theater Near You: "[B]eneath the movie's bright-surface lurks a dark feminist fable about the consequences of objectifying women."

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Sundance. Snow Angels.

"David Gordon Green's fourth feature, the casual yet deeply serious, soulful Snow Angels continues along his own lovely path, reaching into particulars of working class life with wit and empathy," writes Ray Pride at Movie City Indie.

"Based on Stewart O'Nan's 1994 novel (with a screenplay by Green, crafting his first adaptation), Snow Angels packs together three interlocking stories into a tense running time, with dense layers of tragedy sprinkled liberally throughout its sprawling yarn," writes Eric Kohn, who takes notes on the post-screening Q&A for the Reeler.

"[E]verything is placed with the same attention to perfect detail as his previous three feature films, Undertow, All the Real Girls and his best film, George Washington," writes Steve Ramos at indieWIRE. "The undeniable truth of Green's filmmaking is that there is no ambivalence about his movies. You either love his sense of deliberately paced naturalism or you find it lulling. Point Blank: I am a fan and will always celebrate his work."

"In the end, Snow Angels is perhaps best understood as a study in community isolation, in which personal connections are inevitably fleeting and the private pain of others, as suggested by the final shot, is all too easily forgotten," suggests Variety's Justin Chang.

"Strong stuff that mops up the floor with the likes of Little Children," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny.

"This is my favorite of his films to date," declares Anne Thompson.

Updates, 1/23: Mike D'Angelo at ScreenGrab: "Those hoping for a return to the woozy lyricism of George Washington and All the Real Girls will likely be disappointed: Formally, this is Green's most conventional work to date, with only a handful of touches that are recognizably his own."

On the other hand, Cinematical's James Rocchi: "It's still a film that's identifiably his, even as it has the potential to turn him from a lesser-known indie director into an A-level dramatist."

Update, 1/24: IndieWIRE has its usual set of questions for DGG, yes, but also a video interview.

Updates, 1/26: Craig Phillips takes extensive notes on a panel featuring Green, Tamara Jenkins, Gregg Araki and Hal Hartley.

Beth Gilligan at Not Coming to a Theater Near You: "Snow Angels is by far the most plot-driven of his films, but unlike in Undertow, where his confidence as a filmmaker seemed to erode somewhat when forced to shift into more conventional narrative gears, here he handles the multifaceted story with aplomb."

Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog: "It's his most solid film to date, and the best we've seen in this solid festival of solid films ready to be sold for what will hopefully be a solid profit."

Update, 1/28: Online listening tip. Cinematical's James Rocchi talks with DGG.

Updates, 1/29: Tom Hall: "Snow Angels announces a new phase in the filmmaking career of David Gordon Green.... It may not be comfortable or fun, but the movie was, alongside Chris Smith's The Pool, the most accomplished and deeply felt feature I saw in the competition."

Eric Kohn: "[H]is finest achievement... It's American Beauty for smart people."

Coverage of the coverage: The Park City Index.

Weekend shorts.

"A Baroque theater director and fifty-something American expatriate in France, [Eugène] Green has directed four oblique, tender and smart-alecky, charmingly pretentious films," writes Ken Chen in a longish piece for Film International. "These films have a calm sealed quality, like science fiction movies that only coincidentally take place in our own universe."

Jim Emerson enjoyed "Contrarian Week" at scanners so much, he's calling for a Contrarian Blog-a-Thon for the weekend of February 16 through 18: "Make your own contrarian argument for/against a movie or a specific moment in a movie or a filmmaker's work or a whole genre if you want to. Just make sure you build a real argument (with examples!) rather than a crackpotty ad hominem attack." Andy Horbal has a list of more up-n-coming Blog-a-Thons.

Somewhat related to contrarianism, though, the IFC News not only has a fun idea for a collective feature, they've also come up with the perfect title for it: "Gagging on the Kool-Aid: Cult Films We Just Don't Get."

Also: "You could down a trough of Gogol, Kafka and Buñuel and still not come up with an absurd domestic apocalypse as simple and disconcerting as that of Emmanuel Carrère's La Moustache," writes Michael Atkinson, who also reviews Mouchette: "In Bresson's no-nonsense hands, this grim fable becomes a pantomime stations of the cross, so completely focused on sensuous details, ethical interrogation and the fastidious lasering-away of movie bullshit (like acting and action) that it comes close to the simple thrust of a medieval Christian icon." More from Steve Erickson at Nerve and Marcy Dermansky.

Via the Literary Saloon: "Contemporary Czech cinema began with the novelist Bohumil Hrabal," writes Steffen Silvis in a review for the Prague Post of Jirí Menzel's latest adaptation (you may remember that Closely Watched Trains is based on Hrabal's work as well), I Served the King of England, set to compete in Berlin. Silvis: "Though Menzel has formulated an interesting narrative structure to contain Hrabal's marvelous excursiveness, and has invented a handful of striking visual solutions for various scenes in the text, the whole seems soulless." Related: Waggish reviewed the book in March 05.

Well put, Looker: "That Woody may be an artist of merit, as opposed to a Bergman-and-Fellini-fetishizing gag-man who hides his shallowness behind talented actors and artful cinematography, is a notion that didn't seem plausible for me again until reading [David] Rakoff. Plus he's got wild, fascinating ruminations on all kinds of things, from George Sanders's suicide note to Viva's mockery of Nico to Drew Barrymore's nipples. His blog is a must-read, from start to finish."

"[H]opefully the currently touring Rivette retrospective will allow Paris Belongs to Us, and Rivette's later masterpieces the chance to assume through wider consensus their deserved stature in cinema history," writes Jeff Reichert. "By his second film, The Nun..., Rivette had easily surmounted the problems of his first feature, and delivered not only the first of many great works but one of the most seminal films of the Sixties." Also at Reverse Shot,Danielle McCarthy on Dreamgirls.

David Bordwell on a particular sort of shot: "I started to call it mug-shot framing, but I found that art historian Heinrich Wölfflin had called it planar or planimetric composition. I went with 'planimetric' because that term suggests the rectangular geometry so often seen in these shots." Related: Online listening tip. Annie Frisbee talks with Bordwell for Zoom In.

"Film is generally at its best when it recognises its roots in modernism, i.e., when it rejects conventional notions of realism, disengages from bourgeois values, and questions the primacy of narration," argues Ronald Bergan in the Independent. But: "Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, we are increasingly seeing the avant-garde abandon the cinema for the gallery - a shift made possible by the digital revolution."

Also: Indies and the studios alike are going all New Agey, suggests Geoffrey Macnab; and Joe Eszterhas's Hollywood survival guide.

You get a sense of just how very contentious the mere mention of Ralph Nader is in Nick Schager's review of An Unreasonable Man, balancing quite fairly between the adoration and disdain evidently revealed in the doc.

Also at Slant, The Films of Kenneth Anger: Volume 1 is a "long-overdue presentation for the valuable fragments of Anger's outlaw poetry," writes Fernando F Croce.

"Movie ratings help shape the culture." A New York Times editorial tips a hat to Kirby Dick's This Film Is Not Yet Rated in recognition of its possible influence on a decision by the MPAA to reform the ratings system. "[Dan] who inherited the system from his predecessor, deserves credit for pushing for these changes. He says there are likely to be more reforms ahead, which is good, because there is still more to be done." Bilge Ebiri has Dick and Rated producer Eddie Schmidt's response to the new measures at ScreenGrab.

Also in the NYT:

• "Siberiade is not as sublimely Homeric as it is grippingly melodramatic and visually extravagant - a sort of Slavic Gone With the Wind filmed under the mystical influence of Andrei Tarkovsky, the visionary Russian filmmaker with whom [Andrei] Konchalovsky occasionally collaborated as a screenwriter," writes Dave Kehr. "The pleasure of this kind of epic filmmaking lies in the gradual accumulation of details and the slow drawing together of plot strands, until the grand design is finally revealed."

• "You might think it would be difficult to fashion an entertaining account of the life of a polyester manufacturer, even a fictitious one," writes Andy Webster. "But the Tamil director Mani Ratnam, known for intelligent political dramas, has done so with Guru, an epic paean to can-do spirit and Mumbai capitalism."

• Manohla Dargis on Dam Street: "Like any number of Chinese films that make the festival rounds, it offers a portrait of alienation in a post-Mao world as believable as it is grim, grim, grim."

• Matt Zoller Seitz: "[Azazel] Jacobs's approach is descended from a long line of minimalist filmmakers, from Jacques Tati (Monsieur Hulot's Holiday) up through Jim Jarmusch (Mystery Train), but The GoodTimesKid dances... in its own sweet style." Also premiering at the Anthology Film Archives is Two Wrenching Departures, Ken Jacobs's "elegy for two... friends, the cameraman and co-director Bob Fleischner (Blonde Cobra) and the performer Jack Smith (Flaming Creatures)." More from Ed Halter in the Voice, Andrew O'Hehir in Salon and from Paul Harrill.

• Doug Aitken's sleepwalkers "is an outstanding example of what might be called archivideo or videotecture," writes Roberta Smith. That said: "Where Mr Aitken usually touches on an implicitly social turbulence, his first public art project in the United States largely reflects the glamorous, sealed-off and elitist sheen that has become endemic to urban life, especially in Manhattan." More from Aileen Torres in the New York Press.

• "For three days this week, French and foreign researchers came together in a conference sponsored in part by the National Library of France and the University of Versailles to dissect and psychoanalyze, criticize and lionize Ian Fleming's debonair creation." Elaine Sciolino reports from Paris: "Titled 'James Bond (2)007: Cultural History and Aesthetic Stakes of a Saga,' [cute!] the conference - France's first scholarly colloquium on James Bond - was aimed at developing a 'socioanthropology of the Bondian universe.'"

• Matt Zoller Seitz on The Hitcher: "The remake preserves many of the original's notorious set pieces, including a showstopper in which the cab and trailer of an 18-wheeler are used as a torture rack. The mix of mystical solemnity and chain-reaction slapstick suggests a Road Runner cartoon directed by John Woo. This is the kind of film in which the heroes often have the evildoer dead to rights but fail to pull the trigger, ostensibly because they're prisoners of bourgeois morality, but really because if they did the smart thing, the film would be a short subject." More from Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times.

• "Older people and the younger, at times under-age objects of their desires are appearing on screen in almost every combination, in literate films whose target audience seems to be aging, upscale baby boomers," observes Caryn James. "But sometimes there is a huge gap between what the filmmakers intend and the way even a sympathetic audience may respond."

• David Carr, the Bagger: "Independent bloggers can laugh all they want about the imperious posture of the mainstream media, but I and others at The Times have never been more in touch with readers' every robustly communicated whim than we are today. Not only do I hear what people are saying, but I also care."

• Laura M Holson: "As YouTube, with the backing of Google, becomes a powerful force in the media world, Hollywood studios and other entertainment companies are trying to figure out if it is friend or foe."

David Edelstein in New York: "Many talented directors have a