Once again, Cinderella Man is back in theaters for more of the same--no audience. Face it, Ron Howard--you directed a big, stinky flop that no one liked. No amount of re-releases or special money-back guarantees (or phone-throwing tantrums) are going to change that.

But there's a better fight, Ron--the show you executive-produce AND narrate AND people actually like in larger numbers than Cinderella Man. That show is Arrested Development and it's the only good thing you'll ever be associated with (save Bryce Dallas Howard).

Use your magic powers to save Arrested Development, and all is forgiven.

filmenthusiast2000: There's literally no way Just Friends doesn't make my top 10 for the year.
filmenthusiast2000: I'm not saying critics are drones... But give Just Friends the same marketing push as 40 Year Old Virgin/ Wedding Crashers...And it would go up 30 points on metacritic.
filmenthusiast2000: Instead of being thrown to the over-eager 3rd tier critics for an easy bash.
robbiefreeling: i was thinking about that this morning on the subway
robbiefreeling: so much better than 40 Year Old Virgin….SO much better
robbiefreeling: there are surprisingly few cheap potshots in the film
filmenthusiast2000: I didn't know you were so lukewarm on 40 Year Old!
robbiefreeling: i hated 40 Year Old Virgin…didn't laugh beginning to end
filmenthusiast2000: Wow! I'm impressed!
filmenthusiast2000: Seriously!
robbiefreeling: all the jokes of the dudes in the electronics store.....zzzzzz, tired, obvious. And Catherine Keener was far too "sensible" and "classy"
filmenthusiast2000: I certainly prefer JF and Amy Smart...
robbiefreeling: and all those comic book and collectible figurine jokes
filmenthusiast2000: Yeah, it seems with "studio trash, a few million in marketing makes all the difference with critics between "bawdy guilty pleasure" and "tired rom-com retread"
robbiefreeling: Just Friends, seemed much fresher. The actors in the film take such delight
robbiefreeling: I'd say that's the main difference in watching a cast of able young comedic actors doing their thing as opposed to cynical, "seasoned" pros like Steve Carrell
robbiefreeling: Anna Faris is one of our great comic talents, but because she didn't start out on SNL, she's virtually ignored
filmenthusiast2000: Have you revised your opinion of Mr. Reynolds?
robbiefreeling: Often, he veers too far into outright jerk territory, and he's a smidgen too hateful to be a rom-com lead, but a lot of his timing is dead on
robbiefreeling: his chemistry with his brother is the real delight of the film. The scenes with Smart seem negligible in comparison
filmenthusiast2000: Yeah, well I could say his about-face into sincerity at the end was a bit much to swallow. But then I was crying, so whatever.
robbiefreeling: Yeah, but you cried at Doom
filmenthusiast2000: The detail work in the movie is so great: the tossed off, half-heard lines ("This town is full of losers, and I'm pulling out"--that's Springsteen's 'Thunder Road'), the Mortal Kombat song on the 95' mix-tape ("The Summer of like")...
robbiefreeling: yeah, there's a lot of great off-screen last-minute dubbing that adds to the film's flippant charms…and there's also plenty of refreshing slapstick instead of crummy sex jokes
robbiefreeling: Why I find 40 Year Old Virgin so stultifying is because when you rely only on sex jokes, the film becomes oddly agenda-driven, a la that piece of trash American Pie, which is not about laughs as much as furthering myths about American male sexuality. Just Friends has none of that, it's really about the characters
filmenthusiast2000: Whoa whoa whoa, let's not throw out the baby (Pie gave us the gift of Seann William Scott!) with the bathwater.
robbiefreeling: true...and JF has some of that insanely overplayed Seann William Scott feel to it (i.e.,reaction shots that would be a bit much in a Don Knotts vehicle)
filmenthusiast2000: I'd put Reynolds next to Scott in the super-affable, smarmy jock school of comedic acting. Reynolds just seems like a really fucking funny second-string quarterback who would goof off in math class and say the most hilarious shit ever. Which is far more my cup of tea than the snotty skateboarder guys--Johnny Knoxville and Jason Lee...
robbiefreeling: Knoxville and Lee are two of the most reprehensible pieces of human garbage ever to be allowed onscreen
filmenthusiast2000: Friends is about 20 minutes overlong, but so was 40 Y.O. Virgin, and JF instilled me with far more confidence that there was always another LOL lurking around the corner.
robbiefreeling: that's true...Virgin was leaden and it went on and on to its inevitable conclusion...not to mention when Carrell takes that daring leap through the air and smashes into the truck at the end of the film, the slapstick seems like it comes out of nowhere. in JF, the physical mayhem is nicely spread around so nothing seems out of place
filmenthusiast2000: And the low comedy takes the high road every time--Reynolds singing All-4-One in the beginning prepped me for a string of limp "Remember 10 years ago" nostalgia gags, but the retro material that did pop up was so perfect and specific (i.e. the Mortal Kombat song) that it was irresistible.
robbiefreeling oh THAT's what that song was! My brother used to listen to that. i knew it sounded familiar
filmenthusiast2000: Faris, feigning a concussion, and glomming toothpaste out of her mouth is probably the funniest thing I've seen at the movies this year. In 50 years, when they hand her a Lifetime Achievement award, that's a shoo-in clip.
robbiefreeling haha....that's the only scene i think about when I recall the film
robbiefreeling Anna Faris - Best Supporting Actress
filmenthusiast2000: "Game" is the word that springs to mind when I think of her screen presence.
robbiefreeling i saw about 20 minutes of Scary Movie 3 when i was home for Thanksgiving...not that bad
filmenthusiast2000: Oh my no. Sheen's in top form.
robbiefreeling: well, we can at least agree on one thing: Thank God Syriana was sold out
filmenthusiast2000: Seriously.
filmenthusiast2000: I just downloaded Just Friends wallpaper for my work PC

What worthy artist will win this year?

It’s that time of the year again….and Reverse Shot has Oscar Fever!! In an attempt to combat the ever-proliferating Oscar Watch websites and their googly-eyed mascots (Gold Derby’s Tom O’Neill looks like the offspring of Jerry Seinfeld and the muppet Scooter…and we’re supposed to trust his prognostications?!), we offer our pragmatic predictions. So, take it from the experts: we have the real inside track, and your fearless Reverse Shotters know who’s really going for the gold come this January or February or March. More importantly, we know that this is the only true barometer of art…and away we go!

Best Picture: Though everyone from Ebert to Edelstein has been predicting the clean and easy Lord of the Rings-ish sweep at this year’s Kodak Theater of Lodge Kerrigan’s epic Keane, I am going to go out on a limb and say that I foresee a possible Keane snub. Hollywood has been all abuzz about Damian Lewis’s subtle, haunting work since the film was released way back in summer (prime Oscar time), but let’s face it, there’s been a lot to distract Academy voters ever since, and Kerrigan might just have to settle for a Best Actor nod. In my mind, the best pic category comes down to two obvious nominees: Rob Zombie’s rollicking, lovable little-engine-that-could The Devil’s Rejects, and Hubert Sauper’s Darwin’s Nightmare, which is well on its way to being the first documentary ever to get a best picture nomination. As we know, the Academy has been all about globalization in recent years, and since this promises to be a “topical” and “political” year, I just can’t see them ignoring a film about the plight of impoverished Tanzanian waterfront villages ravaged by AIDS, unemployment, and poverty. I mean, this is the OSCARS we’re talking about.

Best Actor: Looking past Damian Lewis’s easy win, the name on everyone’s lips seems to be Banlop Lomnoi. Virtually unknown before rocketing to stardom last year with the sentimental favorite Tropical Malady, Banlop Lomnoi has barely been able to sort through the stacks of scripts that have started piling up on his desk (at his new Malibu beach home). Radiating sexy intelligence, Banlop Lomnoi bravely took on duel parts in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s twisty delight. With two crowd-pleasing roles in one film (as a wide-eyed gay Thai soldier in love with a village boy and then as a wordless hunter searching the deep thick jungle for his abandoned lover who has transformed into a tiger), how can Oscar ignore?

Best Actress: If there were any more of a household name than Banlop Lomnoi, it would be Dina Korzun. An Academy favorite since 2000’s Last Resort, the Russian actress has been accruing Oscars and other awards left and right for her patented onscreen delicacy. However, shocking as it may be, there’s an outside chance that, if Korzun backlash ignites, her understated work in Forty Shades of Blue could be left off the final five of what has shaped up to be this year’s most overcrowded category. If the Academy is going sentimental, they could pick Liv Ullmann from Saraband (which, like Forty Shades of Blue, played at the Film Forum, which often guarantees an Oscar nod); if they’re going for heavy, there’s Oscar stalwart YOU, from Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Nobody Knows, whose performance as the negligent, childlike mother sent audiences into spasms of recognition; and of course, no one could deny the immense cultural impact of Marilou Berry’s portrayal of a troubled, selfish, unlikable, unattractive, overweight French teen in Agnes Jaoui’s Look at Me (that film’s easy stateside box-office triumph over Mean Girls proved that American audiences are looking for something more than vapid starlets in their leading ladies). You heard it here first.

Finally caught up with the new print of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger last night and not a moment too soon: Finally, cinema to be thankful for as we enter the holiday season. Still, as glad as we should be to have a treasure like this available again (and in such glorious form) it’s simultaneously depressing to realize that one of the best movies on screens right now is 30 years old and that its time and place-specific dystopian worldview still feels frighteningly relevant. It’d been a long time since I first watched this, and seeing it again after Dumont’s masterpiece Twentynine Palms, it’s obvious that Zabriskie Point isn’t the only Antonioni touchstone Bruno took cues from.

What most struck me is how closely The Passenger fits in with that fertile 70s and early 80s cinema of more or less oblique protest (there’s a much better genre name for this out there…)—films like Ripstein’s The Change, Sembene’s Xala, Bresson’s The Devil, Probably, Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire, Fassbinder’s In a Year of Thirteen Moons, and Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia. A varied bunch of films that all strike me as channelling a palpable sense of societally-directed outrage at their core even if their narratives aren’t explicitly political. It’s the kind of movie I feel like we’re sorely lacking right now—the closest thing I can immediately call to mind from this year is Lord of War and I guess, to a lesser extent, Good Night and Good Luck but that’s so wrapped up a kind of wistful historical specificity that it’s practically a mausoleum. Either way, both of these are far cries from the sort of personal politics at play in The Passenger.

Supporters will probably cry, “How Now, Paradise Now?” which is a fine movie, I guess, but do I really need to take it seriously just because its main characters are suicide bombers? Especially given that “fine” is pretty generous for a movie that shoehorns its ending and political sentiments into its mix with a surprising lack of grace and delivers an intellectual complexity far below the gold-standard recently set by Avi Mograbi’s documentary Avenge But One of My Two Eyes (still without distribution). Two very different movies about different sides of the same conflict, but Mograbi takes his anger and channels into coolly rational accruing of facts and instances that overwhelms the senses where Hany Abu-Assad takes his and leaves us with…a pretty shopworn three-act’er of hott dudes running around in suits. I had hopes when the initial bombing run goes awry that this would turn into some sort of really odd Beckettian drama of a human explosive wandering around, lost, but Abu-Assad just never lets go of narrative drive. The conclusion is all but foregone from the opening credits.

We need filmmakers to stand up and start delivering political (not partisan) cinema. By that rationale, things like Hotel Rwanda and Paradise Now are steps in the right direction, I suppose, but neither of those strikes me as offering images as troubling as say, Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. Are our great narrative filmmakers of today hoping that the new crop of documentary films will take up the slack? If so, they should take a quick look at the films shortlisted for the documentary Academy Award and think again: Music! Kids! Clown Dancing! Yawn. I’ve only seen a handful of their picks, but of the bunch I haven’t seen, the only one I can conceive feeling regrets about missing would be Darwin’s Nightmare. I’m sure they’re mostly fine movies all, and inspiring more of than not (that does seem to be Academy stock in trade), but what are they inspiring us to do; besides feel safely inspired?

Making fun of Richard Roeper is like playing "Tag, you're it!" with a cerebral palsy patient. So I don't need to elaborate all that much about his smug asswipe review of Breakfast on Pluto which popped up last night on TV as I was flipping stations. Maybe it's his disgusting, contorted frog-face as it spittled when he lispingly mocked Cillian Murphy's performance that got my blood boiling...or perhaps it was just the fact that he's one of, like, 3 film critics that most people in the county are aware of that did it. Either way, the only way to counter bad TV criticism seen by millons of viewers is to write incisive online criticism that no one will read. So they can't chisel on my tombstone that I didn't try. To continue our Neil Jordan salvage effort (look for our next symposium to take this to the next level), we proudly present, up today, Reverse Shot's exclusive Neil Jordan interview and Breakfast on Pluto companion piece. Read it if you have time, but more importantly, go see the film, one of the year's best.

Now, I know that Gary Indiana recently, hilariously, called the New York Press “fishwrap,” and I know that when I carry it around the streets of New York I have to hide my head in shame behind my collar, and I also know that at RS, we’ve been trying to refrain from bad-mouthing other film writers, BUT Matt Zoller Seitz’s Breakfast on Pluto review was too much to bear this morning. We’ve all lamented his word-count-indulged, “I’m just a guy who watches movies like you, dudes” layman schtick, and the issues I take with Seitz’s words on Neil Jordan’s wonderful new film are probably more appropriate for a letter to the editor, but who am I kidding? Nobody reads it.

Well, nobody reads us either, so I might as well go ahead: Hey Bonehead, you wrote this: “If Jordan was making the point that Kitty is too artificial, too consciously self-constructed, too much a theatrical/psychological construct to ever feel complete and happy and satisfied—if he were, in a sense, a gender-bending human Pinocchio prevented by his upbringing and society's prejudices from ever becoming "real," that would be a valid and satisfying point of view.” I’m glad that would be valid and satisfying for you, but the point of the film is that Kitten’s constructed identity is a complete, whole, valid entity. She is not hampered by society’s ill will, but more importantly, she is NOT confused about who she is. This is a stunning notion for a main character in mainstream cinema—sexual identity, miraculously, becomes beside the point in Breakfast on Pluto.

But wait, Seitz also says: “He starts and ends the movie as a mesmerizing collection of mannerisms that never solidify into a complete, credible person, in the way that, say, Candide or Joe Buck or Forrest Gump did.” Ah, the old Gump trump card. Zemeckis’s trashy best picture winner is an ahistorical historical piece that conservatively floats over tumultuous history by remaining completely inactive in the face of adversity. I’ve heard many compare Kitten to Gump….as if Kitten’s ability to remain an individual despite constant political turmoil somehow makes her comparable to that 65-IQ’d numbskull. Gump was a conceit, Kitten is a full-fledged individual. So by this rationale, transvestite equals retard?

While it would make the whole film easier to swallow for Kitten to lament her sad, sorry state of being of indeterminate gender, Jordan’s film, to put it in more simplistic, Oprah-ready terms, is all about the joy of knowing exactly who you are. And that joy is infectious to the film’s glorious, colorful rhythms. Expect more on the film from Reverse Shot next week, because we’d hate to see middling reviews consign it to the Alternative Lifestyles video bins at TLA.

In case you were wondering, Reverse Shot is not immune to the hype. Or at least, who can help but be aware of the inundation of weirdo publicity about Brokeback Mountain that’s been cascading like golden showers for the past six-odd months. But if there’s something I simply can’t fucking stand anymore (even more so than the predictable crap over at the Drudge Report), it’s the constant stressing of the UNIVERSALITY of the central gay love story of Ang Lee’s surprisingly unadorned, sturdily mounted (laugh, but it’s TRUE) cobalt-blue kinda-western. In interviews, the ballcapped, grinning Lee has been doing it, almost to the point of panic-stricken tongue-knots (“It’s a universal love story…universal…they don’t necessarily have to be two guys.”). Yes, I get it, don’t alienate the straights. Got it. Now, newly minted hesitant gay poster boy Jake Gyllenhaal has been ducking for cover for months, as in the new Details: "I approached the story believing that these are actually straight guys who fall in love," he says. "That's how I related to the material. These are two straight guys who develop this love, this bond. Love binds you, and you see these guys pulling and pulling and tugging and trying to figure out what they want, and what they will allow themselves to have."

To use the oft exclamation from one of my fave gay-panic movies of all time, Dreamcatcher: Well, fuck me, Freddy. Uh oh, Focus Features, here it comes…I’m gonna say it. I’m gonna say it….get ready:

Brokeback Mountain is GAY. Thank God. Double gay with marshmallow, two cherries, almond slivers, and hot, hot fudge. No, not in the Trick, Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss way that most of the country perceives as reliably, ghettoized homo, but lots of denim and Heath Ledger’s low-register drawl cannot disguise the fact that, no, dude, it’s NOT universal: This love story, nicely handled and wonderfully expansive in its own realm, is specific in every manner, from its Montana setting, to its 60s-to-80s time period, to its two MALE closeted characters whose love remains a closed-lipped, “fishing buddies” affair over many decades. I know Oscar nominations are expected, and to make it the crossover success it has to be, you needed to Titanic up the poster and have Heath and Jake act all aw-shucks and egg-shell crushing when talking to Star Jones and Katie Couric. But please, no more “universality”; every corner of every frame is specific to one particular, American social indignity that continues to this day, the full emotional scope of this melancholy love story cannot be stolen away from its landscape. Yeah, plus, there’s saliva-lubricated ass-ramming, and lots of goopy man-on-man making out. I’m seeing it again.

The new issue of Reverse Shot is up, and it's easily our biggest yet.

In this issue:

RS Fesses Up: In which Reverse Shot writers tackle that canonical film they'd just never gotten around to.
Spotlight on Kiyoshi Kurosawa: Interview and commentary on a handful of his films.
They Came From Memphis: Interviews with and reviews of work by William Eggleston and Ira Sachs
New York Film Festival coverage
Two new Shot/Reverse Shot duels: Oliver Twist and Three Times
Plus: New releases, DVD reviews, and three new Reverse Shot interviews.

Enjoy...and if you're so inclined, swing back here and let us know what you think.

American Beauty is what it is—I can’t seem to muster bile anywhere comparable to that of many of my colleagues for it, perhaps because I still can’t quite explain how it was that Mendes managed to drop kiddie porn (thanks to Jonathan Rosenbaum for this call) into the marketplace and have it mistaken for high art. We’re not that dumb, right? I mean, Pete Townshend got banged in the privacy of his own home for acts probably less obscene than what Mendes’s camera commits upon the persons of Thora Birch and Mena Suvari. A few years on, and excepting Chris Cooper, American Beauty seems less the start of a beautiful friendship than the biggest career-killer in recent memory. (Sam paid it forward) Why get upset about a blip receding in the distance when Todd Solondz still stalks an Earth full of so much beauty?

So Mendes returns after Road to Perdition (which I missed) with Jarhead, an apolitical war film about snipers waiting to fight in the first Gulf War that’s so filled with events that it’s wholly impossible to buy into the central idea: That the interminable desert days and the lack of “kills” mandated and promised by their training are driving these young murderers over the edge. In a movie like this, central scenes shouldn’t involve receiving letters or being punished—we should be in the shit staring at sand, or watching others stare at it. The whole thing’s so ludicrous that when Peter Sarsgaard stands up from digging his sleephole/grave to proclaim his realization of the obsolescence of humans in warfare, the “bold” attempt at a thesis statement is obvious, and laughable, and, well, not really supported by the movie. Honestly, Stealth gets at this idea better. Shakespeare could have crystallized a whole play around a monologue like this, but then he would’ve had a play worth watching in the first place. This is Mendes—a theatre-Brit, but no Shakespeare—and all he’s got is Jake Gyllenhaal dancing with a Santa hat hanging off his crotch.

To be fair, Sam does have a handful of good images up his sleeve: soldiers playing football in full chemical war gear, a horse emerging from the cataclysmic darkness surrounding a raging oil fire coated with the stuff (sure, its overdetermined and the fires are probably CG, but I like to think he’s nodding in Tarkovsky’s direction). But in a movie where men lessen the tensions sprung from their inability to kill Iraqis or fuck girlfriends back home (who they all worry are fucking someone else) by pretending to fuck each other, and this heavy, heavy homoeroticism is just left on the table…what the hell is going on? I’d mention the "choice" early 90s soundtrack, or the general sense of, “make it pretty and no one will notice that we’ve got nothing going on,” but why bother?

Ben Younger's Prime, which I just caught up with this weekend, has been receiving middling reviews, yet one must ask why. Clever yet not self-consciously so, smart yet in a pragmatic rather than show-offy way, sophisticated yet in the actual sense of the word rather than due to characters clutching martini glasses, Prime is a robust little romantic comedy that never takes a single cheap shot in favor of laughs, letting its comedy emanate purely from its situations.

In a role that on paper would be supporting, relegated as it is to mostly reaction shots, Meryl Streep portrays a possible sterotype (controlling Jewish mother who is also, coincidentally, her son's non-Jewish, much older girlfriend's therapist) as a multi-dimensional, decent, searching human being. Every bit her match is Uma Thurman, who looks relieved and refreshed at not having to massacre 88 little Asian men with a Hanzo sword or rip out Daryl Hannah's eyeball, whose role is bright, sharp, and open...which is the norm for this mostly unheralded actress. (Thurman usually dives so forthrightly into a role, that her enthusiasm is often alienating for viewers used to the posing diffidence of the Gwyneths of the world.) Actor-wise, Bryan Greenberg is the weak link, but as the film progresses, his lack of charisma, or at least his inability to parlay his middling charms into something more emotionally nourishing, becomes the point.

Prime, a very Jewish, very practical, evocatively New York story of a love affair, doesn't traffic in lies -- odd for a studio romantic comedy. No one farts at an inopportune moment, overflows a toilet, flings a booger into a soda, or jizzes all over someone's wedding cake -- yet the laughs are there. There could be hope here, yet seeing as the film is from a remarkably female point of view (the handsome Greenberg is even more sexually fetishized than Uma; the main conflict is moved from the romantic travails of the couple to the emotional awakenings of the two older women) most critics, seem to have missed the boat. Ask yourselves why it is that when a male-oriented, hangdog list-making extravaganza like High Fidelity is released, critics (mostly male, mostly dorks) fall all over themselves trying to find the right praise, yet Prime is received with a polite nod at best? In Her Shoes prevailed with critics because it had the Curtis Hanson brand name behind it. He wasn't just telling a women's story, he was "stretching." Ben Younger seems to be the real deal.

Just to prove we're not entirely full of hot air, Reverse Shot has just purchased a Brattle Theater seat to aid in their fundraising drive. This is in addition to donations made by individual staff members. Next time anyone catches a film there and plops down in the fourth row, third seat from the left, their ass can thank us.

If you're not sure what I'm talking about, read the entry below. And then go here to donate.

We're perhaps a little late in jumping on this bandwagon, but the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, MA needs to raise $400,000 by year's end or else it will be forced to cease operations after 52 years of film programming. Now, I'd love to say that saving the Brattle would mean that we're preserving some grand, classic movie palace, but that would honestly be lying. No, the place is more of a film pit--you can see the seams in the screen in you look really hard, it's not uncommon for the projectionist to blow a changeover, and the audio system sits in plain site on the stage next to the screen--but these kinds of drawbacks are more than the "charm" of the place, they're what makes it lovely and vital. Cheesy to say, perhaps, but the Brattle experience (complete with the creaky floorboards, zero grade seating plan, antiquated "admit one" ticket stubs, heavy emphasis on Bogie...) has a real, tactile sense that shiny neon multiplexes only approach at that moment when your feet unstick from the floor. Put simply, going to the Brattle, for any program, represents a different kind of connection with movie watching, and anyone reading this who cares about cinema should recognize what I’m talking about. Don’t get me wrong, multiplexes have their place, and serve a purpose—often well—but our film culture can’t survive if left in the hands of AMC/Regal/Loews alone. And besides, The Brattle birthed the Janus Films folks whose library is now put out on DVD by everyone’s favorites over at Criterion. Imagine what the landscape would look like without them?

So, all of you cinephiles out there who open your wallets to the tune of $10 or $20 every time Moveon.org or Howard Dean comes calling, think about skipping a screening or two this month and go here to make a similar donation. I'm sure many of you are reading this in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, etc., and though sympathetic, are wondering exactly how the closing of a grungy little screen in The People's Republic of Cambridge could possibly effect watching movies in your town, but stop and think for a second about the larger communal aspects of cinema—beyond the sounds of the creepy bearded dude two seats over. For many of us, the towns and theatres of our cinematic coming-of-ages are far from the places where we eventually grow old with movies, but we wouldn’t be the viewers we are today without those formative experiences. So, if we continue to allow economics to hack off the minor league screens out in the sticks (and hell, this is Boston we’re talking about—provincial yes, but not Duluth—if we can’t maintain an indie art screen here…), each successive wave of fresh-faced newcomers to New York or Los Angeles is going to have less respect for what’s playing at the Film Forum and or the NuArt than the last.

We can all sit around and bitch about how film culture is dying, how no one cares, and how it doesn’t matter because it won't be long before we'll all be watching movies beamed in HD directly up our anuses and into our spinal cords. Or we can each take small steps towards preservation. Tsai Ming-liang once told Reverse Shot, “You see these major changes over the past ten years and it hits you, the speed of things, how fast these changes are happening. But there's no way back. There's no use worrying or feeling sad about things.” He may be right, but I harbor a hope that there might just be more room for co-existence between the old and the new than it seems. We just have to care, and especially about small theatres programming small movies like The Brattle.

Again: to make a donation, go here

While most everyone seems to be packing their bags and heading home on Atom Egoyan's Where the Truth Lies some of us here at RS are still wrestling with it. As it should be--Egoyan is still one of the world's pre-eminent filmmakers, and every time he steps up to the plate, whether he hits a home run or strikes out, it's always worth taking a close look at his swing.

clarencecarter: so, I saw the Egoyan - yeah, not so great. But I love it
eshman: you're being contrarian in that devilish way. The movie’s painful
clarencecarter: I wrote a little about it today...I had a lot of fun. even though every time alison lohman opens her mouth the movie dies
eshman: i like that you dwelled on that moment where she sits across from the old Egoyan cast members. it’s the only genuinely bizarre moment, and all it does is remind us of what he could and should be doing...
clarencecarter: yeah, i think he's trying to turn that moment into something, but the movie never quite makes it
eshman: Lohman's stuck with unsalvageable dialogue
eshman: and i think it would be better if she didn't even try.
eshman: which shows you how corrupt it was from the outset
clarencecarter: I think Barbara Stanwyck could've made something out of that role
clarencecarter: I just think Lohman was dealt a hand she couldn't quite deal with and folded
eshman: perhaps, but the "White Rabbit" sequence? how fall-down-flat is that?
clarencecarter: okay, I’ll grant that: the rabbit scene - ugh
eshman: that White Rabbit bit reminded me of the Art History discussion in Ararat.
clarencecarter: I still think Ararat's the lesser of the two.
eshman: maybe
eshman: but at least there's passion and conflict at its heart
clarencecarter: sort of, but I feel like if one of the two gives a sense like it’s going through the motions, it’s Ararat. that's the movie he "should/needed" to make. Truth Lies...how the hell does Egoyan decide to take this on? It immediately reeks of an ill-fitting glove situation, in a good way.
eshman: i know. but it does seem poorly calculated to deliver him to a "wider audience"
eshman: i'm embarrassed for him
clarencecarter: oh me too, but not because I think he was really after the wide audience, more because he's so in his own head that he just misses at the genre. it's admirable in its way.
eshman: so why bother with genre?
eshman: why does every filmmaker think they need to do this?
eshman: do fiction writers interlope this much? no, they know better
clarencecarter: it's like a dare – “maybe I'll be the one who can swim out to sutter's point without drowning.”
eshman: right
clarencecarter: they all sink though - and it’s good for them.