Recently in Festivals & events Category

Took the train to British Columbia Thursday for the Vancouver International Film Festival, one of the five largest fests in North America (377 films this year), from which I'll be reporting for the next week. Checked into my hotel, looked out the window and had a moment of Polanski déjà vu from "The Tenant": I didn't see myself looking back at myself, but I think that's me in the window below, writing this post. So far I have no urge to jump or put on a wig. More as it develops...

A "NCFOM" spin-off from "Chacun son Cinema," ("To Each His Own Cinema"), Cannes 2007. Starring Josh Brolin. Written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen.

(tip: Baris Azman)

Werner Herzog is a regular. One time I met a man in a cowboy hat on Main Street and he was Jimmy Stewart. I saw Andre Tarkovsky and Richard Widmark exchange shots on the Sheridan Opera House stage (though not on the same night). Krzysztof Zanussi translated forTarkovsky and showed his miraculous "Imperativ." Kyle MacLachlan and Laura Dern strolled around town, hand-in hand, wearing matching seafoam green outfits and white shoes the year of "Blue Velvet." I was greeted heartily by Crispin Glover, who momentarily mistook me for director Tim Hunter ("River's Edge," "Tex"). I bowed down and kissed Hannah Schygulla's hand....

Continued below, after jump...

"Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" screened all over the world yesterday -- on a Sunday afternoon, roughly in synch with the gala unveiling of the picture at the Cannes Film Festival. The usual film-festival and press-screening review embargoes were promptly ignored, so although the movie opens May 22, many outlets ran full reviews on their websites immediately. Because... well, because they could, I suppose. Variety even posted a preview of the review that its reviewer was about to write, in case, after 19 years of anticipating the next "Indiana Jones" movie, you couldn't stand waiting one more minute while he took the time necessary to process and record his thoughts about the film he'd just seen. Not because he believed it was great or a disaster or even because he had anything in particular he wanted to say about it right away, but because... well, Daily Variety knew its readership simply could not do without knowing instantly that the movie "begins with an actual big bang, then gradually slides toward a ho-hum midsection before literally taking off for an uplifting finish." OK! Doesn't that just whet your appetite for the full-course review?

As Roger Ebert noted on his blog Monday, he saw the film in Chicago and loved it, but at the time he filed his review he suspected he might be going against the critical tide, if there was one:

The first thing Paul Schrader wanted to talk about after the Ebertfest screening of his ambitious 1985 "Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters" was his youthful fascination with the primitive rite of "suicidal blood sacrifice." That's what he said his script for "Taxi Driver" was rooted in -- and, no wonder, since he had been raised a strict Calvinist (is that redundant?) and, as he put it, "Christianity is a blood cult" that glorifies sacrificial suicide. In "Mishima" it's the act of seppuku; in "Raging Bull" it's boxing; in "The Last Temptation of Christ" it's crucifixion... To writer-director Schrader, they're all manifestations of the same bloody thing.

In Sally Potter's "Yes," there's a scene in a restaurant kitchen in which a Lebanese chef and a young Brit-punk dishwasher get into fierce confrontation (you can't really call it an "argument") over politics and religion. The kid grabs a frying pan and goes after the chef. The chef picks up a knife. Standoff. The manager arrives. Summarily, he fires the chef.

In the Q & A after the screening at Ebertfest, some people said they thought this was clearly a race-based (or racist) decision on the manager's part. Others debated the choice of weapons: Didn't a knife appear more threatening than a pan?

Back up two weeks to the Cinema Interruptus series of screenings at the Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, CO: We're looking at the scene in "No Country for Old Men" in which Sheriff Ed Tom Bell returns to the scene of the crime at the motel. [Spoiler alert -- although why you would be reading this blog if you haven't seen "NCFM" is beyond me.] The way the scene is constructed, we expect Chigurh to be standing behind the door when Ed Tom enters the room. The door opens flat against the wall. Ed Tom steps over a pool of dried blood in the doorway, looks around the room, checks the bathroom window (which is locked from the inside) and, relieved, sits down on the bed. He notices an air vent that has been removed. Four screws and a dime are on the floor.

What more do you need to know? I'm not saying it's unreasonable to want to know. But take a moment to look before you start jumping to conclusions. What is there and what is not there. Does the movie provide the answer(s) to your questions, or does it not? If not, what does that decision tell you? That the Coens are sloppy or forgetful? That they're interested in something else, like the experience Ed Tom has just gone through? That maybe you're asking the wrong questions? What else?

After the screening of Bill Forsyth's long-unavailable masterpiece "Housekeeping" at Ebertfest (about which more later) somebody asked him why he used the word "moving" in a key piece of dialog rather than novelist Marilynne Robinson's word-of-choice, "drifting." Forsyth said he didn't remember for certain, but imagined it was because "drifting" was simply "too on-the-nose," too "poetic" sounding. Actress Christine Lahti, who played the character speaking the line in question, and who joined Forsyth on stage (neither of them having seen the movie, or each other, for 21 years) confirmed that "drifting" works beautifully on the page of a novel, but wouldn't have sounded right if spoken aloud on the screen. So much artistry is reflected in that simple explanation. What seemed at first like kind of a dumb, nit-picky question was justified by the answer.

Forsyth spun another tale of adaptation that mirrored the oblique and inevitable comic structure of one of his movies:

Seeing a series of exquisitely subtle films that includes Jeff Nichols' "Shotgun Stories," Eran Kolirin's "The Band's Visit" and Bill Forsyth's "Housekeeping," you become sensitized to how clumsy most movies are about unloading their expository details. These Ebertfest films and filmmakers know how to reveal what needs to be revealed indirectly, without the audience necessarily even realizing that it's being let in on a wealth of information.

So: A real-life example of efficient, semi-oblique expository dialog overheard in a restaurant in Champaign-Urbana on a stormy Friday night. A young couple have just arrived and are about to be seated.

Hostess (smiling): "Oh, it's just the two of you tonight."

Man: "Yeah, we popped in a Disney movie and slipped out the side door."

See, that's a little movie right there. Filmmakers, take note: How much do we know about the lives of this man, this woman, and their history with this restaurant from these two short lines?

More about this subject (and others) in further catch-up Ebertfest posts...

The Illini Student Union wi-fi network has been down since late Friday/Saturday morning, so I'll have to file more when I get back home (I'm between planes in Chicago now, on airport wi-fi). I think the Saturday convention of student scientists on the U of I campus (and/or the massive rain-storm the night before) may have overloaded the system.

Overheard in the hall outside one of the science convention meeting rooms, one student to another: "Well, should we just go back to our anti-social lives then?"

My Ebertfest has already been made for me because I spoke to Bill Forsyth yesterday and, at one point, he said "Great." This is major -- particularly for a guy who, with his friends, went around saying "Great" in Gordon John Sinclair's Scottish accent from "Gregory's Girl" for years. It's a well-known fact. Bella, bella.

In honor of tomorrow's Ebertfest screening I went back and dug up my original 1987 review of Forsyth's "Housekeeping" -- which was the #1 film on my Ten Best list that year (along with such films as John Huston's "The Dead," Tim Hunter's "River's Edge," Alain Cavalier's "Therese" and John Boorman's "Hope and Glory"):

Ruthie (Sara Walker) and Lucille (Andrea Burchill) are skating on thin ice. The orphaned sisters, now going through a gawky teen-age phase, spin silently in circles on the frozen surface of Fingerbone Lake. In the distance, a cluster of laughing children and barking dogs play rambunctiously, but Ruthie and Lucille keep to themselves. They don't like the noise.

After the Ebertfest screening of "Delirious" Thursday afternoon, writer-director Tom DiCillo ("Johnny Suede," "Living in Oblivion," "Box of Moon Light," "The Real Blonde") recalled sending Roger Ebert an e-mail. He was in despair over the distributor's treatment of his latest film, which Ebert had reviewed quite favorably. Out of frustration, and although he'd never written to a critic before, DiCillo posed five pained (and semi-rhetorical) questions about the injustice of the movie business, the last of which was: "Is this all a Kafkaesque nightmare that will never end?"

Ebert wrote back and answered every question. To the final one, he said yes.

What is Ebertfest without Ebert? Fest? Kicking off the 10th Anniversary edition of Roger Ebert's (formerly Overlooked) Film Festival, Chaz Ebert passed along her husband's sentiments that, today, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time -- that is, in a bed in Chicago instead of in at the Virginia Theatrer in Urbana-Champaign. But, she reported him saying, you could also say the same thing about the day he tripped on the carpet and fractured his hip. Nobody's giving up hope, though. Chaz said they were consulting with doctors day by day and that she wouldn't be surprised if Roger wound up making it here after all before the fest is through. [UPDATE: The next day Roger and his doctors decided that making the trip wasn't worth the health risk.}

Last year Ebertfest seemed to improve his rate of recovery exponentially, so we can only hope he'll make it to town. (For a sample of good wishes see the comments at his blog, Roger Ebert's Journal.)

So, the festival is just getting started tonight, but already I've learned some things just from talking to people and reading the program. For example:

I'm in Urbana. My bag isn't. (It's an old canvas backpack thing that I never should have checked anyway. Now I'm paying for it.) I'll be reporting from Ebertfest this week, but I'm heartbroken that, for now at least, Roger won't be here. In case you haven't checked out his brand new, under-construction blog, Roger Ebert's Journal, please do so. Roger writes:

The 10th Anniversary Ebertfest begins tonight in Urbana-Champaign. It is with some melancholy that I write these words on a legal pad in a hospital bed in Chicago. After consulting with my doctors, I have decided it may not prudent to try to make the journey today with a fractured hip....

I'm off to the Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, CO, (April 7 - 11) for my favorite week of the year. This week, Monday through Friday for two hours each day, I'll be leading a discussion with the audience as we go through a great movie together, shot by shot. Last year it was "Chinatown." This year you'll be shocked to learn that I've picked "No Country for Old Men." Complete schedule here. My schedule of panels, screenings, etc., here. I'll be blogging when I can throughout the week. Other panels I'm on concern abortion in popular culture, the aesthetics of brutality, train-wreck celebrities, and digital acting. I can't wait to see what we come up with!

You may have heard some version of this story about Richard Widmark, who died last week at age 93. I was there, at the Telluride Film Festival in 1983 when it happened, in the Sheridan Opera House for the tributes to Andrei Tarkovsky and Widmark. Emotions were heightened, perhaps, not only by the thin mountain atmosphere, but but by a terrifying Cold War showdown between Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union and Ronald Reagan's USA (I don't know which scared me more at the time) over the shooting down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, which we didn't learn about until we got to Telluride. Things were chilly up there.

The emotions associated with my memories are indelible, even if their precision has faded. But the gist of what Richard Widmark said that weekend, and the eloquence with which he said it, will always stay with me. Shortly after Widmark's death, I contacted Gary Meyer, director of the Telluride Film Festival (whom I'd known as co-founder of Landmark Theatres), to see if Widmark's tribute speech was transcribed anywhere, because I would love to reprint it. Those were relatively early days for the Telluride festival (which began in 1974 and seemed much more remote than it is now) and Gary couldn't find any record of the speech, which I remember Widmark reading from notes he produced from his jacket pocket. But he did find some 1983 press coverage, from which I have pieced together the following "story."

The Burt-a-Thon (formally known as the Burt Reynolds-a-Thon) starts today over at Welcome to L.A.. The awesome Larry Aydlette, whom some of you may know from his blog-lives as That Little Round-Headed Boy and/or The Shamus, has set himself a truly daunting, awesomely ambitious task: For the entire month of February, he will... well, let Larry explain it himself:

Obviously, Burt Reynolds didn't get the e-mail that he was supposed to go quietly away. But that's not the Burt Reynolds way. In his autobiography, "My Life," he begins with a quote from George Bernard Shaw: "I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. For the harder I work, the more I live."

So, I've decided to honor that work ethic and use his birth month for 29 straight days of Burt Reynolds coverage. This isn't a love-a-thon. In rewatching a lot of his movies, I've come to the conclusion that he didn't necessarily deserve to win the Oscar for the films that he and many critics thought he should have won them for. And he was never nominated for what seems to me to be his one indisputable masterpiece (although I doubt many critics will agree with me). But there are quite a few of his films that are very, very good, and deserve reconsideration.

All week I've been meaning to link (and contribute) to the 'Short Film Week' Blog-a-thon co-hosted by Only the Cinema and Culture Snob (December 2 - 8). But I'm still recovering from the Pacific Northwest storm and flooding (long story) earlier in the week. There are many things I'd like to write about, but I probably won't get to them until after the blog-a-thon is technically over. (For now, maybe I can recycle my Close-Up Blog-a-thon short movie [above] and my piece on the opening credits sequence for 'Dexter', which is a perfect little short on its own -- not unlike Martin Scorsese's "The Big Shave," in certain provocative respects.)

But the archive of articles will remain -- and there's some great stuff, including Matt Zoller Seitz on Chuck Jones' classic Looney Tune, "What's Opera, Doc?"; Joe Bowman at Fin de cinema on 20 breakthrough music videos (hey, they can be incredibly expressive and accomplished works); Jeffrey Hill at Liverputty on the Disney science film "Our Friend the Atom" (1957) [as a kid, I was fascinated by Frank Capra's Bell Telephone film, "Hemo the Magnificent" (1957), about hemoglobin]; and more than I can even begin to mention. It's a trove you'll have fun digging through...

Consider: If a filmmaker like, say, Brian De Palma, had used actual images of dead and injured Vietnamese war casualties in one of his fictionalized, semi-pseudo-documentary features like "Greetings" (1969) or "Hi, Mom!" (1970), would he or the films' producers or distributors have run a significant risk of being sued by the victims or their families? Are the legal or ethical issues any different now, with the carnage in Iraq? Why or why not? A few things to mull over regarding the latest "Redacted" scandal/controversy/promotional gimmick:

I suspect that De Palma was quite consciously out for publicity at the New York Film Festival press conference for "Redacted" Monday, when he accused Mark Cuban of HDNet and/or Magnolia Pictures of "redacting" the images of actual war casualties in his film's final montage. And it worked. Here's a movie about documentary reporting and amateur video and blogging of the occupation of Iraq and... look! IFC has posted a viral YouTube video of the NYFF confrontation between De Palma and Magnolia Pictures president Eammon Bowles that has been featured (even embedded) on sites such as Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, Movie City Indie, GreenCine Daily, spout blog, jürgen fauth’s muckworld and I don't know how many other outlets including... well, the site you're looking at right now.

How much more meta do you want to get?

Bowles denies he was in on any "staging." But De Palma? Isn't that what he does? He provokes, he fakes, he toys with what's genuine and what's phony to the point where the distinctions become tricky or even meaningless. If his role in the press conference, at least, wasn't part of a "Be Black, Baby" performance piece (see "Hi, Mom!") then it sure ought to have been. And even if it wasn't, it still is. Spontaneous, pre-meditated, both, neither -- it's still a spectacle designed for the cameras and the audience.

But that's not really the most important issue, is it? De Palma says he got the images for the montage sequence either off the Internet or otherwise, and that they are photos of real people, with real injuries, that photographers took in Iraq. Except for a couple pictures created specifically for "Redacted" -- an wounded pregnant woman featured earlier in the movie and the victim of the fictionalized, (re-)enacted rape and murder -- the photos are meant to be perceived as shockingly unfiltered, and/or to further the movie's strategy of pushing the viewer to question what is real (I suppose I really should put quotation marks around that word in this context) and what has been composed for the movie you're watching. In the version of "Redacted" shown at the Toronto and New York Film Festivals, and perhaps in Venice and elsewhere, the faces of the actual victims have been blacked out -- as if someone had taken a marker and scribbled over their eyes to conceal their identities. (The logo of a YouTube-lookalike site shown in the movie has been similarly "redacted.")

De Palma says he wants to use the montage with the unredacted faces. Bowles says (in comments posted at Movie City Indie):

the sole reason that the photos are redacted, is that it is legally indefensible to use someone's unauthorized photo in a commercial work. any claim to the contrary is either hopelessly naive or willfully false. And any indemnification does not preclude getting sued, and considering the asset bases of cuban and wagner versus depalma, there's no issue about who's purses will be attacked (not to mention the presumption of agreeing to the image of one of your loved one's mutilated body living on in the world wide media).

Brian De Palma is neither naive nor stupid. He knows what Bowles says is true -- and that even if a suit went to court and the producers were able to successfully argue that their use of the photos was journalistic in intent, even within the context of a non-documentary commercial feature film, the cost of fighting such a lawsuit would be significant. In fact, "Redacted" announces itself as a "visual document" of "imagined events" (I'm not sure I remember the exact language used in the opening titles, but I believe that's close), and as such does not attempt to present any factual documentation for those events. De Palma also knows that, while "Redacted" plays with documentary, web, home video and other techniques and formats, it can't help but be an exploitation movie too, no matter how serious its concerns. It's right there in the title: Come see what has been forbidden for you to see.

Again, that's what De Palma does....

"The Kite Runner," directed by Marc Forster ("Monster's Ball," "Finding Neverland," "Stranger Than Fiction") and based on Khaled Housseini's best-selling 2003 novel, opens the Chicago International Film Festival tonight. But the New York Times reports that Paramount Vantage has delayed the US theatrical release out of concern for the safety of the child actors in the film:

The studio distributing “The Kite Runner,” a tale of childhood betrayal, sexual predation and ethnic tension in Afghanistan, is delaying the film’s release to get its three schoolboy stars out of Kabul — perhaps permanently — in response to fears that they could be attacked for their enactment of a culturally inflammatory rape scene.

Executives at the distributor, Paramount Vantage, are contending with issues stemming from the rising lawlessness in Kabul in the year since the boys were cast.

The boys and their relatives are now accusing the filmmakers of mistreatment, and warnings have been relayed to the studio from Afghan and American officials and aid workers that the movie could aggravate simmering enmities between the politically dominant Pashtun and the long-oppressed Hazara.

In an effort to prevent not only a public-relations disaster but also possible violence, studio lawyers and marketing bosses have employed a stranger-than-fiction team of consultants. In August they sent a retired Central Intelligence Agency counterterrorism operative in the region to Kabul to assess the dangers facing the child actors. And on Sunday a Washington-based political adviser flew to the United Arab Emirates to arrange a safe haven for the boys and their relatives.

“If we’re being overly cautious, that’s O.K.,” Karen Magid, a lawyer for Paramount, said. “We’re in uncharted territory.”

In interviews, more than a dozen people involved in the studio’s response described grappling with vexing questions: testing the limits of corporate responsibility, wondering who was exploiting whom and pondering the price of on-screen authenticity....

Ebert writes of the film itself with great admiration:

How long has it been since you saw a movie that succeeds as pure story? That doesn't depend on stars, effects or genres, but simply fascinates you with how it will turn out? Marc Forster's "The Kite Runner," based on a much-loved novel, is a movie like that. It superimposes human faces and a historical context on the tragic images of war from Afghanistan.

The Times story reports that Paramount Vantage has delayed the theatrical release "by six weeks, to Dec. 14, when the young stars' school year will have ended."

Though the book is admired in Afghanistan by many in the elite, its narrative remains unfamiliar to the broader population, for whom oral storytelling and rumor communication carry far greater weight.

The Taliban destroyed nearly all movie theaters in Afghanistan, but pirated DVDs often arrive soon after a major film’s release in the West. [...]

In January in Afghanistan, DVDs of “Kabul Express” — an Indian film in which a character hurls insults at Hazara — led to protests, government denunciations and calls for the execution of the offending actor, who fled the country.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the “Kite Runner” [12-year-old] actor who plays Hassan... told reporters at that time that he feared for his life because his fellow Hazara might feel humiliated by his rape scene. His father said he himself was misled by the film’s producers, insisting that they never told him of the scene until it was about to be shot and that they had promised to cut it.

Hangama Anwari, the child-rights commissioner for the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, said on Monday that she had urged Paramount’s counterterrorism consultant to get Ahmad Khan out of the country, at least until after the movie is released. “They should not play around with the lives and security of people,” she said of the filmmakers. “The Hazara people will take it as an insult.”

This reminds me about another must-see movie from the 2005 Toronto Film Festival, Christian Frei's "The Giant Buddhas," now available on DVD. I never did get a chance to write about it from Toronto, but I want to rewatch it and discuss what it does -- looking at the statues of the Giant Buddhas, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 through stories and perspectives both historical and contemporary.

Steven Boone over at The House Next Door has seen the latest -- er, "Final" -- cut of what may now, 25 years after its debut, be "Ridley Scott's" "Blade Runner," in the new version premiering at the New York Film Festival. Above all, Boone was wowed by the digital presentation:

"The Final Cut" is remastered from original 35mm elements and transferred to High Definition digital video at 4K (4096 horizontal pixel) resolution. Projected in HD at 24 frames a second for this year's New York Film Festival, this "Blade Runner" has no visible grain, dirt or scratches, stuttering frames, reel-change "cigarette burns" or soft-focus moments when the film gets loose in the projector gate. Funny how I thought I'd miss all those things, their "organic" qualities, but this restoration gives us a pristine image without sacrificing warmth. The picture even fooled our editor, who at first thought he was looking at a 35mm projection. This "Blade Runner" removes every barrier to getting lost in Scott's fire-and-rain Los Angeles short of presenting it as interactive theater.

I saw the original version first-run in 70 mm at Seattle's Cinerama Theater in 1982, and grain was evident, probably for a couple reasons: 1) many of the visual effects involved multiple, non-digital exposures; and 2) the film wasn't actually shot in 70 mm, but was blown up from 35 mm.

According to an extensive, multi-sourced Wikipedia article on the film, the 1990 version advertised as a "Director's Cut" and shown at the Nuart in LA and the Castro in San Francisco was actually a 70 mm workprint. (In the days before digital, effects were often done in 70 mm, even for 35 mm releases, for better optical quality.) Scott approved the 1992 Director's Cut, but wasn't entirely satisfied with it. Wikipedia offers comparisons of the various versions, citing the primary changes as:

* The removal of Deckard's explanatory voice-over
* The re-insertion of a dream sequence of a unicorn running through a forest
* The removal of the studio-imposed "happy ending," including some associated visuals which had originally run under the film's end-credits.

It was apparent from the beginning that the voiceover was a big problem -- and Harrison Ford (who didn't get on with Scott, much less the studio execs who were calling him in to read narration) has said he did it badly and begrudgingly, hoping they wouldn't even be able to use it. (It's that cringe-worthy at times.) Scott, however, says he wasn't taken off the picture, and that he completed the original release version after it tested badly with audiences.

But the movie was a theatrical flop anyway, producing rentals of only $14.8 million at roughly the same time "E.T." was on its way to zooming past $300 million. According to a definitive piece by Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times Magazine (September 13, 1992), the film may have died then and there. But the new home video market extended its commercial termination date:

"Blade Runner's" availability on video kept it alive in the eyes of the always loyal science-fiction crowd, and gradually, over time, the film's visual qualities and the uncanniness with which it had seemed to see the future began to outweigh its narrative flaws. Scott says he saw the interest rise, "And I thought, 'My God, we must have misfired somewhere; a lot of people like this movie.' " And not just in this country. In Japan, where the film had always been successful, "I was treated like a king," art director [Snyder reports. "The fans would be too in awe to even look at you." The film's look began to show up in art direction and design: Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" and the stage design for the Rolling Stones' Steel Wheels tour were influenced by "Blade Runner." And when laser discs appeared on the market, "Blade Runner" was one of the films that everyone just had to get. It became Voyager's top-selling disc immediately upon its release in 1989, never losing the No. 1 spot.

(Are spoiler alerts now becoming unfashionable because we should just assume everybody's seen the movie or knows the ending? I don't care. This is one.)

In Sunday's New York Times ("A Cult Classic Restored, Again"), Scott says of Ford's character, Deckard: “Yes, he’s a replicant. He was always a replicant.”

Dave Kehr points out errors in the New York Times story about the future of 3-D by Sharon Waxman (the Judy Miller of showbiz reporting), which Kehr describes as "riddled with errors and misperceptions, to the point where it is actively misleading." Not the first time for Waxman, and it won't be the last. (I had to stop reading her "Rebels on the Backlot" book because it was likewise riddled with factual errors and such gross misunderstandings of how the movie business works that it led her to draw preposterous conclusions about what she witnessed or was told.)

There's a classic line in the Waxman article from Springsteen/"Titanic" producer Jon Landau: “The screen has always been an emotional barrier for audiences. Good 3-D makes the screen go away. It disappears, and you’re looking at a window into a world.”

Yeah, that damned screen. If only it weren't there to present an emotional barrier for us. (Maybe if we removed it -- and the back wall of the theater -- the projector could just show the movie into 3-D "reality" and allow us to really feel the emotions the movie is trying to convey!) It's like the way those blasted audio speakers get in the way of our emotional involvement in recorded music. Gotta get past that...

DK also refers us to a hilariously profane (i.e., Tarantinoesque) account of the "Death Proof" press conference in Cannes by Rob Nelson of the Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages. Excerpt:

Not that I don't appreciate the privilege of seeing a longer "Death Proof"—I positively adored it at 87 minutes on the bottom-half of the ill-fated "Grindhouse" double bill. But whoever encouraged the Cannes Film Festival to advertise its new cut at "2h07" (i.e., 127 minutes)—director Quentin Tarantino, perhaps, or (more likely) the Weinstein Co.'s Stuntman Harv—is practically begging for a long ride on the fuckin' roof of the white Dodge Challenger, sans straps. I mean, the goddamn thing is no fuckin' longer than 113 tops—I fuckin' timed it—but that didn't stop Stuntman Harv from bum-rushing the Death Proof press conference yesterday to say that "you're missing the essence of Tarantino" at 87 (pffff...), and that the new cut, when it's released internationally, "will dwarf Grindhouse—trust me." Fuck, man. Does anyone, even Tarantino, trust Harvey Weinstein at this point?

Near the end of the press conference, which had QT literally sweating with enthusiasm for his movie and its many sources, a journalist asks Monsieur Grindhouse how he feels about writers having been requested by Harvey's crew to pay $1,500 apiece for a seat at the Cannes "Death Proof" junket. [...]

... As you might've guessed, gorgeous Butterfly (Vanessa Ferlito) finally does her big Texas Chili Parlor lapdance for Kurt Russell's icy-hot villain in a scene that QT invests with as much meta-movie passion as a fuckin' car chase or shootout or samurai showdown. Butterfly's tailfeather-shakin' shit is ridiculously, hilariously hot—even, it seems, for the lady from Uzbekistan who pipes up during the press conference to thank QT for his kick-ass female-empowerment movie on behalf of "all the women of Central Asia."...

It's confession time again here at Scanners: I've never gotten into Wong Kar-Wai (aka -wai, aka -Wei). I watched about half of "Chungking Express" and it seemed like better-than-average Tony Scott, but that didn't particularly interest me. (I guess I was hoping for something more like the hilariously deadpan first segment of Jim Jarmusch's "Mystery Train," which is what various descriptions had led me to expect.) So, while humming Peggy Lee ("Is That All There Is?"), I turned it off and vowed to give it another shot at some future date. Never happened. And I wanted to see "2046" (despite my, er, reservations), but when I found out it was a semi-sequel, I felt like I should first see its predecessor, "In the Mood For Love" and (although I have both saved on my TiVo -- in HD, no less) I've never gotten 'round to either.

Now my friend (and MSN Movies Editor) Dave McCoy, who's disliked more Wong than I've even seen (but likes "In the Mood for Love"), writes about the shade-sporting hypester's English-language "Blueberry Nights" from Cannes. This would have been ideal for the Contrarianism Blog-a-Thon:

I'll admit it: I don't get Wong Kar-Wai. I don't get his movies, I don't get his silly dark glasses that everyone else finds chic and cool, and I especially don't get the universal adoration heaped upon him. It's one of those things I know I should probably appreciate more. Like Björk. Or Thomas Pynchon. Or golf. Or brussels sprouts.

When the Hong Kong (by way of China) filmmaker burst on the international scene with "Ashes of Time" and, more prominently, "Chungking Express" in 1994, he immediately became both a critical darling and cult fan favorite. I found both films boring stylistic exercises. Friends told me his next film, "Fallen Angels," would turn me around. "It's got multiple story lines; you like Altman!" they said. I couldn't make my way through it. "Happy Together," an emotionally brutal gay love story, won him Best Director at Cannes in 1997. I fell asleep during it. His last film, "2046," an experimental sci-fi/time-travel thingy was so pretentious and infuriating and laughable to me that I walked out of the press screening. Of course, it topped numerous critics' top 10 lists in 2004 and that's when I started referring to the director as Wong Kar-WHY? But what about "In the Mood for Love," you ask? OK, I'll give you that one, in that he toned down the "look at me" cheap theatrics and for the only time made me feel something for Kar-Wai's tragic characters. And Tony Leung's performance killed me. [...]

But here's the thing: I always give WKW another chance. I always feel like, yes, this is the one that will turn me around! [...]

Look folks, I tried ... but "My Blueberry Nights" flat blows.... It's atmospheric ... it looks cool, man. And all of his other showy, decorative tricks made the trip to America, as well: the lingering slo-mo shots of actors looking into space (soooo deep), the claustrophobic framing, the melancholy soft focus -- everything, we suddenly realize, to take our mind away from a thin story about lost love and shattered souls that we've seen hundreds of times.... It'll probably win the Palme d'Or.

My one consolation happened when I was sitting in a movie theater before the next screening. Two prominent critics were talking to one another. One asked how the other was doing, and he replied, with lovely sarcasm, "I just flew in today and had Wong Kar-Wai inflicted on me." Right on, my brother. You don't by any chance hate brussels sprouts, too?

A few notes:

1) Brussels sprouts are my favorite green vegetable. Steamed with butter, garlic and a little lime juice. I'm telling you...

2) Although Dave is perfectly correct to characterize lead actress Norah Jones as "the pleasant singer whose CD is found in every soccer mom's gas-guzzling SUV" (and, yes, she's probably been the subject of as much fashionably middlebrow hype as the Great Wong), she has achieved one moment of sublimity, a year or two before her rather bland debut album. Listen to her sing Roxy Music's "More Than This" on Charlie Hunter's "Songs From the Analog Playground." It's heaven.

3) Read the whole piece, with Dave's specific observations about "Blueberry Nights" (is that a wine spritzer?), and please feel free to rise to Wong's defense with your comments.

4) My advice: Beware of films bearing Natalie Portman, the Julia Ormond of the 00's. Or at least approach them with trepidation. (OK, I did think she was good in "Closer." So good I forgot it was her.)

5) Anybody feel similarly about other much-ballyhooed contemporary sacred cows (and Cannes winners) like, say, Abbas Kiarostami, or Lars von Trier, or Theo Angelopoulos, or Quentin Tarantino, or... ?

I don't usually do this (and have no intention of making a habit of it), but I wanted to share a couple of appreciations of Roger Ebert, on the occasion of his first public appearance (at his Overlooked Film Festival, aka Ebertfest) since complications from surgery last July. I know Roger doesn't want me to turn this or RogerEbert.com into a big bouquet of flowers for him -- but let's just take a moment to celebrate his return to public life (and more reviewing!). Over the last ten months or so, many have written, in public and private, about what Roger and his writing have meant to them, and two recent notes struck me as especially eloquent.

The first is from Ted Pigeon, whose blog The Cinematic Art is a favorite of mine. (Check out his piece about critics and blockbusters, too.) Ted begins by observing:

Like so many young film lovers, I first discovered my love of film criticism through Roger's engaging and intelligent movie reviews. His work showed me that film criticism is important, that it can be the source of great feeling and knowledge of cinema, and that criticism is essential to the advancement of cinema as an art form. It is a necesary companion to the experience of watching films for those who care deeply about films.

The other piece was e-mailed to me by Peter Noble-Kuchera of Bloomington, Indiana, who recently attended Ebertfest. With Peter's permission, I'm publishing his entire article after the jump. This paragraph really resonated with me:

To know Ebert by his TV show is not to know him at all. You have to read him. He was the first film critic to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and one of only three ever to have been so acknowledged. He is the only American critic to review virtually every film in major release. His essays, while without the crabby flashiness of Pauline Kael’s, are marked by the groundedness of a Midwesterner, exacting writing, deep insights, and more than that, deep compassion. More than any critic, Ebert seems to understand that the movies are made by people who, with all their flaws, were trying to make a good film. He is a tireless champion of small movies of worth, and no critic has done more to leverage his influence in order to bring those films to the attention of America.

As I've said many times before, it wasn't until I started reading (hundreds, thousands) of Roger's reviews when I was the editor of the Microsoft Cinemania CD-ROM movie encyclopedia in the mid-1990s that I came to appreciate what terrific critic and writer the man really is. I feel more strongly than ever about that after three and a half years as the founding editor of RogerEbert.com. He's so very much more than the sum of this thumbs.

The rest of Peter's report (lightly edited) below...

"Stupidity is the devil. Look in the eye of a chicken and you'll know. It's the most horrifying, cannibalistic, and nightmarish creature in this world."
-- Werner Herzog

I could listen to Werner Herzog talk all night. And I have. (See this transcript from Ebertfest 2005, for example.) Watching the marvelous "Stroszek" (I think of it as Herzog's Fassbinder movie), with Werner, as everyone calls him, seated in the audience two rows behind me, the famous dancing chicken at the end reminded of the quote above. ("Stroszek" has one of the great final lines in movies: "We have a 10-80 out here, a truck on fire, we have a man on the lift. We are unable to find the switch to turn the lift off and we can't stop the dancing chicken. Send an electrician. We're standing by..." Those of us who are not waiting for Godot are indeed waiting for the electrician, or someone like him...)

Later I asked Herzog if he had changed his mind about chickens, dancing or otherwise. "I only like eating them," he said. In response, I naturally quoted a great exchange from "Chinatown":

Noah Cross (John Huston), peering at a fish on J.J. Gittes's plate: I hope you don't mind. I believe they should be served with the head.

J..J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson): As long as you don't serve the chicken that way.

I also asked Herzog if he'd seen Michael Winterbottom's fantastic bio-comedy about the Manchester music scene, "24 Hour Party People" (perhaps second only to "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" among my favorite films of the new millennium -- and the one I've enjoyed re-watching the most), in which the lead singer of Joy Division commits suicide with the last scene of "Stroszek" playing on television in the background. Herzog said he'd heard about it, but hadn't seen the movie. Well, he has something to look forward to.

If you'd like to listen to part of the discussion between Herzog, David Bordwell and Michael Barker (a low-fi MP3 recording made on my Treo 680 -- have I mentioned how much I love my Treo 680, the life-changing "TiVo" of handheld gadgets?), click here.

It was remarkable to see how the Angry Young Herzog I remember from the '70s and '80s (in Seattle and especially Telluride) has evolved into such a congenial elder statesman. As his friend Paul Cox (who cast Herzog to play the father in "Man of Flowers," a film he described as being about "male loneliness") lamented technology (Cox is irrationally terrified of computers and cell phones), and proclaimed the imminent end of mankind's time on Earth, Herzog was more genial and philosophical. Yes, he said, it may be our turn to become extinct, like many species before us, but that's no reason to be "gloomy" in the time we have left: "Let's keep making films and treasuring friendships and drinking beers."

(When Cox, who spoke of women almost as if they were another species -- claiming they were "closer to the soil" in a way that made them sound almost bovine -- said that he couldn't think of any films about "female loneliness," Kristin Thompson came up with three masterpieces off the top of her head: Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Three Colors: Blue," Chantal Akerman's "Jeanne Dielman," and Carl Theodor Dreyer's "Gertrud.")

OK, now a few more pictures from Ebertfest 2007, after the jump...

An experience like Ebertfest 2007 is beyond my capacity to convey in words -- and I'm not just talking about the movies. At one point I asked Roger if he was having as much fun as I was. He wrote on his pad: "The time of my life!" Sitting in his recliner in the back row of the Virginia Theatre in Champaign, IL, (his customary spot -- but this time with cushier accommodations and more legroom) he sure looked like he was having a blast. The rest of us had a fine time, too, as I hope you will see from these photos I took...

Introducing "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" Sunday at Ebertfest, Roger Ebert used a laptop to speak for him. More about the festival in a few days (I'm still on the road and very busy), but if you want to see/hear a Quicktime video of Roger's introduction (I took it with my Treo 680 from the third row, my customary place in the Virginia Theatre -- usually in the third or fourth row next to my movie-mates David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson (check out their Ebertfest blog coverage here), who are about to head off for New Zealand, you can play it by clicking here. It's not great quality, but it plays just swell in Quicktime.

Three cheers for Roger Ebert, for the 9th Overlooked Film Festival (aka Ebertfest, now in progress) and for technology! I wrote and filed the following story for Thursday's Sun-Times, sitting on the stairs to the balcony in the Virginia Theatre in Champaign, IL, Wednesday night -- between 7:30 and 8:30. Had my PowerBook G4, which I typed on. Then transferred the story (via synch) to my Treo 680, and wirelessly e-mailed it to the paper in Chicago. More about Ebertfest soon -- I'm kind of in the middle of things, and I'm waiting to borrow a cable or card reader to retrieve my own photos; for some reason mine can't read the XD card....

"It's my happening and it freaks me out!" said Chaz Ebert on behalf of her husband, Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert, on stage at opening night of the ninth Roger Ebert Overlooked Film Festival in Champaign-Urbana. The line (memorably quoted by Mike Meyers in the first "Austin Powers" movie) is from the Ebert-penned screenplay for Russ Meyer's 1970 cult classic "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls," which is among the titles in this year's festival.

It was Ebert's first public appearance since he suffered complications from surgery last June, and it brought down the full house at the Virginia Theatre in Champaign. As he announced in a message featured in the Sun-Times and on his web site (rogerebert.com) Tuesday, Ebert is not able to speak now, pending further surgery, so Chaz had to do the talking for him. As Ebert wrote on a pad before the screening, "After we go onstage, Chaz will read one line from me that will say it ALL."

Chaz recounted how the festival was nearly cancelled late last year, when Ebert was in the hospital and the pace of his recovery was uncertain. But Festival Director Nate Kohn visited Ebert in his Chicago hospital room with a message from Mary Susan Britt, the festival's Associate Director: "The festival passes sold out in a little over a week in November. You have to get out of that hospital bed and come down to Champaign-Urbana."

"At that moment," Chaz said, "Roger made a commitment. If it was at all possible, he would be here tonight.... This is where he wanted to be, this is where he is, this is where he's staying," she said, and the crowd responded with a standing ovation.

Through his wife, Ebert reminded the audience of the personal importance of Champaign's Virginia Theatre, the restored movie palace in which the Ebertfest films are screened. "I saw 'Gone With the Wind' here, and my father saw the Marx Brothers on this very stage."

THIS is the Roger Ebert I know and love! Read the full piece on RogerEbert.com:

Message from Roger Ebert on the eve of the 9th Overlooked Film Festival (aka Ebertfest):

My Ninth Annual Film Festival opens Wednesday night at the University of Illinois at Urbana, and Chaz and I will be in attendance. This year I won’t be speaking, however, as I await another surgery.

I have received a lot of advice that I should not attend the Festival. I’m told that paparazzi will take unflattering pictures, people will be unkind, etc. Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. As a journalist I can take it as well as dish it out.

So let’s talk turkey. What will I look like? To paraphrase a line from “Raging Bull,” I ain’t a pretty boy no more. (Not that I ever was. The original appeal of Siskel & Ebert was that we didn’t look like we belonged on TV.)

What happened was, cancer of the salivary gland spread to my right lower jaw. A segment of the mandible was removed. Two operations to replace the missing segment were unsuccessful, both leading to unanticipated bleeding.

A tracheostomy was necessary so, for the time being, I cannot speak. I make do with written notes and a lot of hand waving and eye-rolling. The doctors now plan an approach that does not involve the risk of unplanned bleeding. If all goes well, my speech will be restored.

So when I turn up in Urbana, I will be wearing a gauze bandage around my neck, and my mouth will be seen to droop. So it goes.

I was told photos of me in this condition would attract the gossip papers. So what? I have been very sick, am getting better and this is how it looks. I still have my brain and my typing fingers....

Wish you were here! Sorry I haven't posted for a while. A death in the family, followed by the Conference on World Affairs (where I'm going through "Chinatown" with the audience, as well as serving on other panels) has kept me from my laptop. (See article in the Boulder Daily Camera.)

Roger Ebert (who is greatly missed this year -- but promises to be back for the 60th CWA next year) has been maestro of the Cinema Interruptus program for about the last 30 years. Maura Clare, the CWA's incomparable Conference Coordinator and Director of Public Affairs, sent me a list of all the amazing films Roger has shown over the decades, which I thought I'd share with you:

1970 – 1974 – No films were shown. Most panels were about an hour long, and were series titled. Roger participated in panel discussions about Unisex, The Future of X-Rated Films, Meditation, The Devil’s Advocate: Moving Pictures, TV: The Man With the Power Saw, and Prurience.

75 – Using the series title Persona, CITIZEN KANE was shown and discussed by Roger every day at the Fox Theater on The Hill. In Addition, Roger participated with others on series titled What the Declaration of Independence Does Not Mention: A Right to Property, The Mythology of the American Experience, The Changing Understanding of What is Human and What is Natural in Human Nature, Created Equal but Everywhere Unequal.

76 – NOTORIOUS (the first Uninterruptus/Interruptus) every day at 4 pm at the Fox Theater on the Hill, using the series title How to Read A Movie.

77 – THE THIRD MAN every day at noon in the Memorial Forum, using the series title Decoding a Movie

78 – 8 1/2, every day at noon in the Memorial Forum, using the series title Analyzing a Film.

79 – LA DOLCE VITA (first of plan to study LA DOLCE VITA at least once every decade) every day at noon in the Memorial Forum, using the series title Analyzing a Film.

80 – AMARCORD every day at noon in the Memorial Forum, using the series title Analyzing a Film.

81 – CRIES AND WHISPERS every day at noon in the Memorial Forum, and the series title changed to Films.

82 – TAXI DRIVER every day at noon in the Memorial Forum, series title Analyzing a Film.

83 – LA DOLCE VITA every day at noon in the Memorial Forum, series title Analyzing a Film (second of every decade study).

84 – Roger did not arrive until Tuesday, and using the Fiske Planetarium Tuesday through Friday he discussed two Werner Herzog films, GOD’S ANGRY MAN and HUIE’S SERMON, one Ranier Werner Fassbinder Film BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VAN KANT, one Louis Malle film MY DINNER WITH ANDRE, Errol Morris’s GATES OF HEAVEN and Les Blank’s WERNER HERZOG EATS HIS SHOE. All these were at noon.

85 – CASABLANCA every day at noon in the Memorial Forum series title Film.

86 – THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE every day at noon in the Memorial Forum series title Film.

87 – THREE WOMEN every day at noon at Macky Auditorium (first Macky use), series title Analyzing a Film.

88 – THE THIRD MAN every day at noon at Macky Auditorium series title Analyzing a Film,

89 – OUT OF THE PAST every day at noon at Macky Auditorium series title Film.

90 – RAGING BULL every day at noon Macky Auditorium series title Film.

91 – CITIZEN KANE every day at noon Macky Auditorium series title Analyzing a Film.

92 – SILENCE OF THE LAMBS every day at 4 pm (first 4 pm showing) Macky Auditorium series title Film.

93 – JFK every day at 4 pm Macky Auditorium series title Analyzing a Film.

94 – LA DOLCE VITA (third of every decade study) every day at 4 pm at Macky Auditorium series title Analyzing a Film.

95 – There was no CWA in 1995.

96 – PULP FICTION at Muenzinger Auditorium every day at 7 pm (designated 19:00 in the program) series titles no longer used.

97 – FARGO every day at 7 pm (19:00 in program) at Macky Auditorium.

98 – DARK CITY (film selection changed after program went to press, program says VERTIGO) 7 pm at Macky Auditorium.

99 – VERTIGO every day at 7 pm at Macky Auditorium.

2000 – CASABLANCA every day at 4 pm (first 4 pm scheduling) Macky Auditorium.

01 – FIGHT CLUB every day at 4 pm at Macky Auditorium.

02 – MULHOLLAND DRIVE every day at 4 pm at Macky Auditorium.

03 – FLOATING WEEDS Sunday then Tuesday through Friday, 4 pm at Macky Auditorium; TOYKO-GA Monday only 4 pm at Macky.

04 – THE RULES OF THE GAME every day at 4 pm at Macky Auditorium.

05 – LA DOLCE VITA (fourth of every decade study) every day at 4 pm at Macky Auditorium.

06 – THE LONG GOODBYE every day at 4 pm at Macky Auditorium.

Set your Strawberry Alarm Clocks: The annual spring ritual of Roger Ebert's Film Festival in Urbana-Champaign (now in its ninth year) runs April 24 -29, 2007, at the gorgeous old Virginia Theatre. The name of the fest has always been rather flexible: "Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival," "The Overlooked" (sounding like something from "The Shining"), "Ebertfest"... Next year, the event will been officially re-named: Ebertfest -- the Roger Ebert Film Festival.

The tradition of appreciating "overlooked" films (by any criteria Ebert chooses to apply) continues, however. The festival will climax with a closing-day screening of Russ Meyer's "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" (screenplay by Ebert himself) and a live performance by the Strawberry Alarm Clock, the psychedelic rock band featured in the film (and in Jack Nicholson's 1968 "Psych-Out," as well).

Roger Ebert will be there, introducing the festival and watching the films with the audience, but because he's still recuperating from surgery, will rely on an "expert group of colleagues" to conduct the on-stage interviews this year.

Other guests of the fest will include Werner Herzog (appearing with "Stroszek," Paul Cox (director of "Man of Flowers"), actress Fatoumata Coulibaly ("Moolaade"), writer-director Joey Lauren Adams and festival favorite, actor Scott Wilson ("Come Early Morning"), director Andrew Davis ("Holes"), film scholars David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson and Samba Gadjido, musician Jim White, producer/distributor Michael Barker (Sony Classics), and plenty more.

The 13 films featured in this year's Ebertfest are listed below, with titles linking to Ebert's original reviews of the films, where applicable. Other blurbs come from the festival's official web site, where the complete schedule and details can be found: www.ebertfest.com.

Continue reading at RogerEbert.com

Dennis Cozzalio at Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule reports on Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse 2007 Festival at my former neighborhood rep house, the New Beverly Cinema (right by El Coyote!) in Los Angeles. Dennis includes an ebullient assessment of "Revenge of the Cheerleaders" (1976), a giddy teen sexploitation movie I have been very fond of since I showed in my college student film series. Writes Dennis:

There is no curriculum at the "morally compromised" Aloha High School, only figures of authority to disregard or blatantly undermine— these cheerleaders and the rest of the Aloha student body make Riff Randall and her crowd look like straight-A honor society members. The girls and boys only want to have fun, which translates into a heady brew of screwing, playing basketball, cheering, robbing students at a thug-happy rival high school of their drugs (during class!) and riding around in a cherry red 1955 Buick convertible with the top down, and their tops off, of course. (The nudity is democratic too—there’s more than a flash of full frontal male twiggery on view here, including Hasselhoff, though his Boner status, based on this evidence, is overinflated.)

It’s been a long time since I’ve encountered such a relentlessly likable feel-good-at-all-costs vibe in any movie, let alone one as low-rent as this one. Tarantino said in a recent interview, referring to discovering treasures in the world of exploitation movies, that not only do you have to drink a lot of milk to get to the cream, with exploitation fare you have to drink a lot of curdled milk to get to the milk. And that’s what "Revenge of the Cheerleaders" felt like to me Sunday night—the reward for having slogged through a lot of similar comedies that had the sex and nudity but none of the zip and tang and spirit this one has in buckets.

And there's so much more. Dennis also writes about Angie Dickinson and Rock Hudson in "Pretty Maids All in a Row," and other grist for the grindhouse...

I went to one of the first editions of the Portland International Film Festival back in 1978 or 1979 (thanks to Ruth Hayler of Seven Gables Theatres), where I saw Peter Weir's "Picnic at Hanging Rock" for the first time. They were also doing an Alexander Korda retrospective, and it was great fun to see "The Four Feathers," "Thief of Bagdhad" and "The Private Life of Henry VIII" on the big screen.

PIFF is now celebrating its 30th year, and DK Holm reports on the films, the fest -- and the audiences -- at GreenCine Daily:

Portland breeds a different sort of filmgoer. This is the town where its seemingly unemployed Generation Why sit for hours within its numerous coffee houses drinking $5 dollar brews seriatim and typing endlessly into their brand new MacBooks. Everyone in Portland is "in a band." Or they own a brew pub. Or they virtually live in one. Portland Man rides his bike to work (cursing at the Earth-fracking cars the entire route), enters each of the city's monthly foot race marathons, works for the city (probably the Water Bureau), shops at Whole Foods, and to this day thinks back fondly on that wine tour of Provence he and the wife made back in '92. Portland Woman, by contrast, is an independent and independently minded citizen who can't find a worthy male. She is a mirror image of the "Sex in the City" gals but without the clothes. She is obsessed with shopping, eating, her figure, her co-workers and office politics, her favorite celebrities (or her favorite causes), and is either about to enter, is in, or has just departed her Fag Hag stage. They complain about never meeting any good men and then move in with a meth addict. Personals ads here are very popular and highly effective. People in Portland don't "date." They have a date, and then get married.

Within this context, it's a wonder that any films get seen at all. Yet over the years, the festival has expanded from one small venue to its current reach, four auditoria scattered throughout the city (though all of the theaters are confined to the city's downtown area), hosting a dizzying number of offerings.

"As its poster and advertising remind us, "Quinceañera" won both the jury and audience prizes at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, and those honors are strangely indicative of its dramatic and stylistic limitations. If there was ever a movie that seemed precision-tailored for a Park City reception, this is it -- the quintessential example of the festival's favored brand of hand-crafted, slice-of-life, youth-oriented filmmaking that expresses affection for a nicely captured American subculture. In other words, it's a Sundance specialty, right from the box.

"This is a shopping-list movie: A double coming-of-age story spiced with local color; a bittersweet portrait of a Los Angeles neighborhood in transition; a warm and soapy celebration of a Mexican-American community. "Quinceañera" is also a thoroughly predictable melodrama that's both kitchen-sink and 'After-School Special.'"

-- from my review of "Quinceañera" last summer

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. These are films, cobbled together from familiar elements designed to appeal not only to a Sundance jury (or audience), but with an eye toward getting the filmmakers some "Hollywood" money for their next picture. And that, in itself, is fine. Nothing wrong with trying to climb the ladder of success. But I don't particularly want to watch somebody's resumé on a movie screen, particularly when it's sold to me as a "personal story" (or a "subversive thriller") and plays like pure Hollywood formula schlock.

John Sayles admits that "Return of the Secaucus 7" was just such a resumé picture. After years of writing horror and exploitation scripts for Roger Corman ("Piranha," "The Lady in Red," "Alligator"), he wanted to start directing his own, more personal stuff. The reason there's a basketball game in the movie was simply to show that he knew how to handle an action sequence. But Sayles was expanding his craft and moving from formulaic commercial genre filmmaking toward more personal projects, not the other way around.

Remember "Project Greenlight," the HBO (then Bravo) series, produced with good intentions by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, with the Weinstein Miramax? The deal was that they would choose an unproduced first-time script and give a novice director a chance to make the movie, which Miramax would finance and distribute. By the third (and final) season, they joined forces with Wes Craven and were making a horror exploitation film for Miramax's Dimension division.

The lyrics to the theme for this year's Golden Globes telecast began (and I'm not making this up):

One night only, one night only
That's all I have to spare
One night only
Let's not pretend to care...

Um... OK.

Full list of nominees here.

I haven't seen all the nominees ("The Dead Girl," "American Gun," "Wristcutters: A Love Story," etc.), but, as always, there are some most welcome nominations. (Links below go to my reviews, festival coverage -- or even Opening Shots.)

"Man Push Cart," for best first feature (director Rahmin Bahrani), male lead (Ahmad Razvi) and cinematography (Michael Simmonds). Opening Shot treatment here.

"Half Nelson," for best feature, director (Ryan Fleck), first screenplay (Anna Boden & Fleck), male lead (Ryan Gosling), female lead (Shareeka Epps)

"Pan's Labyrinth," for best feature and cinematography (Guillermo Navarro). (But not Guillermo del Toro for director and screenplay?!?!?!)

"Old Joy," for the John Cassavettes Award.

Paul Dano for "best supporting male" (that's the IFP's category) in "Little Miss Sunshine," which is also nominated for best feature, screenplay, directors -- and Alan Arkin, also nominated for supporting male. I love Arkin (it's all about "Little Murders," people!), but I thought Steve Carell and Dano stole the movie, with Toni Collette and Greg Kinnear close behind.

Catherine O'Hara for best female lead in "For Your Consideration."

Robert Altman, best director for "A Prairie Home Companion."

Biggest disappointments: No documentary nominations for "51 Birch Street" or "The Bridge." The former may have been too deceptively simple and artless (in truth, it's a complex work of art) and the latter too cold and disturbing for many in the Indie tent-party crowd.

I'm still technically on break, but I'll be back to blogging (and editing) Wednesday.

Manohla Dargis (one of my favorite critics) does a fine job of putting the New York Film Festival into perspective in today's New York Times. This is very much the kind of realistic historical and aesthetic evaluation I've been hoping somebody would write, ever since I posed my own questions about the role and relevance of today's NYFF, in posts and comments here and here. Dargis writes:

Good, bad and sometimes just blah, most of the selections in the coming week support Mr. Peña’s assertion that the festival represents something like the state of the art. Too bad the fine art has to share precious shelf space with white-elephant frippery like “Little Children�? and “Marie Antoinette.�? Along with the similarly audience-friendly film “The Queen,�? which was released in theaters the day after it opened the festival, these selections feature the bulk of the recognizable faces in the event. All three are red-carpet bait, the sort of star-gazing entertainments that attract the mainstream-media attention that is so crucial for festivals from Cannes to Los Angeles. All three are also being released by a studio or studio division, and are among the small set of English-language films that will dominate awards chatter until the Oscars in February.

Given the increasing competition for the audience’s attention, it would be easy to justify putting any one of these three in the festival: films like “The Queen�? sell tickets (and newspapers), and probably make board members happy. But it is harder to justify programming all three in a festival with just 25 slots in its the main section. The New York Film Festival isn’t a grab bag; it’s an elitist event for film lovers willing to shell out as much as $40 a show. In a D.I.Y. world with too many choices, including an estimated 600 film festivals, some of which have seriously deep pockets and no qualms about pandering to their audiences, elitism is a virtue. It’s also this festival’s greatest strength.

The public’s appetite for serious work of the sort that has defined the New York Film Festival since its inception in 1963 has diminished, at least in theatrical terms. The generation that watched Jean-Luc Godard’s “Masculin Féminin�? at the festival in 1966 and continues to get to Lincoln Center this time of year, still sometimes frequents its local art-house theater. Not so, apparently, that generation’s progeny: a similarly large and dedicated younger audience for filmmakers like Mr. Weerasethakul ["Syndromes and a Century," also shown in Toronto], whose films show at prestigious festivals the world over, racking up ecstatic reviews along the way, has yet to emerge in America. That said, the vanguard of fiercely engaged cinephiles blogging online about the latest in Korean cinema suggests that a new generation of passionate filmgoers could emerge with more nurturing.

There are a multitude of complex, interconnected reasons why foreign-language cinema has taken such a hit, including its displacement by American independent film in the public’s over-multimedia-stimulated imagination. In this climate small distributors are finding it difficult to take chances with challenging, difficult, thoughtful (each adjective another kiss of death) foreign-language films, even when individual titles come equipped with glowing notices and the imprimatur of a world-class festival like Cannes. When even well-received American independent films like “Old Joy�? and “Mutual Appreciation�? are facing a tough market ride, it becomes increasingly difficult for a director like Mr. Weerasethakul to get a toe in the distribution door. His films don’t look, sound or play like the usual Hollywood or Sundance fare; they are, like their director, sui generis.

It’s great that “Syndromes and a Century,�? which has yet to find an American distributor, is on the menu this year; too bad that the entire program isn’t similarly adventurous. It has always been the case that some good films, like Jia Zhang-ke’s “Dong�? and Tsai Ming-Liang’s “I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone,�? both of which showed at recent festivals, don’t make it into the New York lineup. ["Dong," shown in Toronto, is a companion piece to "Still Life," which won the Venice festival this year and was belatedly added to the Toronto line-up, but neither "Still Life" nor "Dong" is in NYFF.] Festival programming is always a matter of timing, taste, desperation, politics and logistics, not to mention worthiness. But if the New York Film Festival is going to remain relevant in these difficult movie times, it needs to work harder to secure the best, and it needs to nurture a new audience, not just dine out on the faithful. Whether it scales up or retains its modest proportions, it needs to embrace the very exclusivity that makes it occasionally maddening and generally indispensable.

Brava! As a recent NY commenter here at Scanners recently reported, the NYFF is running a trailer for itself saying something like: "Some people accuse us of being selective and having high standards, but that's what our audience expects from us." I'm all for elitism -- as long as it implies having standards. Simply having a small number of slots does not alone make a festival "selective" or "elitist" or "prestigious" or "exclusive." It makes it limited. And that's fine. Telluride (held over Labor Day Weekend) doesn't have all that many slots, either. A festival is defined by what its programmers do to fill the slots that are available. As a film festival programmer myself (from the epic Seattle International Film Festival to the "exclusive" Floating Film Festival), I know how hard it is to program these events, whether you have hundreds of showings or only a few, so I am fully sympathetic. But any festival needs to figure out its identity and its role in the film culture (based, in part at least, on its location and its desired audience). I think Dargis's assessment of NYFF is right on.

The Vancouver International Film Festival is now underway: 300+ films in 16 days (September 28 - October 13). Be sure to check out dispatches from the fest from David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson on their new blog!

From David's initial VIFF entry:

The festival is particularly strong in Asian cinema, programmed by the indefatigible Tony Rayns; the festival also gives the “Dragons and Tigers�? prize to young Asian filmmakers. It was while serving on that jury last year that I came to fall in love with this festival. There are over 40 Asian programs this time, including Ann Hui’s "My Postmodern Aunt" (starring Chow Yun-fat), Tsai Ming-liang’s "I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone," and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s "Hana" (his last film was the very touching "Nobody Knows"). A special treat is Bong Joon-ho’s "The Host," already a cult monster movie that has Hollywood studios fighting for the remake rights.

Vancouver is also very strong in Canadian cinema, as well as documentary, experimental, and international work. Like all great festivals, it’s actually several festivals in one: No way you could see everything you want to see. It was so exciting last year that I determined to return and try to see even more new films.

Festivals are important to us film lovers, because you want to keep up with creative work being done all over the world. Living in the US makes it hard, because so many wonderful films–sometimes masterpieces–don’t get released theatrically. Marketing a film in a country as large as the US requires massive amounts of money, and many interesting films just won’t attract a big enough audience to pay back costs. Also, I’m afraid that some Americans are narrowing their tastes in movies, so that they won’t give a “foreign film�? or a “little movie�? a chance. Festivals exist to do just that.

In this morning's New York Times, A.O. Scott offers his "Critic's Notebook" view of where the NYFF fits into movie culture (at least in New York). Scott sees it as a showcase for "quality." Compare to my questions and comments about NYFF:

Film festivals crowd the calendar and circle the globe, but New York’s is different. Instead of hundreds of films, it presents a few dozen, and it presents them, for the most part, one at a time, rather than in a frenzy of overscheduling. It is neither a hectic marketplace nor a pre-Oscar buzz factory, like Cannes or Toronto, or a film industry frat party, like Sundance. Its tone tends to be serious, sober, and perhaps sometimes a little sedate, even when the movies it shows are daring and provocative.

If I may trot out another metaphor, the New York Film Festival might be compared to an established, somewhat exclusive boutique holding its own in a world of big box superstores, oversize shopping malls and Internet retailers.

NYFF! Huh! (Good gawd, y'all.) What is it good for?

I laughed when I read Caryn James' tired and trivial "All the King's Men" piece in the New York Times the other day -- especially this little nugget of unsupported parochial spin:

Oscar-ready films that have opened in September, like “Mystic River�? and “Good Night, and Good Luck,�? have come out of the prestigious New York Film Festival. “All the King’s Men�? went to the nonexclusive Toronto film festival, and the word there was that the movie was mediocre at best.

What are those two statements intended to mean? That films stand a better chance at winning Oscars if they are launched in the "prestigious" New York Film Festival (which shows about 30 features, including revivals -- the vast majority of which have already played Cannes in May, and Telluride and/or Toronto in September) rather than the "nonexclusive" Toronto International Film Festival (which shows ten times as many films)?

As David Poland points out ("Why We Don't Link To Caryn James Much"), that notion is "as wrong as wrong can be." He cites the obvious counter examples of Oscar faves shown at Toronto but not NY: "Crash," "Brokeback Mountain," "Capote," "Sideways," "Ray," "Finding Neverland"... and mentions that Clint Eastwood's "Flags of Our Fathers" also isn't being shown at NYFF. (For that matter, neither is Martin Scorsese's "The Departed," although both films open in October.)

But who even cares whether a film festival screens a movie that's later nominated for an Oscar? That's not what film festivals are about. So, is James suggesting that the more "exclusive" a festival is, the better it is? In that case, surely the Floating Film Festival (which shows twenty-something films and is programmed mostly by film critics, including Roger Ebert, Richard and Mary Corliss and me), and which is held aboard a cruise ship for only 200 or so festivalgoers, is the more "exclusive" fest. (Bruce Kirkland of the Toronto Sun has called it "the world's most exclusive.") Still, Roger Ebert says the two best film festivals in the world -- in terms of influence and quality -- are Cannes and Toronto.

Or maybe James is suggesting that "mediocre at best" pictures are helped by exposure at "prestigious" film festivals, but not at "nonexclusive" ones? (Didn't seem to help "The Da Vinci Code" or "Southland Tales" get better reviews out of Cannes...) Does she think people would think the movie was better if it was in NYFF rather than TIFF? Does she also have a bridge for sale?

But the question I really want to ask is: To whom does the New York Film Festival matter and in what ways? The general public can't get tickets, which are almost exclusively reserved for donors to the Film Society of Lincoln Center. NYFF is social payback -- time to give the old rich folks a little cinematic baksheesh for their generous financial support.

My favorite headline of the week (so far) comes from Reuters: "Reading 'Da Vinci Code' does alter beliefs: survey." According to a poll of Britons, Dan Brown's phenomenally popular novel has effectively re-written the bible for many Christians and non-Christians alike -- so much so that some Catholics are saying the book and the movie should carry "a health warning":

LONDON (Reuters) - "The Da Vinci Code" has undermined faith in the Roman Catholic Church and badly damaged its credibility, a survey of British readers of Dan Brown's bestseller showed on Tuesday.

People are now twice as likely to believe Jesus Christ fathered children after reading the Dan Brown blockbuster and four times as likely to think the conservative Catholic group Opus Dei is a murderous sect.

"An alarming number of people take its spurious claims very seriously indeed," said Austin Ivereigh, press secretary to Britain's top Catholic prelate Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor. "Our poll shows that for many, many people the Da Vinci Code is not just entertainment," Ivereigh added....

ORB interviewed more than 1,000 adults last weekend, finding that 60 percent believed Jesus had children by Mary Magdalene -- a possibility raised by the book -- compared with just 30 percent of those who had not read the book...

Hold on a minute: They're saying a whopping percentage of (at least technically literate) Brits now believe the pseudo-biblical "revelations" in "The Da Vinci Code" are true? I suppose it's no wonder millions of people in the modern world claim they believe in the bible, "Intelligent Design" and astrology -- even when they admit they know virtually nothing about them. In so many ways, we still live in the Dark Ages. Just let me say that if you are so credulous that a novel (fiction!) or Hollywood movie can upend your comprehension of one of the most dominant religious traditions in the world, then you are possessed of all the faith (and reason) you deserve.

A "prominent group of English Roman Catholic monks, theologians, nuns and members of Opus Dei" commissioned their poll from Opinion Research Business (ORB) and, according to the Reuters article, has "sought to promote Catholic beliefs at a time when the film's release has provoked a storm of controversy." (If they hire a publicist, I do not recommend Tom Cruise's sister for the job.)

Ron Howard's ultra-super-secret movie of "The Da Vinci Code" kicks off the Cannes Film Festival Wednesday. And the Catholic establishment is... madder than heck:

At several moments during the Eighth Overlooked Film Festival, I thought I had been transported to a time in which the greatest artists of the movies were not only familiar to all, but properly and enthusiastically appreciated and revered. That such a time would be in the spring of 2006 kind of threw me for a loop, but this was a festival in which (I swear) the two most commonly (and reverently) invoked cinematic influences were not Eli Roth and Quentin Tarantino but Robert Bresson ("Pickpocket," "Au Hasard Balthazar," "Lancelot du Lac," "L'Argent") and Yasujiro Ozu ("Tokyo Story," "Late Spring," "Early Spring," "Floating Weeds"). Not that any of the young filmmakers at the Overlooked were trying to claim their work was on par with these cinematic masters, but you could tell from their films that Ozu and Bresson really mean something to these guys, their influences genuinely and thoroughly absorbed into the cinematic sensibilities of another generation. It gave me hope for the future of movies as something more than a commodity.

The thing about speaking truth to power is that the powerful don't really like it all that much. That was apparent at the White House Correspondents Dinner Saturday night, when Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central's satirical "The Colbert Report" (basically a Fox News parody in which Colbert plays a fact-challenged, egomaniacal character based on Bill O'Reilly -- and Sean Hannity, Britt Hume, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter...) delivered a speech that cut maybe just an eentsy bit too close to the truth (or "truthiness") for the comfort of the President, the First Lady and the ineffectual reporters in the audience.

"Man Push Cart": Alfred Hitchcock supposedly said that while most movies are a slice of life, his were a slice of cake. He's right about the last part, although most movies are not slices of anything resembling life as most of us experience it. But "Man Push Cart," the film by Ramin Bahrani, a director born in Iran and raised in North Carolina, is not only an exquisitely realized slice of life but a slice of filmmaking perfection. I didn't know, as I became absorbed in this portrait of a New York City street vendor whose life is slowly slipping from his grasp (like his heavy pushcart on one occasion), that it would become one of my favorite movies of recent years until moments after its inexplicably magnificent ending.

So many movies and filmmakers and conversations, so little sleep. Well, that's a film festival for you. I was especially impressed with Ramid Bahrani's "Man Push Cart" -- a film of extraordinary attention to detail in every aspect. Not only does it closely observe the behavior of its central character Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi), a Pakistani pushcart vendor at 54th and Madison in New York City, but every image and sound and gesture accumulate to create a Sisyphean portrait of a life slowly rolling out of control. More about it and other Overlooked events later. Meanwhile, check out the photo album(s) and MP3 audio of selected Ebert on-stage interviews.

URBANA, IL -- All the guests of Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival stay in the Illini Student Union building on the campus of Ebert's alma mater, the University of Illinois. That's right -- the third and fourth floors are a hotel -- with Wi-Fi access in the rooms, too. Take the elevator to the main floor and -- voila! -- you're in college again! And that's the spirit of the Overlooked -- discovering and learning about terrific movies (and movie-makers) you may otherwise have missed. But it's not just the movies: Ebert interviews the filmmakers after the screenings, the audience gets the chance to ask questions, and panels debate the present and future of independent production and exhibition.

Further reflections on the 2006 Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, CO: John Lennon said life is what happens to you when you're making other plans. Life is also the process of finding connections between everything that happens to you (there he goes with that "We're all pattern-seeking animals" thing again!). So, last week at the CWA, three panels I was on ran together in my head in ways I think are interesting. But then, it's my head we're talking about, so I'm probably inclined to think my digressions and free-associations are interesting, otherwise I wouldn't have spent so much time mucking about with them.

At last week's Conference on World Affairs, I was on a panel somewhat facetiously titled "An Epic Debate: Are Video Games an Art Form?" with Roger Ebert (whose answer to the titular question is, as you probably know, "no"). Sun-Times tech columnist Andy Ihnatko was supposed to join us, but at the last minute he couldn't make it. Fortunately, we were able to recruit author, brain expert and laparoscopic surgeon Leonard Shlain to join us.